How to Conduct a Wheel Safety Check for a Mountain Bike

Series Summary

So you're getting ready to head off into the middle of nowhere on your new mountain bike, with images of extreme sports heroics and Mountain Dew commercials dancing in your head. Ignore the fact that you spend all day at the office, all night watching tv and all weekend puttering around the house. Just resting up for the big adventure, you tell yourself. All you have to do to be ready is actually purchase the bike you've had your eye on for weeks. Then you're ready to go. Think again. First of all, you need to get into shape. You may be able to pedal over the horizon, but you also need to be able to get back as well. And what happens if you fall off your bike and dent your noggin because you don't have the proper riding technique or the right helmet? Or something goes wrong with your bike. How are you going to get it back in running order? Perhaps you haven't seen The Hills Have Eyes or Deliverance, but the lesson to be learned from these movies is that wilderness has some pretty unsavory lessons in store for those who venture forth unprepared.

Before you ride down the wrong path, watch this series of film clips on mountain biking safety. Our expert takes you trough the basics of riding and shifting techniques as well as how to fix your chain and other common repairs. And he gives you straight answers about tire pressure and tire clips as well as the rules of trail riding. Learn everything you need to know to insure a safe return from the wild.

Video Transcript

"Pretty much the first thing you want to do when you arrive to the area you’re going to ride at, is you want to make sure that your bike is safe to ride. The most fundamental thing is to make sure that your wheels are properly installed, the brakes are all lined up, enough air pressure and all that other sort of stuff. I think, one thing that I’ve seen so many times with all sorts of people riding bikes is that they don’t know how to properly install or remove a wheel. So, your wheels held on by what’s called a quick release lever, so it’s a, there’s a little cam, right in there, you can just see it’s just profiled that keeps the wheel on. So it’s not a wing knot, you don’t just turn it, turn it, turn it, until it, until it gets tight because that doesn’t actually hold it as tightly or securely as your quick release so you know, got my closed quick release, I open it, undo it a little bit to clear these little tabs that prevent your wheel from falling out if you somehow forget to close things, so my wheel’s off, so it makes it way easier to transport, but you need to know how to take the wheel off to change a flat tire, stuff like that. So, to install my wheel make sure that your disc brake rotor lines up with your disc brake, if you put it on backwards it’s not going to be very safe, so drop it down, make sure it clears in there with the disc pads, you want to rotate your quick release until you start to get some clamping force and you want to have your quick release tight enough so that it takes the palm of your hand to close. If you can just close it with your fingers, it’ll be a little bit too loose. So that’s the front wheel, rear wheel, pretty much the same thing, little bit more complicated because you’ve got to deal with the chain and all that other sort of stuff. So what you want to do is you want to shift your bike into the smallest or largest cog, just to know where everything is to start off with, then you undo your quick release lever, push down, pull the derailer out of the way and your wheel’s off. So same thing, you’ve got your gears here, you’ve got a quick release lever, and you have to remember what gear you took the bike off in, the chain off in, needs to be the gear that you put it back on in, or you can shift, the heat of the moment, you pull it off, some other gear, just go over to your shifter, shift it down, slot it in, remember to put the chain over the cogs, because it won’t work otherwise push things up and back. Make sure you get the disc brake lined up, sometimes it’s easier to do this if you have the bike flipped over. In this case it might not be, so we’re in sort of push down on the wheel to make sure everything fully seated, close up the quick release lever and boom, your wheels are off and on. "