Adjusting Threaded Headsets in Road Bikes

Video Transcript

"This older road bike that I ride has something that you rarely ever see on mountain bikes anymore, which is a threaded headset. You'll find mountain bikes that still have these as well, but they fell out of fashion in road bikes a lot more recently than they did in mountain bikes. And what makes this different than the headset you probably have on your mountain bike, is your mountain bike stem here clamps onto the steer tube, whereas this one, it inserts. You can see that there's a bolt in there, and if I loosen that bolt, I can raise or lower the stem, and also, what keeps the stem in place. So, I'm going to use a 6mm wrench, going to stick it into that bolt up top, rotate it counterclockwise, and I can raise or lower my stem. You can see there's a little bit of corrosion on that grease, meaning it's probably time to undo my front brake, pull the stem out, put some grease in there and clean everything out. Because I have a steel frame, it's also quite possible that even with fairly regular grease maintenance and intervals, I might have the quill of my stem seize into my steer tube. So, I want to avoid that. The way you adjust the tightness of these headsets, is independent of how you adjust your stem, unlike on your mountain bike, where you tighten a preload top cap, then you tighten down the stem. With these you can see there are two nuts, there's this top nut which is what's called a lock nut, and this bottom nut. And what they do is -- is the steer tube on this fork is threaded; it's a series of threads. So what you do is you tighten down your bottom nut until everything moves nice and smooth and free. You can see this move fairly smoothly. And then you tighten the top nut against it, to lock everything down and keep things from loosening up. And there's only one secret I can really share about adjusting threaded headsets, which is leave your bottom nut a little bit loose, so that when you tighten down that top nut, it tightens it the rest of the way, giving you years and years of trouble free riding."