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Just hit 1000 bottom bracket replacements in my shop log
I always thought the press-fit ones were the biggest headache, but looking at the numbers, square taper BBs from the 90s have been the real repeat offenders for us. It's made me rethink our parts stock and what we push customers to upgrade. What's your most common 'comeback' repair that surprised you when you looked at the data?
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wesley832mo ago
The drive side failure pattern matched up with what we saw too. Left side cups would come out looking almost new while the right side bearings felt like they had gravel in them. We started just selling single drive side replacements for the budget repairs and it worked way better than expected. On the bikes left out in the weather, the square taper failures jumped up even more because the seal design on those old cartridges just cant handle moisture creeping in from the pedal threads.
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thomas2913mo ago
Ever track if the square taper failures were mostly on the drive side? We found the left cup often outlasts the right by a huge margin, so we stopped selling full cartridge kits as the default fix.
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the_charles3mo ago
How many of those square taper jobs were on bikes that were clearly ridden hard and put away wet? Our data showed the same thing, and it blew my mind. We kept a huge stock of cartridge BBs thinking they were bulletproof, but the failure rate was way higher than the press-fit ones everyone complains about. It totally changed what we keep on the shelf now.
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