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Discussing ways to reduce waste and build community!

Celebrate thrift as a virtue, talk about creative ways to make do, or show off how you reused something!

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Grinding off rivets to re-use bicycle cranksets (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/zerowaste@slrpnk.net

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49609301

I’ve found that a crankset that comes with rivet-attached sprockets costs the same as cranksets with no sprockets. So we get ripped off either way. The all-in-one piece wastes a crankset everytime the sprocket wears out and probably overspends on sprockets. And the universal crank fleeces you up front by cheating you out of a set of sprockets.

The rivets on my crankset are 72mm apart. Is there any reason I shouldn’t ragefully take an angle grinder to them?

Will I merely have to find sprockets with aligned holes, or could I run into other compatibility issues like mismatched hole sizes or other mating problems?

The bcd cribsheet shows a standard “Shimano 2003 XTR MX960 4-arm middle” has the bolts 72.1mm apart. So it seems I could get lucky though it’s a bit scary that a specific year (2003) is mentioned.

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[–] diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago

I have done nothing so far. My current crankset has 3 sprockets. The middle sprocket is worn to the point where the chain slips, so to drag this out I just stay on the biggest sprocket. But that is probably going to start slipping this year in which case I will be forced to change it.

I found a flee market seller who sells just the right crank, with one sprocket riveted to it, for $€ 5. So it’s cheap enough that it may be my next move. It seems to have holes in it to add another sprocket to it.

But in any case, I will not throw away my dead crankset. I will keep it just incase I one day find compatible sprockets and then I will try grinding.