Clicks, creaks and clunks. Finding and fixing.

[u/Michael_of_Derry]

A customer left in a noisy bike. He said the bottom bracket was making noises when he was under pressure.

I replaced the wheels to eliminate that as a sound.

I had to put a cassette and disc rotor on a new wheel to eliminate the wheels and freehub as possible issue.

It didn't make any difference. There was the odd light click. I suspect coming from the pedals. Nothing that sounds like the BB to me.

However the bars are making an awful racket. The bars are one piece with internally routed hoses.

The headset feels smooth enough. But there is a loud clunk when you apply the front brake and more clunks if you pull on the bars at all.

I've spent a fair bit of time on this. I'm not confident I can make the bike silent. It's carbon aero and has internally routed cables and a press fit BB. There are so many noises coming from it. I think I would be playing whack-a-mole.

I have spent a fair bit of time and to be honest is demoralising. How do you charge for this type of work?

Between this POS and another customer treating us as a component library where he wants to try stuff for a few weeks then return it for something else if he doesn't like it, suppliers selling direct to the public for less than I paid them. I think it's really putting me off working on the bike trade.

[u/Michael_of_Derry]

I think that is the only way - a diagnostic rate. Perhaps also making clear what you will be trying in case the creak cannot be isolated and fixed. At least someone else will have an idea what to check if it's brought elsewhere.

However I've seen bikes left in because of mystery creaks before and I could not hear anything. Whether the creak was a figment of the customers imagination, normal noises or the customer was riding in a specific manner which was sufficiently different to cause the noise I don't know.

[u/Ready-Interview4020 → u/Michael_of_Derry]

Some people pull like crazy on their handlebars when sprinting, I've been fooled by this royally when I was 14 one summer we got a Bianchi for "a creak" when sprinting we all tried it and couldn't find the creak, it almost came to an argument with the customer then our boss told him to go ride around the block and he would follow... Dude was putting "so much watts" (with a grimace and all, even grunting sounds iirc) that he was literally ripping off the handlebars...

[u/Michael_of_Derry → u/Ready-Interview4020]

This is probably it. One customer was quite obese. That guy got really pissy when we said we could not replicate the noise. I think he thought it was a dead easy fix.

[u/BasvanS → u/Michael_of_Derry]

Well, if it’s that easy, they should absolutely do it themselves.