 bicycle enthusiast. And the next 15 minutes. And welcome to In The Studio. In the next 15 minutes, I'm going to go over some of the basic parts of your average bicycle. I have two bicycles today in the studio that I will be going over the parts of in the next 15 minutes. And I will basically go through each of the components and explain a little bit of what they do. So thanks for joining us this afternoon. All right, let's go to I'm going to sit overall here real quick on this bicycle. Most bicycles are in the design of these triangle shapes. And that is known as the safety bike. And it's been accepted as sort of the technology that is the common bicycle shape. And it has two wheels, obviously. So I'm going to start basically on this bicycle, which is a simple version of a bike in that a lot of the parts have been stripped off. And then I'll move on to the next bicycle. So starting with this bicycle at the very front here, we have what's called, if you zoom in here to this hub, this is a bicycle hub. This is particularly a front wheel hub. And if you notice, it holds the spokes to the rim. The spokes go from the hub to the rim in a alternating manner. And basically in the hub here is what's called a spindle. This hub is a metal body. And inside the metal body are ball bearings that allow the hub to turn against the spindle. And between the two are ball bearings. There are bicycles that have cartridge bearings. This in particular has ball bearings. Notice this little janky looking thing here. That's actually just to keep the hub nice and shiny so when it spins. So that's a pro tip for you out there, to keep your hub nice and shiny is to have a little string or something. Next here is this. This is called a quick release. A lot of bikes have quick release on them. And instead of having nuts, you have this quick release device that can come off. And you always want to make sure that that quick release is not out or the wheel could fall off. If it's out, that's what it looks like. If it's like that, it's tight. And that is basically the quick release as the hub. That is attached to, that holds the spokes. The spokes as you can see are attached to this rim here. The rim is the, this is a 26 inch rim. That's the pretty common size for bicycles. And that in the turn is attached to, and if we maybe you can zoom out just a tad, there's attached to these two metal splines here or these two metal, the arms, which are called a fork. So this, if you zoom out even more, you can see that this is a bicycle fork right here. And it's covered in stickers because this is a, again, this is a janky bike. So ignore that, but this is a fork and it's basically has what's called a rake to it. This is the rake and some forks go straight down. This has rake to it and some forks are really raked out. And what that means is when it turns, it sort of amplifies the effect of the turn when the rake is great. Attach this fork is something you might wanna zoom in to this point here to see what's called the caliper brakes. So these are caliper brakes. There are different types of brakes. On the other bike, I'll show you a different type of brake. This is a caliper brake and it is attached. There's two arms on either side. It's attached to some posts that are attached to the fork. So you can see this fork here. And on the back, I'll show you on this particular bike, there are no, there is no brakes. So you can actually just see the posts. And this brake is just screwed onto the posts like this. And when you squeeze your brake handle, it's all it's doing. And if you tilt up a little bit, you'll see what it's pulling. It's pulling this right here. And this is basically just pulling the cables which is then pulling these two brakes. If it wasn't attached, you can see that the brakes, let's see if I can, I'll just attach it here. You can see that these brakes are basically loose. And if you pull this cable, obviously nothing's gonna happen to the brakes because they're not attached. So this is called a caliper brake. Moving on up here, and you probably wanna stay zoomed in. Hello again. This is, on this point right here is the headset. This is a, the fork is attached to the frame via this headset right here. So there's two, there's two parts to the headset. This is the part that's actually just, there's a headset, there's ball bearings in this. They're called races in this portion. And there's ball bearings in this portion of the headset. And this particular headset is attached using two bolts. A lot of modern headsets are attached via sort of just clamp down there. And they're held together by a clamp, not by threads. This is called a threaded headset because the headset is actually threaded onto the fork. The fork itself, even though it looks like it stops here, it actually goes all the way up into, up to this point here. So this particular metal part goes through the head tube. This is called the head tube. And it extends all the way up to here and is attached via these bolts. So if you never need to adjust your fork, if I were to undo these bolts right here, this fork would just drop. And this next component here would come out. And once I loosen something, this next component is called the stem. This is a bicycle stem. This stem here has a high angle. Some stems are low angle, like on a road bike. This has a high angle stem so that you can reach it and stand up very easily to reach your handlebars. The stem is attached with a sinker bolt inside here. And if I were to undo that bolt, the stem would also come out of the fork. The fork would still stay attached. The sinker bolt basically just has a, goes down inside and when you tighten it, it pulls this other item against it and it basically widens out and exerts pressure on the inside of the tube keeping it in place. The stem, as you can see, comes up to these handlebars. These handlebars, like this particular handlebar is just a flat bar. There are circular bars or road bike bars. There's not much on this handlebar so it's pretty simple, which is why it's a good example. This is just a bell for telling people that you're about to, you're coming close to them or otherwise give a warning or just a friendly hello to your neighbor that you're happened to be passing by. This is a, this, on this side here is called your brake lever. And it's only job is to pull cable. Everything on a bicycle is actuated by cable on most bikes. There are electronic bicycle components now and there are even some hydraulic parts but in this old bike and most bikes you see around Davis are gonna be actuated by cable. So this lever here is just pulling cable and you can see exactly what cable it's pulling right here. When I pull this, it actually pulls this cable up and pulls the brake. So this is the brake lever on this particular handlebar and we'll go ahead and since we're here on this particular shot, I'll show you this, this is a shift lever right here. Again, this is a thumb called a thumb shift lever because you use your thumb. The whole idea behind it is just to pull cable. You're just pulling cable and you're wrapping it around the circular part here. And when you pull cable, you're pulling the derailleur on the other side which we'll get to. But this is sort of your control function here. You have your brake handle and you have your shifter. So let's move back down now to the stem and we'll head into the larger bicycle frame before we head to the back. This is called the top tube. So maybe we can maybe zoom out a little bit to a wider shot, that's good. This is called the top tube of the bicycle right here. So you have your top tube and that's the part you stand over. This is the part that usually when they're fitting a bike, they'll have you stand over a bike and in the old days you just lift it up and say, oh yeah, you have about two inches of clearance. That's good. That means if you, in theory, it means if you get off the seat, you're not gonna hit your, in between your legs on the top tube and that was sort of the idea behind bike fitting is, yep, that seems about right. There's different ways to do bike fitting now but that top tube is still a measurement that's used. So top tube, this is called the down tube here and it's attached, these three are attached to the seat tube and that's basically the triangle shape that gives you most bicycles. Different bicycles will have different angles on these. This head tube here is attached to the top tube which is attached to the down tube and the angle of this head tube will determine how sharp your steering is. A lot of bikes have a tilted back head tube and so the steering is a lot more relaxed and it's like a cruiser bike if you're on the beach. Notice it takes you a little bit longer to turn it. A road bike will be a lot steeper angle here and by steeper angle it means it's very twitchy and it doesn't take much time at all to turn the handlebars. Moving back to the top tube, this has a water bottle cage on it by the way. We'll move back to the seat tube. Attached to the seat tube is the seat post. Attached to the seat tube at the bottom here and we should zoom in so you can see is a crank arm and the crank arm itself is attached to chain rings. So here's a crank arm that's been removed off of its spindle and you can see how it's attached. This particular crank arm has one chain ring on it so it pulls the chain when it spins. Inside the crank arm it's attached to a bottom bracket and when it spins it pulls the chain and you can see as we just move back here that it pulls the chain. The chain is under tension by what's called a derailleur. So this has a rear derailleur. Some bikes have a front derailleur. The front derailleur would help you pull the cable between the different chain rings. This rear derailleur here is spring loaded and here's one that's been taken off of a bicycle. You can see that it's spring loaded so that it snaps back to place. Basically snaps back to place when it's under pressure, when it's not under pressure I should say. So when it's attached to the bike then it's under pressure and it's basically pulling these chains through these pulley system here. So you have an upper pulley and a lower pulley on this particular derailleur and when the chain is being pulled by the front you can see that when I pull the cable on the thumb lever it's shifting it between the different cogs on this freewheel. So this back here is called the cog or freewheel depending on how the setup is and here you can see some that have been taken off of a bicycle. That's basically what's pulling the chain on the back wheel. It's attached to a hub that's in the back. Here's, this is a freewheel where the cogs have actually been removed and again you can see where the chain basically attaches to those splines and when the chain gets pulled if we give a close up here you can see how the derailleur itself is actually moving even though I'm not pedaling and you can only ever shift if you're pedaling. So some people try to shift when they're not pedaling it's not gonna happen. The derailleur is trying to move because it's pulling cable and I can manually just move it for you like this. I can manually move the derailleur and pedal at the same time. It won't like it. Here I'm manually shifting it and this is what they'd have to do in the old days when they were racing the Tour de France they would actually get off their bike and actually just manually shift this into a different gear and then bolt it to state and make it stay but we can have the advantage of actually doing that in our hand. So I have the advantage of being able to do that with our front shifter. So that is the drive train all of which I demonstrated just now between the crank arms, the chain and the derailleur. One more thing on the back here you can see that there's no brake attached to this brake post on this particular bike and I'll give you a couple more items here on a bicycle as far as the tubes go. This is the seat stay tube and this is the chain stay. So you can refer to it when you go to your bike shop. Oh, the seat stay is bent or the tire's not centered between the seat stays or the chain stays but that's the name of these tubes is a chain stay and chain stay. I think since we're so short on time I will simply, since I mentioned it I will bring this bike over and show you that things do get a little bit more complicated when you start adding more gears and more items on this bike. If you want to look down here real quick you can see that this actually has a front derailleur of this particular bike. I will point it out right here and that does shift between the three different chain rings on the front. This also has a slightly different brake setup and which is right here. These are called V brakes and they're a little bit different than a caliper. They're stronger basically than a caliper and there are now brakes that actually, rather than stop clenching on the rims there are brakes that actually clench in the middle of the hub and those are called disc brakes when you add what's called a rotor onto the hub and you can, the cable will actually actuate right down here and grab onto the rotor and those are called disc brakes so. That brings us to the closing of the show. If you'd like more information you can go to SheldonBrown.com This is a website that has been around since sometime in the 90s. It was an early website when the internet was very new. SheldonBrown has since passed on but he founded a bicycle store in a Massachusetts called Harris Cyclery and it's specialized in helping beginners how to learn how to work on their own bikes and learn all the different parts of a bike. So I highly recommend going to that website to get more information about bicycles. If you ever want to learn how to work on bikes yourself you definitely need to know the language and how to communicate that language to other people so you can buy the parts that you need and make sure that you don't waste money on parts you don't need. Thank you very much for joining us and this has been in the studio. Hope you've enjoyed your basic getting to know your bicycle here at Davis Media Access.