Winter has arrived, so I am going to do some maintence on my road bike and go put it in humidity controlled storage at a boat facility so it won't corrode too much in the salty air here. I want to get it all ready so when I take it out in the spring I can hit the road right away. So I am swapping cables, new chain, etc to get it ship-shape. I also plan to change the headset. The original headset died last winter during storage, so I replaced it. It is a Pinarello that uses some sort of proprietary integrated design. I bit the bullet and bought replacements, but they did not seat properly on the fork race, which created a gap at the frame-fork union which gathers crud, and is just not right. The problem is that the replacement bearings have a very square inside edge, while the original ones were somewhat chamfered allowing the fork race to seat as it was designed to. Today at an industrial machine shop, they had replacements with the proper chamfer, but at $90 a piece, I balked. I have a new Campagnolo Centaur hiddenset headset lying around, so I am considering trying to use it instead. The original headset is 42x30x7 (61806 RS) and has somewhere between an interference and slip fit. The Campagnolo one is 41.6-8 or so. Will this have too much slop? Will the cup shape of the Campy one be too different? This integrated design seems dumb becaue the cartridge bearings are supporting a large lateral load which they do not seem designed for, so I feel even a sloppy loose-ball Campy one with races designed to bear loads in th edirection they do will be better.
The reason I am hesitant to just try is I am worried about killing the original fork race, and being SOL.
Winter has arrived, so I am going to do some maintence on my road bike and go put it in humidity controlled storage at a boat facility so it won't corrode too much in the salty air here. I want to get it all ready so when I take it out in the spring I can hit the road right away. So I am swapping cables, new chain, etc to get it ship-shape. I also plan to change the headset. The original headset died last winter during storage, so I replaced it. It is a Pinarello that uses some sort of proprietary integrated design. I bit the bullet and bought replacements, but they did not seat properly on the fork race, which created a gap at the frame-fork union which gathers crud, and is just not right. The problem is that the replacement bearings have a very square inside edge, while the original ones were somewhat chamfered allowing the fork race to seat as it was designed to. Today at an industrial machine shop, they had replacements with the proper chamfer, but at $90 a piece, I balked. I have a new Campagnolo Centaur hiddenset headset lying around, so I am considering trying to use it instead. The original headset is 42x30x7 (61806 RS) and has somewhere between an interference and slip fit. The Campagnolo one is 41.6-8 or so. Will this have too much slop? Will the cup shape of the Campy one be too different? This integrated design seems dumb becaue the cartridge bearings are supporting a large lateral load which they do not seem designed for, so I feel even a sloppy loose-ball Campy one with races designed to bear loads in th edirection they do will be better.
The reason I am hesitant to just try is I am worried about killing the original fork race, and being SOL.
Joseph
For anyone in the future who is contemplating this and finds this post in a seach, forget it.
I got antsy, so I pulled my headset and test fit the Campy cups. Doesn't work. The cups won't sit squarely, so they wobble around. I've just orderd proper bearings from www.simplybearings.co.uk.
