Salvaging My Old Stationary Bike

I’ve had this upright stationary bike so many years and ever since I assembled it, the tension adjustment never really worked well and you can hear a clicking noise when you pedal. It has 8 levels of tension and even at its tightest it still feels relatively easy and not adequate to do stand up pedaling. That’s the reason why I haven’t been using it very often and opting for the recumbent bike instead.

I decided that the next time I had a few days off, I was going to try to find the problem and fix it. Already suspecting it had something to do with the cable, that’s where I looked first. Manipulating the top part of the cable near the adjustment knob didn’t solve the problem so I went farther down. This entailed disassembling the housing of the pedals. I encountered another problem when I tried to remove them because the screws were either too tight or already stripped. For some of the screws that I couldn’t remove, I ended up using brute force to break and peel the plastic housing apart. So I was now into the heart of the whole system, found the source of the cable, twisted a couple of nuts this way and that, but to no avail. All I could do was tighten the cable in a way not it was meant to be assembled. But it worked! Having broken the plastic housing, I just threw them away and the bike actually looks better without them. It looks more like a spinning bike now except that the handlebars are higher. Nevertheless the tension adjustment is tighter now, the clicking sound has disappeared, it's the quietest machine I have at home, and I got a better workout afterwards. With a series of what ifs (what if I do this, what if I try doing it that way), I managed to salvage an old bike and spared myself the expense of getting a replacement. I still want an elliptical machine though…

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