Not everything went as planned, but I successfully tore my bike down to just the frame and built it back up into working condition. It’s also not lost on me how fortunate I am to have had the time and resources to spend on this endeavor.

And the winner is
The brakes take the trophy as the most painful part of the build up process. It takes a long time to get the air out of brand new empty hydraulic lines. Compressing, pulling, compressing, pulling, just get ready for it. It takes a while. But it’s satisfying too once you do it correctly. I had to redo mine because I skipped steps (e.g. not using grease on the barb, olive and nut threads). Lesson learned the hard way on that one.

And the runner up is
The dropper post, OMG, that was a pain. Getting the housing to stay on the dropper and not get pulled into the frame repeatedly was a pain. But once complete, it works like magic.

Gloves and towels
Get 3x the number of Nitrite gloves and shop towels you think you need. You would be surprised how much of a mess you make with your greasy dirty bike.

Crank arms
They can be brutal to get off. In hindsight, I should have used a regular allen wrench with a long pipe on the end or something to get additional leverage. Instead, I took the lazy way out and broke a bit off in my crank arm bolt using my expensive torque wrench. Stupid. Lesson learned.

LBS
Talk to your LBS if you are nervous about any particular steps. They will not only guide you toward the correct tools, but they love helping educate local riders. They want you to wrench on your bike.

Familiarity
Tear down your existing bike and build it back up. The best way to learn and you know all the components will fit versus doing this for the first time on an unknown frame.

Workspace
Work in a clean space like a garage or shed so you don’t drop stuff in the grass like me. I can’t tell you how many parts I found in the leaves and grass.

Laziness
Do the work right the first time. For instance, I skipped DOT grease being lazy and redid it later costing me another $50. Don’t skip out on steps.

Time
Each individual step may not take long, but you don’t do them back to back to back without trial and error your first time. So it might take you days or weeks. If you don’t have a clean secure workspace, then yes, definitely it can take weeks because you are lugging out tools and such from your secure storage area.

Nervousness
What made me nervous. before this project included the brakes, dropper post, crank arms and bottom bracket. Those components don’t make me nervous now because I understand the composition and engineering behind them.

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