sixthreezero PAVE N' TRAIL Assembly - How To Put Together a sixthreezero Bike

Hey everybody, my name is Peter. I'm here today for Sixthreezero to help you see how to assemble a Sixthreezero multi-speed bike in your own garage. This one is a Sixthreezero Pave 'n Trail. It's a 21 speed so it has a front and rear derailleur, gears in the front and the back. And so it's a little bit more of a complicated bike, but it's nothing that you should be intimidated by. A lot of times, a bike like this will be assembled professionally in a bike shop, on a bike stand with certain tools and things like that. You can also do it in your garage and do a very good job.

You don't need a lot of tools, these are pretty basic. We'll need a four, five, and six millimeter Allen wrench, a 14 millimeter and 15-millimeter wrench. Of course, you can also use a crescent wrench, an adjustable wrench. We'll need a nine and 10-millimeter socket, and of course something to open the box up with. All right, let's get started.

When you order your bike online, and I know traditionally you would buy a bicycle in a bicycle shop and with more advanced bikes, racing, bikes, and mountain bikes, it's always the best idea. For more basic level bikes, recreational bikes like these, it's great. Order online, the internet has changed everything. Let's roll with it. Your bikes going to arrive in a box, just like this one.

You're going to open it. Little parts box. We'll show you that in a moment. And then we just lift the bike out of the box. Here's your bicycle all packaged, and there you go. I'll leave the box right there. Now the first thing I like to do is I go ahead and just unpack it. Take off all the zip ties. I'm going to leave on some of the packaging, but let's go ahead and take off the zip ties. You can use the box cutters. Also, some snips are nice to use.

Right down here, this is the saddle or seat and it comes attached to the seat post already. Set that aside there. That should be all the zip ties now. The next step is to lift the front wheel out and separate it from the rest of the bike. There's the front wheel, which was zip-tied to the rest of the bike.

Now, to get started we want the bike to stand by itself. What I like to do is, first of all, please notice the fork is always turned backward for packaging purposes. When you receive the bike, go ahead and turn the fork forward. That's a mistake some people make sometimes is they put the wheel on the fork backward. And take out the packaging item from the fork, and that looks like this. This is not part of the bike, this is the packaging.

Now, if you like, what you can do is go ahead and take the packaging off of the fork, and what I like to do is go ahead and set the front wheel into the fork, and then we can put the kickstand down and the bicycle will hold itself up and we can start to assemble it.

When you put the front wheel in, the tread is usually directional. It's not a big deal on a car that matters in case you run into a lot of rain or something for traction, all that. On a bicycle, it's usually not so important, except that higher levels of performance. If you're confused about which way the tread goes, just look at the rear wheel and match it with the front one. Then we'll just pick up the bike and we will rest the fork right on the axle. I'm going to have to open the brakes here. And I'll show you how that works. Very simple.

I'm going to put the kickstand down and the bike will hold itself up, just like that. If you look, this front wheel has what's called a quick release. The axle is not going to protrude outside of the fork. Sometimes this is unusual for people and they're a little confused by it. This is completely normal. The axle will not protrude outside of the fork. What's going to happen is we're going to go ahead and open this parts box. This is our next step. If I can find my knife right here.

Here's the parts box. Not a lot in it. Pedals, we have some tools, actually, that help you with assembly and reflectors, some touch-up paint, and quick release. Now, different bikes come with different parts. If the bike that you ordered has different parts then those will be the parts that you need for the bike. Some have the quick release, that's called a quick release skewer, some bikes don't. Some bikes may have other accessories that are needed for that bike so if you have extra parts, then you'll need them. If there are some parts here that you don't see in yours, don't worry about it.

Now the axle on the front wheel is hollow and so you can take this quick release skewer and take the nut off of it and slide it through that hollow axle. Now it'll come out the other side and you go ahead and put the little spring and the nut back on this side. It doesn't matter which side the handle of the skewer goes on. Traditionally, it goes on the left-hand side of the bike so you can grab it with your right hand.

I'm going to bring the bike over to you so that I can show you how to clamp it down properly. Here we have the quick-release skewer. Now I'm going to turn the nut on the other side a little, or actually, I'm going to just hold the nut here with my left hand and I'm going to tighten the handle a little bit until it starts to feel a little bit snug. And then we're simply just going to turn it in to lock it in place. Now, what's the proper amount of tightness? When you close it on the palm of your hand, it should leave a little bit of an impression on your hand. We don't want it loose, but you also don't need to go incredibly tight with it. All right. The main thing is you want a good little solid impression on the palm of your hand. Now, this is ready.

However, let me make one more note. And this is very important, especially for a multi-speed bike that has handbrakes. You want to make sure that this wheel is centered in the fork. It can go either way. It can lean to the left or the right. If you clamp it in one of these directions, it's going to make the brakes almost impossible to adjust later on. What we want to do is I like to make sure that I hold it with my left hand perfectly in the center of the fork and then we'll go ahead and clamp it down. Ready to go. You pick it up, give it a little spin and that's ready.

All right, next step, let's go ahead and put it in the handlebars. This part right here that holds the handlebar is called the stem. Sometimes the stem will be attached to the handlebars and you have to slide it into the frame of the bike. Sometimes it comes like this one is already in there. That's because this one is a special type of stem. I don't need to go into the details of what makes it different from the other types, that's a little more than the scope of this video. But all we need to know is that we need to put the handlebars into the stem right now and we need to do it in the proper direction. The first thing is I'm going to take my five-millimeter Allen wrench. Here's the five and we're going to loosen these two bolts. Put the clamp on the stem, so now we have this removed. Holding on to that we'll go ahead and slide the packaging over and eventually rip it off.

Now this, we want to be very careful that we get this properly placed because we want all of the brake and the gear lines to line up properly so they'll function well. I'm going to rip the owner's manual off here. Let me see if I can show you here. What we want, it comes just hanging like this, usually, whatever's most natural for it to hang down there when it's packaged. You want to try and twist a little like this so that you can read the left and the right because it'll have the numbers for the gears and it'll be like this. And then this can be adjusted backward and forwards for your comfort and convenience. But you see how this cable here is lining up nicely on the left, those are lying nicely on the right and then the front brake and the rear brake is crossing over like this, which will make everything turn nicely when the bike is functioning.

Make sure that you've got that. It should not be anything like this or more twisted like that. This will make the operation of the bicycle difficult. You want just a nice clean flow with the brake and gear cables. Then we'll go ahead and put the clamp back on with our five millimeters. One little note on this, and this is good for any time you need to attach something with multiple bolts on a car or a bicycle or any other vehicle or mechanical contraption, you want to go ahead and tighten these bolts evenly. You don't just crank down on one and crank down the other, do them both evenly, tighten them down both at the same time.

Now, also, and this applies a lot of times, especially to people who like to work on cars. Cars you can just crank down on them, give them a lot of torque, bicycles are a little more finicky, a little more delicate. The parts are smaller. You don't need to give all your strength when you're tightening down a bolt. Just give it a nice, whatever you can do with one hand, you don't need to use two hands, you don't need to use a lot of leverage. A little Allen wrench, one hand tight. That'll be all you need to keep those handlebars from slipping.

If you over tighten, you can strip the bolt and then you're going to have to wait for a part and that's would be lousy. There's no reason for it. Now we've got the handlebars and we can put in the saddle, the seat, whatever you like to call it. In the bike shops, we like to call it a saddle. Some people prefer a seat, it's a more general term. It's already attached to the seat post in this case. Sometimes in the parts box, you'll find the seat post, it'll be separate from the saddle. In this case, we also have again, another quick release. And this is great because you tighten it the same way, just tighten down a little bit like this, and then go ahead and push it nice and tight with the palm of your hand leaving that impression on the palm.

The quick-release is great because normally you'll have the seat height where you want it and you can adjust it up and down if you ever feel like it's not quite the right height for you. Another thing too is a lot of times when people lock up their bikes, if you are in a more dangerous area where you may be worried about your bike, you could take this out and take the saddle with you. That may sound silly, but a lot of people get their saddles stolen and they're hard to lock up. A lot of times people will actually just throw these in their backpack and there's nothing to steal there. It may also be possible if you have a smaller cable lock to put it down with the rear wheel or whatever and the string your cable up through the rails of the saddle. We'll go ahead and put the saddle on.We've got our bike looking just about ready to go. I'm going to go ahead and adjust the angle on the saddle. This will be a 14-millimeter wrench, like I said, you can also use a crescent wrench, an adjustable wrench. I'm sorry, this style, a lot of times it's either a 14 millimeter. In this case, it's actually a six-millimeter Allen wrench. I'm going to loosen the bolt down here. I think the robot put that one on a little tight, there we go. Now, what is the right level for a saddle? Well, the main thing is you want to look at the general shape of it and make it level with the ground. However, you really don't know until you sit on it. If it feels like it's slipping down too much for you, then point it up a little bit. If that's uncomfortable, then adjust it that way. But anyway, for generally, you're going to want to make just the general, because it's curved, you want to think of just the general level of the saddle is parallel with the ground. That's a good place to start.

And then you can decide later on when you're actually riding if that's right for you or not. And then we just tighten it back down. You can also slide the saddle back and forward a little bit on the rails. All right. I'll take a little bit of the packaging off just so we can see what we're working with. You may like to leave the packaging on, it will protect your bike while you're working on it. Can't hurt. But we'll take it off just so that everything's nice and clear for you.

A lot of times, when I used to assemble bicycles in a shop, I would actually leave the packaging on until the very end, because then I would make sure that if somehow a tool slipped or something else happened, the bike was protected during the process.

Next thing, pedals. Please note, this is something that a lot of people don't realize, and there's no way you would know unless you were in the bicycle world at all. There is a left pedal and a right pedal. This is very important because, for the safety of the bikes that the pedals don't unscrew while you're riding it, the left pedal is reverse threaded. The right pedal is righty tighty, the left pedal is lefty tighty. You want to turn it in the opposite direction. The way I think of it is both of them, also, you can turn towards the front of the bike when you're installing them into the cranks. We'll do the right one here. Very simple. Now at the bike shop, we will put grease on the pedals, that's always optimal, put a little bit of grease on the threads. So not necessary, but is a nice touch.

And then we'll take the 15-millimeter wrench, pedals are always a 15. Put it on the [inaudible 00:17:06] of the crank and tighten that one up. Go ahead and make that one nice and tight. Now I'm going to turn the bike around. I'm actually going to do it a little bit like this. See if we can make this as clear as possible. This is the left pedal. This one is reverse threaded so it's also going to go turning towards the front of the bike, which is in the leftward direction, which normally would be loosening the threads. In this case, it's tightening. The left pedal is reverse threaded. You don't need to give us a call and tell us that the left pedal is not threading in, it's right. I mean, it's correct, let's say. And then again with the 15 we'll go in here and tighten it on down.

Pretty quick, straightforward process. And this is as complicated as a bicycle gets. Even mountain bikes are no more complicated than this because they're still going to have the front gears, the rear gears, the handbrakes, the shocks, all of that. This is as hard as it gets and it's not that bad. We're already about halfway done. We're going to do the brakes and the gears next and then we'll assemble this rack. I'm not going to assemble the rack yet, I'm not going to bolt it in because it will be in the way of the brakes and just make it a little more difficult for me. We'll hold onto that.

Let's do the brakes. I'm doing this up close because these are a little bit tricky the first time you do it. All we need for this particular type of brake is five millimeters. Five millimeter Allen wrench. What we have here are the brakes are two sides, like this and they're just spring operated. You squeeze them in, they want to squeeze back out. They want to pull back out because of the spring. What we want to do first is adjust the pads and I will do this one, I think would work best for the camera. What I do is I'm going to loosen the paddle a little bit right here, just a little bit, and push the brake in with my left hand here, I'm very carefully going to push the brake right up against the rim. Pressing up against the rim while it's loose, automatically lines it up with the rim in every direction it needs to be.

It can be up and down, back and forth, left to right, and then also parallel with the rim. We want to get all that perfect. But that is almost automatic if you will push that pad right up against the rim while it's loose, get it parallel, and then give it a nice tightening. Tighten it down and then double-check. This looks very nice. Sometimes if the brake is completely flat with the rim, it will make a squealing noise. That's normal and actually on a mountain bike sometimes preferred because it stops really well. But for more recreational bikes, a little bit annoying. If you want to point the brakes in a little bit so that they point towards the front and open out towards the back a little bit they'll still stop great but they won't make that noise anymore. If your brakes are squeaking that's probably the thing, is that the rim is hitting the back part of the brake first.

Now we'll go ahead and do just the other one. Same thing. I'm going to loosen it just a little bit. It can move all over the place. I'm going to push it right up against the rim, nice and firmly so that it matches the rim. Make it parallel there with my finger, tighten it down. Perfect. Now here's the brake cable. It's loose. This is for the front one. It's loose, meaning it's not attached to the brake lever. We're going to take it the same Allen key, five millimeters, loosen that cable. Don't pull it out, leave it in there. Make it easy on yourself. Just leave in there nice and loose and we're going to pull it out this way so we have this end open.

Now watch very carefully here. When you open up the front brake you'll see this little tab here has a circle in it and a slot on the bottom. Simply take that circle on the end of the brake line, match it right to that slot, it's going to hold itself there. And then slide it into this open channel in the brake. There's also an adjustment knob here, these are also slotted. We'll line all those slots up like this, and you can slide that cable right into place.

And then push the housing. This black part is called the cable housing, push the housing right into the brake lever. Easy peasy. Now we'll go ahead and adjust the tension on the brake. See this, this little silver guy here is called a noodle, slip that right into the slot here on the right side of the brake. And now we've got these, all we have to do is adjust them to the rim and tighten it down.

Take the cable. There's a number of ways to do this, some people use a tool. I've never needed to use a tool. I just use my hand like this, I pinch the end of the cable and I just push against the left brake there until I get a nice tension. Maybe pull until there's a millimeter or two clearance between the brake and the rim. And there's a little bit of trial and error on this so go ahead and tighten the cable down, don't kill it, just give it enough so that it holds it. And then go ahead and give us a few firm squeezes. That'll settle all the cable of the housing and make sure there's no slack in the cable. And you'll find out how that feels.

Over time as well, maybe a month into riding the bike this may loosen a little bit too as things settle in, the cable stretches, that's totally normal. All you would do is just tighten it again. I feel it's a little tight right now because there's not a huge amount of movement here, so I'm actually going to loosen this just another, let out a millimeter here, tighten again. This time I'm feeling confident so I'm going to go ahead and tighten it the whole way. Again, don't go crazy on the torque. Just nice and firm, but don't overdo it. That feels great. This is a nice movement right here, you can feel it's got a good squeeze.

But the two little tiny screws on the side of each brake. And what they do is they adjust how strong the brake pulls. In my case, right now you can see this one's moving, this one's not. That's because this one's already against the rim. If I try to pick this up and roll the wheel, move the wheel, it's hitting the left brake pad. We can center that nice and easily by going ahead and turning this little screw in. We're going to turn this clockwise, which puts pressure on the spring, making this spring stronger, pulling the brake back more. It's not going to work until I give this a few squeezes and maybe a little more room, there it's going less. And we still need a little more so I want to do... This spring seems to be very strong. I'm actually going to loosen this a little bit by going counterclockwise on the little adjustment screw right here. Give this a few squeezes. Now, perfect. There's no rubbing at all. It's nice and close so we get a good firm stop. That's how you do brakes. Absolutely perfect.

We do the back as well. We'll do the same thing on the back. It's the same exact process. Go ahead and put the cable out of the brakes. This one's already hooked up to the lever so you don't have to slide it into the slot. I'm going to do the same thing that I did on the front ones, which is this. Go ahead and take that five millimeter Allen wrench, line up the brake pad. Boom. This is how we do it in real-time. Should only take a few seconds once you've practiced. On your first bike, it'll take a little while.

Then I'm going to go ahead and loosen that cable, slide it into the brakes with the noodle that I pointed out before, pull that cable into about the right adjustment. Tighten it up. Give that rear brake lever a few squeezes. I can feel something really settled in there and so now it's super loose so I'm going to re-tighten it. The cable was not seated in there, there was definitely some slack. That's good that we tested it. We'll tighten it up again, give it some squeezes. That looks good. The right pad is touching the rim so I'm going to go ahead and turn the adjustment screw clockwise, strengthening that spring a little bit. Maybe give it two or three turns. Try again. Now it's opening up and the rear wheel spins nice and freely. Rubbing against this packaging though.

Now the reason why I did not attach that rear rack was just so I could access these brakes. Once this rear rack goes in, it's a little hard to get your hands in so it's nice to leave that undone. Let's go ahead and attach it now so that it doesn't want to move or get in the way of the rest of the bike assembly. On the Sixthreezero Pave'n Trail, the bolts for the rear rack are already in the frame.

I'll do it from this side so hopefully, you can see. This is going to be, in this case, a four millimeter Allen wrench. Remove that from the bike, hold on to it, remove the other one from the frame as well, slide the rack into place and then put the bolts right back in where you took them out and that will hold the rack there. These racks, by the way, are not suitable for a passenger. Some people think they are. That's a dangerous move, but they are great for holding all sorts of stuff. You can put a lot of weight on these. If you're in college, for instance, you've got to put all your books on there, no problem. Some people attach a crate to it, some people hang bags that are called panniers. It makes the bike extremely, extremely useful for getting things done. Now the rack is ready.

Now the last part of the bike assembly before pumping up the tires is we're going to adjust the gears. We adjusted the brakes, we're going to adjust the gears now. Normally this is done on a bike stand because you want to be able to ideally turn the pedals while you're working on it. In that case, it's a very quick process if you're able to put it into a stand. I could perfectly adjust the rear gears in about 30 or 40 seconds, actually on a bike stand. Sometimes the front one takes a little longer. A little more art to the front derailleur than the rear derailleur. I'm going to show you how to do this very close to perfect, if not perfect, without the stand. If you notice it needs a little bit of adjusting after you ride...

All right. As I was explaining explained before, ideally adjusting gears, which is what we're going to do next, we're going to adjust the gears, the rear gears on the front gears. Ideally, this is done a bike stand so you can move the wheel like this and move the pedals and adjust the gears with the bike running. Because the only way to shift gears is while you're actually moving the pedals with a derailleur system. However, we can do a really good job in the garage and I'm going to show you how. Alrighty, and again, for a high-performance road bike or for a mountain bike, you're going to go out there and you're going to play hard you do want to get those gears adjusted professionally. For a recreational bike like this, you can do a great job in your garage by following a few simple steps and I will show you right now.

We'll start off, you always start off with the rear gears. Okay. Just so you know, this is called a derailleur and that's what shifts the gears. Moves the chain over. All we need for this is our Philips and I think in this case, it's going to be a nine-millimeter socket for the pinch bolt right here. Can you see here [Luise 00:30:51]?

The first step is to go ahead and up here is the shifter. Let me show you the shifter here. This is the rear shifter, it's on the right-hand side and it has the gears numbered, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And you shift it, in this case, there are lots of different shifters, some are twist ones, some have triggers. This one has a trigger and a thumb shifter, go ahead and hit the trigger on here and you'll see this moving over to the seventh. Put that all the way into seventh gear on the shifter. Then if you go ahead and you pick up the bicycle, you'll move the kickstands, pick up the rear of the bicycle and move the pedal. It's going to shift down to seven because I just shifted all the way seven on the shifter up here. We can brake here with the right hand, with the rear brake. We want to make sure the shifter is in seventh gear. That's the most important thing to start.

Now we'll go back here and we'll use the nine-millimeter socket. Sometimes they use a five millimeter Allen. In this case, it's the nine millimeters here and we're going to loosen the cable. Just loosen, again, don't make it hard on yourself, don't completely take off that nut, it's hard to get back on. Just loose enough so that the cable is free of the derailleur right here. Now what we want to do is there are two little screws right here. What these do is the derailleur wants to move back and forth like this, in and out to move the chain over onto the different gears. These two screws are called limit screws and they will limit how far out and how far in the derailleur can go. If we set number seven perfectly, then the rest of the gears will follow seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. And then we'll set the low limit so that the derailleur doesn't keep going into the wheel, into the spokes.

If you look very carefully, one of the screws will be marked H and the other one will be marked L. That's for the high and the low. You want to go to the H one. It is a Phillips. What we want to do is we want to, since we're in seventh on the shifter up here, and so the spring on the derailleur naturally wants to pull it into seventh gear here on its own, even with the cable not attached, we want to line up the pulleys of the derailleur with the seventh gear. The pulleys are the little wheels that hold the chain right here.

We want the chain all the way down to be perfectly lined up with our seventh gear right here. All right. And we can do that using the high limit screw. If I start to turn this right here, you'll see, maybe you can perceive, the derailleurs starting to move in like this, starting to move inward. If I go the spring brings it back. All this screw is doing here is just pushing it inward. We can also go counter-clockwise and the spring will pull it back. We want to get this lined up perfectly with the seventh. I may get in your way a little bit, I'm going to try not to, I'm going to adjust this so that it's lined up with that seventh gear.

Now, sometimes what you can do too, is go in just a hair more. It's better to be a little bit more towards that sixth gear, than outward. And you'll see why later. It's going to be because of the adjusting of the cable's a little bit, you want them nice and tight. Once we think that this is done, we can go ahead and pick up the bike again, pick up the rear wheel, turn the pedals and see what's making a noise. See if it's just running in that seventh gear nicely. It's actually, I put it in too far. It actually shifted into sixth on its own. That means that I actually moved the limit screw in so far that it shifted into sixth. No problem, all I have to do is loosen it a little more, loosen the derailleur, the spring on the derailleur will pull it back outward, which will line up better with seventh. Now, if I turn the pedals, it should go back into seventh. Needs a little bit more. Shift right in the center. The front derailleurs making a racket, that's okay.

There we are. But you can hear, I'll be quiet here in just a second so you can hear there's no rattling or making any mechanical noise. Nice, quiet noise. That means it's perfectly in seventh gear. Now, once we have it perfectly in seventh gear, adjusted with that limit screw, now we go ahead, take that nine-millimeter socket again, and we'll take the cable, give it a few pulls to make sure it's pulled all the way through housing, there's no slack in the cable. Like this, pull nice and tight, and then go ahead and tighten down that pinch bolt. I'm going to say it again, don't go too tight. One hand is enough and you don't need extra leverage for torque.

Great. Now what we're wanting to do, is we're going to see. We know that it runs well in seventh gear. I'm going to go ahead, I'll move this up here. I'm going to take the shifter and I'm going to give it one click. Now the shifters in sixth gear, but the chain is still in seventh because we haven't turned the pedals yet. In a bike stand in a shop, they'll be doing this all the same time. And like I said, this process on a bike stand takes me about 40 seconds to perfectly adjust gears. In a garage, it's going to take a little bit longer. That's okay. We can still get it done pretty much perfect as well. Now I put the shifter in sixth so when I turn the pedals it should shift into sixth gear and it may not because the [inaudible 00:37:13] may not be tight enough, but we'll try it. It does, it shifts into sixth. Okay.

We'll go to five. Again, we'll give it one click and see if we go into five. It does. Four, it does. This is working great. Sometimes it doesn't want to shift and that's because the cable tension isn't tight enough. There is a little adjustment right here. Can we see that? Let's see right here, this can be turned. If you want to turn it counterclockwise, looking at it from the top, you'll see this little silver bit start to emerge, that will tighten the chain tension and that will make it go more easily from seven to six, six to five, five to four. In our case, we didn't have to adjust this, but if it's having trouble going to a lower gear, go ahead and turn this barrel adjuster here counter-clockwise and that will tighten up the cable for you. We're going to go ahead and shift all the way up to one. Right now we're in three. Here are two and here's one.

Now once we're in one all I need to do with the low limit screw is make sure that the derailleur has enough room to get into the first gear, but not so much that it can actually go into the spokes. Because sometimes it is possible for the derailleur to swing in enough to go into the spokes, that would be very bad. Or it could derail the chain on the spoke side. Take the low limit screw and what we want to see is if you look at the low limit screw here on the derailleur, which is here, you can see all the way through to where it hits the stop inside the derailleur. You just want to give that, when it's in the first gear, you just want to give that about a millimeter of room. And that will give a little bit of wiggle room to the derailleur. You can see I can push the derailleur in about and an extra millimeter. That's enough to get a room to be nice and safely onto the first gear, which is the largest one, but not so much the derailleur can actually go into the spokes. We have adjusted the rear gears now.

Again, you can test it. The way to really test it, of course, once you're done, take it out in the street, give it a ride while you're pedaling, you can shift through all the gears, see if it's having a hard time going into any of them. It should naturally because of the spring, go into the higher gears, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Sometimes a little sluggish going seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, backward. That's because the cable wasn't tight enough. In that case, you can turn the barrel adjuster counterclockwise, and then it'll go more easily seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

All right. Front derailleur. Front derailleurs are, like I said, a little bit more of an art to that one, but I'll show you how to do it. All we need for this is the Phillips and the five-millimeter Allen wrench. Did I misplace my... Here we go. I found it right here. The first step, again, as we did with the rear derailleur, is just to go ahead and loosen the pinch bolt to loosen the cable. We always want to work on these things, not attached to the cable. You'll never get a good adjustment if you're trying to work under tension, under pressure. A lot of people try to do that. Sometimes it can be approximated. Usually, you're just really fighting.

We're going to take a five-millimeter here, loosen that cable. Here's the cable, not attached anymore. Now we set the front derailleur, which the spring makes me want to pull in towards the frame of the bike. And that cable, once reattached is going to be pulling the derailleur out, a way to shift the chain over onto the other gears. We have three chainrings upfront, and then we have the seven years in the back, three times seven, 21 gears. The front derailleur, if you look, it will have a tiny little sticker on it and this is your guide to show how to line it up with the gears. Look, there's a little red sticker here at the bottom of the derailleur. It shows a little depiction of the teeth on the chainring and it also shows where the front derailleur should lineup with that.

In addition to that, you can see the front derailleur is made of two parallel plates right here that either push the chain this way or bring it back in. Those need to be parallel with the chain. As long as we do that, we line up with the stickers are properly up and down, and then also make sure it's parallel with the chain, everything should shift pretty nicely. If it's not, it's easy later on to make adjustments to make it work. But again, it's a little less scientific than the rear derailleur, it's a little more of an art. I'll go ahead and loosen the clamp bolt on the front derailleur. Again, just a little bit lose. Enough loose that it basically holds in place, but then we can move it around, turn it on the tube, loosen the clamp with the five millimeters. Here we go.

Now I can move the trailer back and forth, left and right. I can also move it up and down the tube here. I go to wherever I want. Again also because it's not attached to this cable. All right. Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to go ahead and adjust the height just by moving it up or down with my hand so that the little sticker lines up properly with the teeth on the chainring. And you can see there's a drawing of two little teeth. I want to get those lined up with the teeth on the largest chainring. And what that does is it gives about a millimeter of clearance between the chainring and the bottom of the derailleur plate. If you can visualize that. It gives about a millimeter clearance, that's what we're looking for.

All right. I'm sorry, maybe about two millimeters. [inaudible 00:44:21] right there. I'm going to tighten the clampdown just a little bit so it holds its position a little better, but I can still move it. Now I'm going to site and make it parallel with the chain. We're going to want to do this... I'm sorry, in the... Move the pedal so the chain is in the smallest chainring. Let me do this.

Still not there. Okay, looks good. Double-check the height. I'm not sure if the height is there. I think we're good there, but we'll know when we ride it. If it's not quite there, we know how to adjust it. And sometimes our front derailleur can just take a little bit of going back and forth, that's how front derailleurs are.

The front derailleur also has two limit screws. In this case, you want to set the low one first. And what you want to do is take your Phillips, go to the low limit screw, which will set how far the derailleur can come in towards the bike and you want to turn it clockwise until that derailleur is going to be just about touching the chain, but not quite. Because what we want to do is give the chain enough clearance, but as close that as soon as you shift it pushes that chain over. There's no big gap there. Let's see. And that is low. It's also marked low and high.

And on this one, and some are different, on this one the outside screw is the low set screw. We should have that very close to the chain, but not so close that it rubs. And if we go back and forth like this, we can hear it's not rubbing on the plate. Let me see if I can show you that at all, what I've just done. The inside plate is close to the chain, but not so close that it's rubbing. At this point when you have the small chainring set, so we'll reattach the cable now. Bring the cable up.

Before you do that, make sure it's all the way in the first gar here on the left shifter. It should be in first gear so the chain is in the small chainring. Tighten it now with the five millimeters. All right. Now let's see if what should happen, hopefully, if we've adjusted that properly is when we shift it into the second chainring up here on the shifter it will actually shift into the second chainring. I'm going to go ahead. Since we don't have a bike stand and I can't do these simultaneously, I'm going to shift first and then pedal. Shift into second. A little too much tension so I'm going to pedal a bit. It does not want to go at all.

One moment. It goes around here. I had routed the cable incorrectly. All front derailleurs are different. This one routes over the top and I'll show you that after we've shifted into the second chainring and I make sure that I actually got it right. Let's try this again. I'm going to shift into second up here and I'm going to turn this and it shifts into the middle chainring. Let me show you the routing, which I got wrong on my first attempt just there. Sometimes they route directly, sometimes in this case, this is the Pave 'n Trail and different derailleurs are routed differently. The cable comes in, I'm going to slip my hand back behind here to show you, the cable actually routed over the top part of the derailleur here and then down to the pinch bolt. And it just gives it more leverage.

Not all front derailleurs are like that. On the Sixthreezero Pave 'n Trail, that's how the derailleur is. And this should be a Shimano Tourney if I... Yeah, it's a Shimano Tourney which is pretty standard for this sort of bicycle. All right, so now let's go ahead and put the shifter in number three and then turn the pedals. This is great, it's not shifting. That means there's not enough tension on the cable. What we can do, there's actually an adjuster right here, a barrel adjuster. If you go ahead and turn this one in the counterclockwise direction that will tighten that cable up and it should push the chain over the extra distance it needs to go to get into the third gear. Not quite. What we may also need to do is we may need to adjust the actual adjustment of the derailleur, which we would notice especially after we do a ride.

Here's second, easy, third. Now third also works. And I did that by adjusting the cable tension up here. It went from first to second very easily, but then it was having a hard time getting into third, that's because there was a little bit of slack in the cable so when I was moving the shifter it was actually just tightening the cable, but not yet pulling the derailleur. I tightened the cable by turning the barrel adjuster counter-clockwise, which took the slack out of the cable so that when I push the shifter, there's a direct mechanical connection and moved it right into the largest chainring.

Now we have all 21 gears. We have the seven on the back working and the three on the front working. We're just done with this bike at this point. There's a couple of little details. This one's actually important and very easy. What we want to do is go ahead and tighten the stem. When it comes to you it may be a little loose like this, we want to tighten that down. That's very easily done. There are two, five-millimeter bolts right here. You want to stand over the bike and as best you can, line up the stem with the rest of the bike and also with the front wheel. It's just an eyeball. I close my left eye and I close my right eye and I try to split the difference. And usually when people get on my bikes and they say, "Hey, the handlebars are crooked." And I say, "Well, you look down to do it."

Again, just tighten these two bolts, tighten them evenly. A little bit on the first one, a little bit on a second one to the same tightness and then go back to the first one, tighten a little bit, the second one tighten a little bit, back and forth. Tighten them nice and evenly. And just about as much as you can do with one hand with a small tool like this. You can see it's plenty tight enough like that. You go harder than that you're going to strip the bolt and you won't be able to ride your bike until you get a new bolt. All we have to do now is pump up the tires and go for a ride. We're done.

When you're doing your ride. You want to first check the brakes, check the shocks. We have to pump up the tires. Did I mention that? Make sure you pump up the tires. If you want to look, this is important. Go ahead and just make sure that the tire is seated properly on the wheel. Just give it an eyeball, it should be perfect. Sometimes the tire can come unseated from the rim, which means the tube will come out, and when you inflate it could pop. Just make sure this looks like a nice connection on both sides and then we're going to inflate it.

The PSI, the pounds per square inch are listed on the tire. In this one's case it should be about 65, but let's find out for sure. This one on this bike you can inflate from 50 pounds to 85 pounds. 50 pounds to 85 PSI. I usually go on the higher side, it makes for easier riding. The higher the pressure, the more efficient it is, the faster it's going to go, the easier it's going to be to ride. In my opinion, there's never a reason really to have it at a lower pressure. Sometimes people use it if the weather's worse, it helps for a little more grip, but normally just keep it nice and high. You'll actually find it makes it much easier. Same with your car too, save a lot of gas. You don't notice it in your car but on a bicycle, it makes a big difference. If you ride this at 50 PSI and then pump up to 85, it'll really surprise you. You can notice it for sure.

Ready to go. Make sure the first thing you do, you test the brakes. Make sure it feels like you're braking safely. Feel how the bike feels, back and forth a little bit, left and right. And then go through all the gears. See if it's shifting smoothly. If there are a little bit of problems as we didn't have a stand and we weren't able to check it while we were doing the gear adjustment, then you can see if there are any little adjustments that need to be made. If it's not going fast enough, either to the higher gears or the lower gears. If the front derailleur needs to be made a little more parallel, moved to the left or right a little bit, but we're good to go.

And that wasn't all that difficult, was it? Thanks a bunch from Sixthreezero, and from me, and I'm so glad you got a bicycle because it's one of my favorite things in life. I've never felt the peace and joy on anything else or with anything else that I feel on a bicycle. And that's what you just pulled out of a box, peace, and joy. Take care. Bye.