Winterizing

Can you imagine being forced to push your bike for miles on rideable snow simply because your freehub froze up and the pawls won't engage? Yeah, that would really suck. But this scenario seems to take place every year in one of the snow bike races. Don't let this hapen to you people!

This weekend's 39 degree rain was a perfect excuse to spend some quality time with my FatBike's Shimano XT rear hub and get to know it on a very intimate level. The basic goal was to strip it down to the guts, degrease everything, and then re-grease it with a lube proven at extreme low temps.

Key ingredients:
1) Morningstar Soup grease
2) Morningstar Freehub Buddy tool
3) Morningstar replacement dust shield for Shimano XT





The Morningstar Soup has been tested down to -60F by a mad scientist in Alaska.

I also found some great instructions for tearing down the Shimano XT rear hub here. This is where the Morningstar Freehub buddy comes in. You cannot take apart the freehub mechanism once you remove it from the hub. However, the Freehub Buddy allows you to press degreaser through the freehub to clean it out and then to press the "Soup" through it to regrease it. Without the Freehub Buddy it would be impossible to get any grease into the Shimano freehub. Other hubs are probably easier to "winterize".

The guts of my hub were very clean since I have only ridden this bike on snow. However, the factory grease was very thick even in the moderate temps of my garage and I could easily see how it would be an issue in temps below zero.

One last note, the Morningstar relplaceable dust shield is another key part. You WILL destroy the Shimano dust shield when you remove it.