I’ve been battling a mystery creak on my niner for the past several weeks. The troubling thing is the niner is a hard tail. I’m used to bearings , pivots etc occasionally creaking on my squishy bikes but having the noise start up on the hard tail was alarming. I immediately thought the worst and went to looking for cracks. After I didn’t find anything on the frame after looking things over I started looking elsewhere. It took me a couple weeks but I finally narrowed it down the rear of the bike and I had a feeling it was seatpost or saddle related. First course of action was to pull the post grease everything and remove the saddle and lightly grease the rails. Unfortunately this didn’t yield any improvements. When the creaking was bad enough that I couldn’t completely cover it up with my ipod I started looking again. Still couldn’t find anything obvious after going over the frame. Finally I realized the seat posts on my niner and my intenses are the same. I pulled the post and saddle off my tracer through it in the niner and went for a spin. The resulting silence was a beautiful thing. The saddle currently on the niner is pretty work and has somehow developed a nasty creak when I move around on it. I guess it’s finally time to retire that saddle. At least I can finally stop worrying about the bike and go back to enjoying the silence the Hard Tail brings.

I really do hate these mystery noises that pop up now and again. Whenever they come up it takes me at least a couple weeks to isolate and correct and they worry me constantly until resolved. Considering I will be selling the medium emd frame to cover the replacement large I have in order, I am relieved that all is well with the frame. While on the subject, I now have a moondust large niner EMD on order. I also put in my order form for a new King Headset and Bottom Bracket. Next up I will have to work on getting the drive train moved over to Sram. Once that’s done between my Niner and my new Tracer I will have two very kick ass rides to cover about it anything I’d care to ride. Sadly I don’t think many of my other rides are going to see as much as these two will anytime soon.

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