The drill is whining!
A customer brought in a De Rosa King X-Lite for repairs.
The bottle cage screw hole on the down tube side is spinning in place.
The customer already tried applying super glue to fix it
(ugh!), but it doesn't seem to have worked.
If the spinning is completely terminal, it would be difficult to remove the bottle cage itself,
but we managed somehow.
When I removed the seatpost and looked into the seat tube,
it wasn't connected to the down tube, but
when I removed the fork, I found that the down tube and head tube were connected,
so I confirmed in advance that even if I dropped the rivet nut inside,
it would be recoverable.
↑Top of down tube
↑Bottom of down tube
The crusty stuff around the rivet nut is super glue.
To drop this into the frame,
↑Where the rivet nut is like this,
I'll drill down to here.
A problem occurred here.
The rivet nut itself spins with the drill rotation.
And the super glue vaporized from the rotation heat, or so it seemed—
a strong glue smell came out.
Actually, the order was reversed: the heat from the drill rotation broke the bond first,
and that's what caused the spinning.
I marked it.
It looks like it's rotated about 60° clockwise,
but actually it's (360×n) + 60° or so.
It's spun multiple rotations.
I changed strategy and decided to grind it down with a hand grinder
to the limit and fold over the edge.
Ground down to the limit.
Fold this over
fold
and tear it off.
Now it just drops into the frame.
The other one went quickly since I got the hang of it.
↑Like this
Now I just need to crimp and install this rivet nut with the proper tool.
↑Like this.
↑The crimped part
The original rivet nut we recovered,
was barely crimped at all.
It's surprising that the bottle cage was held with this.
Installed the new rivet nut.
↑Like this
The bottle cage hole threads aren't parallel,
but that's because the down tube has a special shape—it's original.
↑Before work
↑Looking like this
I considered adding a washer to the lower screw hole to at least align the height,
regardless of thread angle, but the bottle cage actually fit as-is.
Since it was the same when we received it,
there's no reason the original bottle cage shouldn't fit,
though some bottle cages might not mount depending on their design.
As a side note, the Carrera Fibra's seat tube side bottle cage hole
is in a similar condition.
I think it has less flexibility in this case, though.
A customer brought in a De Rosa King X-Lite for repairs.
The bottle cage screw hole on the down tube side is spinning in place.
The customer already tried applying super glue to fix it
(ugh!), but it doesn't seem to have worked.
If the spinning is completely terminal, it would be difficult to remove the bottle cage itself,
but we managed somehow.
When I removed the seatpost and looked into the seat tube,
it wasn't connected to the down tube, but
when I removed the fork, I found that the down tube and head tube were connected,
so I confirmed in advance that even if I dropped the rivet nut inside,
it would be recoverable.
↑Top of down tube
↑Bottom of down tube
The crusty stuff around the rivet nut is super glue.
To drop this into the frame,
↑Where the rivet nut is like this,
I'll drill down to here.
A problem occurred here.
The rivet nut itself spins with the drill rotation.
And the super glue vaporized from the rotation heat, or so it seemed—
a strong glue smell came out.
Actually, the order was reversed: the heat from the drill rotation broke the bond first,
and that's what caused the spinning.
I marked it.
It looks like it's rotated about 60° clockwise,
but actually it's (360×n) + 60° or so.
It's spun multiple rotations.
I changed strategy and decided to grind it down with a hand grinder
to the limit and fold over the edge.
Ground down to the limit.
Fold this over
fold
and tear it off.
Now it just drops into the frame.
The other one went quickly since I got the hang of it.
↑Like this
Now I just need to crimp and install this rivet nut with the proper tool.
↑Like this.
↑The crimped part
The original rivet nut we recovered,
was barely crimped at all.
It's surprising that the bottle cage was held with this.
Installed the new rivet nut.
↑Like this
The bottle cage hole threads aren't parallel,
but that's because the down tube has a special shape—it's original.
↑Before work
↑Looking like this
I considered adding a washer to the lower screw hole to at least align the height,
regardless of thread angle, but the bottle cage actually fit as-is.
Since it was the same when we received it,
there's no reason the original bottle cage shouldn't fit,
though some bottle cages might not mount depending on their design.
As a side note, the Carrera Fibra's seat tube side bottle cage hole
is in a similar condition.
I think it has less flexibility in this case, though.