Fun Day today

Unable to remove a left-hand crank today - - it wouldn't budge - judicious use of a plastic hammer on the bb puller didn't work,a heat gun didn't work - brute force in the form of the strong apprentice didn't work - so we ended up cutting through the bottom bracket spindle - fortunately, we were disposing of the bottom bracket anyway. And luckily I had a spare l/h crank that was a close match to refit when we put the new cartridge unit in. This is the only crank we have never been able to get off. Why was it like this? Probably when it was assembled in the factory no grease was applied to the spindle before installing the cranks. The bike has then been used, put away wet and dirty and left for quite some time which will not have helped. Answer - bit of grease on the spindle flats before putting cranks on. We also had a tyre that would not come off a rim (different bike)- having gone through several levers we ended up cutting the tyre off - it was being replaced you'll be glad to know.This tyre has obviously been a problem as you can see where its owner has been using metal levers when he had had a puncture and the rim is a bit dinged in several places. Just a combination of poor rims and poor tyres methinks - no-one's fault. There was an interesting pair of 'twists' in the inner tube. The rims are very shallow with very little 'well' for the tyre to fit into so making it difficult to seat when replacing it. The tyres were 26" x 1.75 and the inner tube was a big fat one which didn't help. At 1.75 the rim is right at the bottom end of the range for that inner tube. Might be better to use one that covered 1.25 - 1.50 which is less fat and might have made it easier to get the tyre back on.The new tyre went on without tyre levers - just using a bit of technique,patience and strong fingers. As it was a 1.95 there was just a wee bit more room for the tube to squeeze in. After all that you can bet I'm looking forward to a nice easy cabling job on a lovely Ridley road bike!