Creaking sound when hot out – any ideas?

@KLizotte 84087 wrote:

Am I doing more damage by riding it for the next month?

Probably not. If its something really bad, it won’t be temperature dependent, imho. Also, there’s two creaks that the venerated SB doesn’t attribute to pedaling force creaks that I’ve found on more than one occasion:

loose/dry QR skewers (clean then apply a light amount of grease to the dropouts, then add a couple drops of light oil to the cam of the QR and make sure the QRs are nice and tight)

loose rear derailleur hanger (this one drove me nuts on a customer’s bike once – I was absolutely positive a creak was coming from the pedal spindle/pedal insert in the drive side crank arm – even swapped cranks & pedals and the creak went away… for a week. noticed the shifting wasn’t staying in adjustment between the customer’s visits and finally noticed the rDer hanger bolts were a little bit loose – tightened up, no more creak for good.)

I checked Cannodale’s bikes archives for 2013 Road Bikes, and I assume that your bike is “Synapse Carbon 5 105”. According to the specs it has crank type “FSA GOSSAMER Pro, BB30, 50/34”. I searched YouTube for BB30 Replacement, and the first video shows the same problem that you have, and even the same bike. Here is the link to the first video just in case:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoUNL8FDweQ

If you search Amazon for “BB30“, you will find several tools(~$11-$35), including those in the video, and the bearing replacement kit(~$40).

From what I know, if dirt get into the mechanism, some of the bearing might go over tiny pieces of rocks, gets squeezed, then propelled instantly after moving over the tiny rock until it hits other bearings or the housing for the bearing, and that’s when you hear the clicking sound. If you keep riding, you make the bearing worse, but that’s not important if you replace it. If a shop tells you they will just clean it and put it back together, then it might still make sound as the bearing may have created groves in the metal to escape the dirt, so it’s better to replace it. Some shops may suggest replacing the crank as well($300+), but that is not necessary.

I know dangerously little about this, but in the last few weeks there was a lively thread on bikeforums.net in which several people asserted that Cannondale didn’t use the right Loctite formula & technique when installing the BBs and this misinstallation leads to creaking.

Well, as much as I like my Cannondale (and I do!), it’s been off-and-on noisy since about a month after I got it. Strangely, the clicking and creaking seem at times temperature and/or distance sensitive. Weird. I’ve greased a bunch of bolts on it with varying degrees of effectiveness. Once I took out the seatpost and reinserted it (without adding any anti-seize) and that helped, miraculously. LBS has done various things to it, also with unpredictable effectiveness. Right now we’re at a point of détente: it doesn’t make much noise, and I’m not much bothered by it. (I’m also shopping for a new bike, but that’s not directly related to any of this.) (Really!)

Remember that, like most things these days, canondale is just a nameplate trading on nostalgia. The company that made the brand by building bikes a couple hundred miles north of here is gone, the people who made the bikes are gone, and the company that bought the name now slaps it on the output of third party factories. Not a story unique to the bike industry.