Creaky CSU Solution

7/27/2025

This topic is related to the origins of Blue Liquid Labs. I’m talking about solving creaky CSU’s. I thought I’d post about this here because if I don’t, this topic might fall victim to historical revisionism. It would be very easy for a company with more resources and a nicer website to claim that their people were actually the ones to figure all this out, so it’s best that I at least give an origin story and put it on record, since this is now history. Mind you it’s a very very tiny portion of history we’re talking about here, but it’s still history nonetheless. Luckily at any point, anybody can use the wayback machine to cross reference what’s been written on the internet with real dates, just in case there are any doubts. And it’s entirely possible that conversations about this might have happened in R and D departments and behind other closed doors. Even more possible is that somebody might have spelled this all out somewhere on the Japanese, Russian or German internet, but I can’t read any of those languages. At least on the English internet, back then at no point did I find even so much as a suggested diagnosis to the problem, let alone a real solution. So now I’ll tell the story of how my diagnosis and solution came about.

It all started with my 2002 Rockshox Psylo SL. After only a year of riding, it began to creak horribly. The internet was still in its early period so there was no good information about this type of thing. Bike shops were still the main source of information and at the time, the people working there preferred to pretend like creaking issues didn’t exist. You were essentially a crazy person if you started pondering aloud about what this mysterious creaking might be linked to. It was almost as bad as if you came in and started contemplating where bigfoot might live. Getting help was hopeless.

Many years went by and I heard through the grapevine that a respected mechanic in my city was using Loctite retaining compound on headset cups. That was very relevant at the time because 1-1/8 head tubes were getting ovalized. I almost couldn’t believe that some loctite could actually hold and stabilize something subject to that much force. Years before, I had heard about people putting headset cups into ovalized headtubes with red loctite as a homebrew type of solution. Now the year was 2008 and I was riding a 2003 Norco Sasquatch with a Marzocchi Z1. Sure enough by that point, the headtube became ovalized. I could feel a well defined knock during braking as the lower headset cup moved rearward inside the head tube. I tried the old loctite trick and it worked. I couldn’t believe it. All the forces coming in through that long fork were effectively being held by the Loctite.

In 2010, I was working at a bike shop that had a hydraulic press and a mini lathe. By that point I was educated about the fretting corrosion seen in other industrial settings, such as the type you’d see on a shaft that had a bearing sitting on it or what you’d see in a machine taper that hadn’t been removed in a long time. I began to wonder if maybe the same thing could be happening inside the press fits of the CSU. By then the internet had matured somewhat and there was now a widespread acknowledgement of the existence of CSU creaks. But at least in the English internet, you could google until you were blue in the face and you’d see nothing written about a solution. My plan was to combine the lessons I learned from using loctite on my Norco Sasquatch with what I knew about fretting corrosion. I made some tooling to press apart my old Rockshox Psylo CSU, cleaned out the corrosion inside and added some loctite retaining compound. Sure enough it worked.

More years went by and there was still nothing written on the internet about how fretting corrosion applies to mountain bike fork CSU’s. Even worse, by that time there began to emerge various suggestions at solutions, all of which missed the mark in one way or another. I heard recommendations to clean out headsets, I read memos about increasing the torque on the top caps, I heard recommendations to drip wicking grade loctite into the CSU without taking it apart, and I also heard a call to increase the press fit interferences of the CSU. While there isn’t anything horribly wrong with any of those things, none of them could reliably produce a situation where a customer handed you a creaky CSU and you handed them back the same CSU in silent form. I knew that pressing the CSU apart, cleaning out the corrosion and loctiting the CSU could reliably produce a situation that made customers happy.

Finally in 2014, I decided to make my own website that was going to spell the whole thing out. It took years to get noticed but once enough people read that article on my website, the connection between fretting corrosion and mountain bike fork CSU’s became something closer to common knowledge. Maybe not exactly common, but among the technical people out there, these concepts and connections became understood. Since then I’ve been able to provide many shops around the world with the tooling necessary to replicate my results. My article and later on my video gave many other shops the courage to develop their own tooling and methodology to fix the problem in their own communities. As far as I’m able to tell, it all started with me publicly pointing out the culprit and the solution back in 2014. This is the article I wrote on my website back then, with the original timestamp of June 21st, 2014. You can click it and make it bigger if you want to read through it.

Steerer Tube Extender

8/3/2025

This is pretty close to what you could call the genesis of Blue Liquid Labs. If we’re being honest, it all came about due to a form of North American poverty. Not the type of poverty that’s necessarily an immediate threat to your life, just the type that’s going to insure that you’ll always be on sub-par equipment.

The year was 2003 and although I had been riding cheap mountain bikes since 1997, this was the first year that I was able to scrounge enough parts to build my own bike. Scrounging being the key word here. Of course, like many people who scrounge, I was faced with a situation where my old fork was slightly too short for my new frame. Buying a new CSU was so expensive, it was out of the question. I was limited to a low stack stem and that’s how I dealt with the problem.

Over the years I would think about how this steerer tube problem could be solved safely. I did work at a bike shop that had a lathe in 2010 but at that time, the steerer tube problem strangely never came up. By 2014 I was working at another shop and an employee there had a tiny lathe in his garage. Sure enough at that shop someone was faced with this same situation that I faced back in 2003. I rode my bike over my friend’s garage and he allowed me to make the first steerer tube extender that I had dreamed up years earlier. No pictures of that first extender from 2014 exist, as far as I’m aware.

By 2017 I had moved across the country and was working at a different shop. At that point I finally bought my own lathe and was renting a detached garage where I could slowly develop my own products. Someone was again faced with the same situation that I faced in 2003. I was able to make them my extender and this time I took some pictures of it. The original design intent for the extender was to be for mountain bikes but this particular one went on a track bike. My design always combined four main elements. A BMX starnut, a strong steel bolt, some loctite and a light press fit. I made each extender custom sized for the inside diameter of that particular steerer tube. You can read the original article I wrote about it in 2017. Click the image below to make it bigger.

Bushing Tools

8/3/2025

This is probably what I’m best known for, with bushing sizing tools specifically being at center stage. Although strangely, the sizing tools weren’t the first thing I came up with. The first mountain bike tool I actually ever thought of was the bushing removal tool. I worked at a shop in 2010 and I had to remove a set of bushings using their tool. The bushings were stuck in the lower casting and the slide hammer on the bushing removal tool just wasn’t enough to get the bushings out. As I was slamming the slide hammer, I immediately designed my bushing removal tool in my mind. Obviously it was heavily inspired by the Park Tool headset punch but it would be many years until I actually made the tool.

It wasn’t until 2017 that the need for a bushing removal tool arose again. By that point I had a tiny little milling machine and lathe. I made the bushing removal tool and the accompanying bushing sizing tool. At that time, I tapped the new bushings back in using a well fitting socket and a tape measure. Two years later I made an accompanying bushing insertion tool.

You can read the article I wrote about this from my old website. I actually still can’t believe it but from that horrible little web page article with terrible sideways pictures, I manufactured and sold so many bushing tools and people would just email me their orders to my hotmail email. The more I think about it today, the more unbelievable the entire thing is. There was no shopping cart on my old website.

Offset Shock Hardware

8/9/2025

I hardly sold any of these but I thought this was a cool project. It all came about because my rear shock sealhead unscrewed itself and spewed all its oil. While I was rebuilding the shock, I installed and rode the only other shock I had, which was 7.875 inches eye to eye. That was much shorter than the original 8.5 inch eye to eye. It turned out to be an eye opening experience. The bike suddenly became low and slack. The cornering improved massively. It felt stable and planted. Of course I didn’t enjoy the lower amount of travel and the accompanying stiffer spring rate. But it didn’t take much to see past that and in my mind I immediately began to design some offset shock hardware that would allow me to put an even longer shock in the frame but still have the low and slack geometry. This happened in 2005 and it wasn’t until 2008 that I was able to get these offsets made. Once I made my first website in 2015, I featured this project for no reason other than I thought it was cool. Click the screenshot below to make it bigger and give it a read.