I bought this bike second hand (I'm new to MTB) and only now realised that it's not the original Q Loc 2 on the front wheel. It has a lever on the other side, which if I loosen enough, this side is able to push in and twist a bit, like I have seen in the Q Loc tutorials.
That's as far as it gets through, it doesn't go all the way through, and in fact the inside seems hollow. Do I need a special tool for it? If so, what would that be?
Thanks
by Th3Chapst3r
2 Comments
You did already everything necessary tu pull it out. But i have a lot on work which needed a hammer or dremel to get out, this system is shit on longterm usage
They sometimes open up when you try to pull them out and then the retention mechanism gets snagged in the gaps between fork and wheel.
It might also be seized if it wasn’t greased before insertion or the grease has since washed out leaving things to start to rot together. Q-Loc skewers just love to do that. I usually resort is often a 9 or 10mm hex nut on an extension, a mallet or hammer, a couple pinches of force applied via impact and hope that the axle breaks free before the fork starts to flex and you start bending things. (Yes, the later has happened to me before, the drop outs on that fork were salted as much as a really, really well salted pretzel. Can’t see the lock nuts of the wheel’s axle kinda well salted.)
In general I’d advise trying to find a third party skewer if plan on keeping the fork long term. Q-Loc is too sensitive towards dirt ingress to be MTB worthy, at least imo. I know that Old Man Mountain makes a fit kit for fork mounting their cargo racks that includes one such skewer, it’s a design that threads into itself and comes in a black anodized coating, so it doesn’t suffer from (galvanic?) corrosion as fast the standard Q-Loc skewers.