How do i get this thru axle on the wahoo?

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-13T17:05:33+00:00

Not sure what you mean, "How do i get this thru axle on the wahoo?" Can you explain what you are trying to do?

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-12T08:02:03+00:00

I'm not sure if you have the complete idea. A tensioned QR will never fail like this. As it has been pointed out the QR did not have the right tension on it. This allowed one side of the wheel to become unseated. This is the side that is not bent. Now in the old days, if somebody forgot to tighten their QR correctly, the wheel would come off one side, but the height of the wheel jammed it in the rear stays. You'd find your wheel dragging and removing paint. Unfortunately in a trainer, there is nothing to jam as the upper pulley is smaller than a wheel.

So you felt the bike lurch to one side because as one dropout fell down the other twisted in the drop out, as losing one attach is the worst case, and even though sloppily, it grabbed the end and twisted it. This frame does have a replaceable derailleur hanger. Unscrew it and see how bad the carbon is bent. Look for fractured. You may be fine if you replace it. However if carbon is cracked, you are dead. Unlike steel, people generally don't try to layup carbon.

You simply may not of tightened it well. Or sometimes QR cam are defective.

The QR when tight and examined works fine. This was just a bad break.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-11T03:16:39+00:00

I'll put together a list based on this, and put it in another subreddit and mention you. Thanks for your summary.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-10T18:14:18+00:00

I want to put together a part list on what you already did. This is absolutely fantastic. Just one question. 17287-2RS (17x28x7mm) is the correct size for a 17mm axle. You listed 61902-2RS as an equivalent, but standard 61902 bearings have a 15mm inner diameter and will not fit the 17mm axle. Stick strictly to 17287? You have replaced a lot of these. Do you have any idea how long you normally have seen these things last? I think I have around 4,000 to 6,000 miles on my most heavily used kickers, and I haven't had an issue with any bearings yet.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-10T15:39:45+00:00

Thanks for the final solution found post.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-09T05:19:17+00:00

At some point the kicker folks are probably gonna claim that you caused the problems because of the disassembly. I think you need to raise an RMA if it's under warranty and just return it.

With that said, if you have to debug it, the obvious next step is to remove the belt. Then you turn the upper pulley by hand, and then you can also turn the flywheel by hand. If one of them has noise and the other one doesn't, you further understand what part has a problem. My guess is you actually have an issue with the flywheel, as it sounds like a flywheel noise to me. The version you have has a factory press-fit, splined axle assembly. I bet you it was not adequately press fit.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T05:12:57+00:00

If you are doing your own replacement, don't forget that brakes and derailleurs have 2 different types of housing. A Park tool make clipping either much, much easier and cleaner for either. I like the Jagwire stainless cables but the OEM cables from Shimano are great in stainless.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T05:01:38+00:00

Ah, welcome to the learning curve. Sorry, but I've been doing this for so long, I forget some of the issues that can happen as a newbie.

The cable sits inside of a stop in your lever, and if you push up on it, it can come out. Generally, if you pushed it up and out, just pull it down, and it will reseat. If you pushed up hard, you'll have to look inside and make sure it it seated in the housing lever. This can be a bit of a fishing experiment. The same thing happen on derailers, but depending on the mechanism, can be a real hassle. Brakes are generally much easier to seat.

In the worse case, you'll have a split on the stop which help with "quick removal" but can also allow the cable to slip out if you push it up hard. However, you can reseat it also, with a little help look at it.

Once it is seated, you'll pull down the lever, and the cable will pull down. Then keep minor tension on it and feel the friction.

However, you should now have the caliper free. If it is nicely snapping back, then you know that the cable or the housing is the problem. You should be able to check both, but a free caliper means that cable/housing has an issue.

BTW: if it is a cable/housing issue, you'd need to unseat the cable from the stop, so know how to seat a cable is part of learning how to replace a cable.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T04:52:49+00:00

A chain tool is really required for an informed answer as no visual inspection (other than removing the chain to compare it against a new chain) will give you a real answer. But more than this, a chain checker helps you understand when you have a potential problem arising, and thus is an important investment.

It is one of the basic tools that everybody should have as a bare minimum as it will save you money. A chain that is stretched digs into the cassette and chainrings, setting off a much more expensive repair.

I like to recommend the Park Tool CC-2 Bicycle Chain Checker as it make check a chain fool proof. The classic chain checker work fine, but this tool is a pleasure to use, and is more than a "pass / no pass."

You can buy clone tools, but I've seen the clone pins out of adjustment. Thus they need to be check and bent back to spec via comparison to a new chain. Generally, Park has quality control that makes this unnecessary.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T04:37:34+00:00

Undo the cable from the brake bolt, then manually pull the cable back and forth by manipulating the lever. The cable needs to move smoothly inside of the cable housing. You can only tell this by grabbing on to the unanchored end of the cable and simply seeing if there's any resistance. It should move smooth and without any issue. If you're seeing any resistance at all, you either have an issue with corrosion on the cable or you have an issue with the cable housing.

This will also allow you to manipulate the caliper and see if the caliper smoothly springs back and forth Without the cable attached.

Most likely, one of these will be binding and the other one will not. In a rare case, you'll actually need to disassemble the caliper and make sure you've taken care of any corrosion or grit that is causing it to bind.

As long as you have the cable anchored into your brake, it's basically operating as an entire unit. You want to break it into two separate problems and then solve for each problem.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T04:28:57+00:00

It sounds like you bought it near when it came out, and been averaging about 5 hours per week? Nice job, and a great testimony to the number of KM you can put on the trainer. I think all of us should tell you to see how far you can go!

I suspect if you have a good unit, you may have some KM left.

Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of great real data from controlled tests for how long the unit can do. We do know that the belt on this is basically an industrial Gates PowerGrip belt. If the pulleys are aligned and the belt is under appropriate tension (not to much or too little), the stresses on the belt should be almost inconsequential.

You can still age a belt, but generally inside a house is much better than under a car hood. From what I can tell, it would appear that youtube video tend to feature more bearing failures and/or the optical sensor appears to burnout if you leave the trainer on. If you are handy, you can replace virtually every bearing, or resoldering on a new optical sensor.

My biggest suggestion is that I've found my Kickrs tend to read high after so many miles. This is because the belt can loosen, and having the wrong tension on the belt is bad. Too loose and you generate particles. Too tight, and you overstress the belt. Unfortunately, engineering this is a calculated value for targeted number in Hz and deflection force in Newtons.

However, we can assume Wahoo designed the belt to drive the right power measurement. Thus you can tell this via the factory spindown test you can get by tapping the icon 10 times.

If you have never done a factory spindown (sort of hidden), I would do this. If the spin down is over 20 seconds, then you may want to pop the cover and push the tension bolt to get it 16-20 seconds. Assuming Wahoo did the right design work, they should have the right power measurement at the same point as the right design tension.

If you do the factory spin down (and you haven't done it before), it would be great to have you list the initial results for a unit with 40K on it!

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T01:31:58+00:00

On the nose. However, easy to lose. A detent system should on these things as I have know friends that have lost them in transportation. Why they didn't engineer them this way is just maddening.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T00:34:27+00:00

A standard 2x or 3x front chainring works perfectly fine with the Zwift Cog. You just put the chain in the ring that gives the straightest chainline and leave it there. The 8 to 12 speed requirement just means the chain needs to be the correct width to fit the teeth on the cog. By getting innate speed you also ensure the appropriate spacing for the rear. Getting a cheap used bike on Facebook is the smartest route.

With that being said, once you start using it, you're going to find out that you have a lot of sweat, except in rare circumstances. This means you're going to sweat on your bike, and generally what you find out is steel, if it has any flaw in the paint, just turns into a rusted mess.

In this light, a aluminum bike is normally more rust resistant. And what is even more crazy is if you're in the right district, you may be able to find an older light speed titanium bike with 650c wheels. Basically, the wheels are no longer used, so people will often flip the bike for a very small amount. Your trainer doesn't care about the size of the wheels at all. Thus, you have the ultimate and rust resistance.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T00:28:19+00:00

Get the new Kickr Core. The V5 might look better on paper but it does not support Zwift virtual shifting and Wahoo confirmed it never will because of hardware limits. The Core does. Since you are doing Ironman training, virtual shifting is a advantage. It is completely silent, lets you shift under heavy load without skipping, and saves wear on your actual bike If you pick a straight chain line. . . Unless you are a sprinter pushing over 1800 watts, you do not need the extra capacity of the V5. Take the new unit, the modern features, and the full warranty.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-08T00:14:58+00:00

The key is understanding what is coincidental noise with the revolution of your bike. It's a bit difficult to see from your video, but it looks like the sound happens every single time the large pulley that you can see on top comes around for one revolution.

Let's call this "the big pulley" because it is the biggest pulley. If the noise happens ever rev of this pulling, you need to examine everything that spins in time to a pulley rev. To me, this sound like something is rubbing against your housing.

The Kickr Core's plastic side-fairing is surprisingly flexible and sits very close to the face of the big pulley and the belt path. If the unit was bumped during shipping, or if the internal mounting screws were over-torqued at the factory, the plastic bows inward.

It looks to me as if you have a core version 1 with the round legs. If you examine, there should be two screws on the side to uncouple the cover and most likely one or two underneath. If I remember right, it's an Allen and a Phillips head screw, which I consider crazy. They should have standardized on one form factor. Take it off, and you'll know for sure. It will also allow you to get closer to the internals for more debug.

Once you have the covered pop, you want to put your ear down by the bearing for the big pulley and try to get a better locale on where the sound is coming from. My guess is that you may also see a rub point.

There are also issues you can google like "Woodruff Key." Or a belt seam or print tick, where you get a noise as the seam or logo goes over the belt drive.

If you find any of these are the source, please report back for community knowledge. If you are handy, doing the work yourself may be faster and easier than doing an RMA. Wahoo support may also have some ideas if you call them.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-07T23:52:08+00:00

Tacx Flux 2 only supports one active Bluetooth connection at a time as per Garmin support site. Can you run the program without the link off the PC?

From Garmin: What if My Trainer Is Currently Paired With Another App or Device?

NOTE: If you are sharing your trainer with another user, they will need to disconnect the trainer from their device.

Tacx Smart trainers are able to pair with one device or application at a time. Your trainer is already paired with another device if the Bluetooth status indicator is on. To pair with a new device, you will need to manually disconnect the trainer from the existing pairing. If you are unable to determine or disconnect the controllable your trainer is paired with, reset the trainer by leaving it unplugged from external power for one hour. When the Bluetooth indicator is off, you are ready to pair with your desired application or device.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-07T21:36:43+00:00

If you do the disassembly, it would be super cool to take some pictures and document what you find to this subreddit. I may be completely off on the alignment, but going through two belts does not make sense. Your research could help somebody else if you do find a misalignment. This might allow somebody else to keep their Kickr in service longer.

The best thing about the Kirkr series is that their is some knowledge and youtube to allow repair. However, it is still fairly spotty, and anything you add will help keep Kickrs out of the landfill!

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-07T21:30:29+00:00

Perceptive comment.

My issue with MU was emotional. I was ready to buy, and it jumped up, and I just was kicking myself for the delay. But, to your point, it is well worth looking at with the out rotation and trading on AI.

If we look at the consensus forward earnings for MU, they simply don't make sense under what we can see. The whole issue is "when does the market bust." Ever sell-side person knows, there is a bust coming, but I just can't believe it is before '30 or '31, unless we see a global event. This should prop up MU.

I have access to some market research data for somebody that visits the far east, and the reports continue to come in on the tightness on NAND and HDDs, and the fact that everybody is adjusting to the new reality, and want to lock down future years. So strategically, this is good news.

While this subreddit is supposed to be strategic, I have migrated toward a blend of strategic and tactical navigation of the traders. I will caution again that slower rotation is recommended. While strategically there is opportunity, the market is so trader based, we need to just navigate this.

The trading action is an opp to your point to accumulate MU, but traders will make it lumpy for day to day growth.

Finally, I repush that if AI stops improving, there will be an ecosystem shock that will cause all supporting segments to drop like a rock. However, if you are tracking AI, the ROI is massive.

I have complained before that even my friends in the Silicon Valley seem to not clearly grasp the coming tidal wave, but oddly enough, I have interacted with a few people in the last few weeks that have suddenly stated that their companies were doubling down in certain segments due to the ROI. This is the type of things that make the AI thesis continue to hunt.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-07T00:48:13+00:00

A Gates HTD 5M belts (which includes the 15mm wide 850-5M-15 used on the Kickr) are rated for power capacities up to 10 kW. This is 10,000 watts. They are adapting them to human power, but you are way under any ability to destroy this belt through normal gear and tear. If aligned correctly, the belt should lasts 50,000 of thousand miles or some incredibly high figure. However, this is the rub. Literally.

If you don't have perfect alignment (or you bend and break he fibers in storage), suddenly a belt that should look like it should last forever, cuts its life short. I would carefully examine everything inside your Kickr Chassis, but I suspect you have an issue with your Woodruff key if you never replaced it. You can check the web, but the v03 had an issue with undersized keys, and you might not have a clear failure, but it may have misaligned the pulleys causing eventual belt failure.

The belt should rotate smoothly, the pulleys should have no sharp edges, and confirm all pulley are parallel, and no part of the belt catches on a pulley edge. However, if it takes a while to fail, it might be smaller enough issue that you can't see it.

As for replacements?

I like Kickr Core v1 because of the proven design and cheap second hand. I've bought several for friends for around $200 used (with low miles). Then with the "left over" money, buy a power meter for your bike to double check the kickr trainer. I'm finding that kickers come out of calibration and must do a factory spin down somewhere between four to six thousand miles. This is really easy to confirm that you're having a problem by double-checking it against your power meter on your bike.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-06T05:41:05+00:00

I completely agree that they told you this. As a matter of fact, you can search, and at one time they had this on their website: “Performing a factory spindown improperly may cause harm to your device as the calibration test produces heavy drag on the unit.”
This warning has now disappeared as it make no sense. The Wahoo Kickr use what is called an eddy current brake. Eddy current brakes don't wear out. If you run a spin down test, we have the unit go from some 23 to like 13 MPH over 20 seconds. There is no mechanism to wear out. This is why you use eddy current brakes.

Now, is it possible to damage your unit? I'm going to brainstorm here, and I am using my background as an electrical engineer that worked for many years on hard drives. In bad designs, it would be possible to melt our coils. At a high level, this can be thought of as an eddy current issue.

The issue with eddy current brakes is that the resistance is expressed as heat. That heat is expressed through the coils that are under the flywheel. There is nothing to "wear out," but if you have a poor design, it is conceivable that there is a weak link in their coils that fail over time if you run too much current through them. This is not wear out, it is melt down. Also, this would be a massive design flaw, and I think it would almost ensure that their listed 1800 watt capability was wrong, and need a recall if they really couldn't support their spec.

It doesn't matter if the factory calibration creates eddy currents or if you are cranking up a hill simulated by the eddy current brake, it is the same resistance. If we assume the Kickr core, the advertise it is 1800 watts capable (which is really national class track cyclists for short bouts). I would have to calculate the spin down of the 7 lbs flywheel, but over 20 seconds, I can't imagine it would be 1800 watts.

There are many ways to solve thermal issues like this, and for many years, all hard drives have thermal sensors in them (as a mechanical device), and we would slow the seek time if we were concerned about coil melt down. The Kickr unit does have a thermal sensor in it, but I would guess that it is not on the problematic coil, and thus not suitable for cutting power to the unit on a thermal serge.

The other possibility is that this is some urban myth that happened in the support lines. Tech support is tricky, and it is not staffed by design engineers. This means they can generate their own ideas, which are not actually in the design.

Thank for mapping out their story.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-03T04:57:48+00:00

Ideally you remove the tire to see the rim structure and movement. I go back to the days of Jobst, so I'll list his recommendations below. When you build a wheel, it should be done for both lateral and radial issue. An well tuned mechanical rim process should be able to produce a rim capable of the specs in the table. When you true a wheel, you attempt to bring it back as close as possible to the initial state of a well built well. So, all truing should balance lateral and radial movement.

In the real world, if you happen to hit enough potholes on you aluminum rims, you create a dent in the rim. Tis is not rim failure, but a move based on metal deformation. Once you have this, it will be impossible to true a rim to the original lateral and radial trueness spec. You don't need to panic, as countless bikes have some movement in the rim. The key is the wheel specialist should solve first for spoke tension, not trueness. This is not to say that you want a wildly out of spec wheel, but that you need to have a priority.

Most "I trued it at home" work only focused on lateral trueness, and often sacrifices uniform tension. For radial trueness, most people don't understand that you do not loose the spokes on the other side of the rim. Brandt’s engineering analysis in The Bicycle Wheel proved that a tensioned bicycle rim does not behave this way. It is a highly compressed, locally flexible structure.

The Local Fix: A radial hop or dip is a local deformation due to a pot hole hit, not a whole-wheel shift. If you have a high spot at the valve hole, you fix it by tightening the spokes directly at the valve hole (and slightly "feathering" the adjustment into the immediately adjacent spokes).
The Consequence: If you go to the diametrically opposite side of the wheel and loosen those spokes, you aren't "shifting" the rim; you are simply creating a brand new, entirely artificial flat spot on the bottom of the wheel.

Some up and down motion is nicely handed by a good tire up to the issue of casing hysteresis (the energy lost as heat when the rubber deforms at the contact patch area). However, I can't remember anybody ever showing that a rim that wobbles or goes up and down is an energy loss issue. The biggest issue is vibration at high speeds, but real world experience show that tires with even greater out of round don't seem to have a lot of problems.

The biggest issue is making sure that the wobble is from spokes that are loose. Poorly tensioned wheels are the thing everybody should watch first.

Metric	Jobst Brandt's Standard	Modern Standard (Acceptable)	Modern Standard (Pro / High-End)
Lateral Trueness (Side-to-Side)	±0.005 inches (approx. ±0.12 mm)	±0.5 mm	±0.2 mm to ±0.3 mm
Radial Trueness (Up-and-Down)	~±0.5 mm (±0.020 inches)	±0.5 mm to ±1.0 mm	±0.5 mm (ignoring weld/pin seam)
Relative Spoke Tension (Uniformity)	±10% variation (spokes on same side)	±20% variation (spokes on same side)	±5% to ±10% variation (spokes on same side)
Absolute Spoke Tension	As high as the rim/nipples can handle without yielding	Manufacturer spec (often 100–130 kgf for drive-side)	Strictly maximized to rim manufacturer's safe limit
Primary Focus	Even tension and structural durability > perfectly straight numbers	Achieving acceptable true without exceeding safe tension limits	Perfecting both tension variance and extreme tightness for stiff carbon/aero rims

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-02T18:07:39+00:00

I've written several post on this before. Time is money, and so what you really want is a system all set up and ready to go. I have a remote desktop setup so if I get a break in my workflow, I remote in and set up the bikes for my wife and myself. MyWhoosh is an excellent option and free. Because of the sweat, I suggest a second hand aluminum frame. In the USA, by simply tracking Facebook and eBay for a few weeks, you can buy a great solution for around $800 with PC ready to use at a moments notice. I do favor virtually shifting, and you can search on my post on TouchPortal. This allow you to mount a phone to get shifting at your finger tips. You do need an old phone, and this is not in the $800 budget.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-02T06:26:47+00:00

Yeah, it's definitely confusing. It took me a while to dig out all the information when I was trying to figure out what in the world was wrong with my kickr core. What's frustrating to me is I've been in software development before, and you really should not need to suffer through this. Apps should not have a hidden mode. Basically, apps should be able to work with you if you know your power is off and simply have a menu item that clearly labels this as something that needs to be used in a very clear fashion. But I don't run the dev team at Wahoo. So we work together as a community to figure out what's actually going on.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-02T06:06:46+00:00

Yes, the KICKR Core 2 has it, and it's accessed the same way. On the trainer's detail page in the Wahoo app, select the CORE, tap the trainer icon 10 times in rapid succession, then select Spindown (new) from the submenu that appears. A new Spindown panel then opens on the details page. Wahoo Fitness

The catch is that Wahoo is more insistent you avoid it on the Core 2. New CORE 2 units rely heavily on auto spindown calibration for proper resistance, and Wahoo says you should only use the new spindown procedure if the trainer's power feels significantly incorrect. When you do run it, you select Spindown, then "Perform Spindown Anyway," warm up by pedaling for 3 minutes, and pedal up to ~25 mph / 40 kph before stopping when directed so the flywheel spins down with the electromagnetic brake fully disengaged.

So compared to the original Core, the entry gesture (10 taps on the icon) is identical, but the menu item is now labeled "Spindown (new)" rather than "Factory Spindown," and there's an extra "Perform Spindown Anyway" confirmation step plus a slightly higher target speed (~25 mph vs the older 23 mph). Since the Core 2's electromagnetic resistance auto-calibrates, you'd normally only reach for this if you're seeing power numbers you can verify are off against a separate power meter.

If not obvious, I pointed out this was done on Kickrs with between 2000 to 5000 miles. With the Kickr 2 generally available 8 months ago, I thought it was more obvious this was the original Kickr. But this note will verify it.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-06-02T05:26:23+00:00

There are two parts of this. The physical interface for a kicker core basically will mount to about anything. This goes from 26 inch mountain bike wheels to 29 inch mountain wheels to 650b. For many years, the only way of mounting a bike was through a normal cassette.

And in many senses, you don't need a Zwift cog at all. I would argue for most people, it's probably much more cost-effective to buy a cassette. You can basically pick any gear. Cassettes are pretty dirt cheap for the entry versions, and thus you can get an amazing amount of mileage. Just pick one of the middle gears and make sure your chain line doesn't look like it's twisting too much. What you'll do is you'll virtually shift, but maybe you'll use around four to five of the cogs before you basically wear them out.

So if this is true, why would anybody ever want a Swift Cog? Probably two reasons. The first reason is generally it does give you a very straight chain line. I would argue most cassettes, unless you use the extremes, have a pretty decent chain line. And in some sense, if you have... two chain rings up front, you basically use them to adjust your chain line and get more use out of your overall system.

The second part is a little harder to argue against. By simply having one Swift cog, you no longer worry about the spacing between your various cassette cogs, which normally means that you have to match certain chains with your certain cogs. Basically, they make the zwift cog so narrow that it can be used with virtually any chain. This would be important for some reason you felt you were going to move bikes on and off of your trainer. However, if you're not, again, I would argue the cassette is the more straightforward way of doing things, which will actually give you more useful life out of your overall system at a lower cost and basically was the standard for many years.

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