The day a 1982 Peugeot taught me about bottom bracket standards

Back in 2018 I was working at a co-op in Portland and this guy rolls in with an old Peugeot UO-8 that needed a new bottom bracket. I popped out the old one and measured it up, ordered what I thought was the right part from the shop. Three days later the thing didn't fit at all because French bottom brackets have that weird 35mm x 1mm threading instead of the standard BSA. That whole mess cost me 2 hours of filing down a cup and $15 in shipping fees. Has anyone else run into weird non-standard threading on old bikes that made you want to pull your hair out?

2 comments

2 Comments

wyattrobinson28d agoMost Upvoted

@clairem47 same here. I swear old French bikes were designed just to mess with us.

clairem4728d ago

Oh I feel your pain on this one. I had a similar mess with an old Motobecane I picked up at a garage sale a few years back. I ended up tracking down one of those French bottom brackets from a specialty shop in New York, but what really saved me was learning to just take the old cup to a machine shop and have them cut new threads into it. Cost me like 20 bucks and the guy had it done in 15 minutes while I waited. That was way cheaper than shipping stuff back and forth and hoping I got the right part. I also started keeping a little notebook with all the weird specs on bikes I work on, makes things a lot easier when I run into something unusual later.