This article guides you through repairing and restoring bicycle pedals. This covers older pedals that use conical axle and ball bearings. It is a shame, if you have an older bike or a restoring project going on, to replace something that can be fixed and thus not salvage a piece of gear that most of the times is irreplaceable in terms of authenticity.

For the guide i will use a pair of pedals that came with a Champion brand road bike that i am currently restoring. They are made of steel and have a chrome finish. Prior to the restoring i had attached a pair of Christophe pedal straps that are a bit out of era but add to the usability of the bike.

Here is the patient!

First i removed the straps.

Then i unscrewed the axle cover using a hex key.

This revealed the axle’ s locking nut and washer that i next removed.

Use one key to stabilize the axle and an other one to loosen the nut.

I used a very narrow philips screwdriver to remove gently the locking washer.

This revealed the conical nut that holds the ball bearings.

That i removed

by loosening and rotating the pedal axle by hand.

Be cautious not to loose the ball bearings that will drop when the axle is removed!

Finally, the pedals disassembled and ready for treatment.

If you just want to repair the pedals, clean old grease, replace old ball bearings and re-grease. Follow the above procedure backwards in order to assemble the pedals.

Mine needed a little hammering to straighten up the pedal cages and de-rusting, brushing and polishing to restore the original chrome finish as some prior owner had the stupid idea to spray paint them black.