You can do it yourself but why bother? I bought the fancy Park tools to do this and have used them a few times (and, yes, I know you can do it without the fancy tools) but they do this all day long at the LBS so I prefer to let them do it for me most of the time, the exception being a beater bike on which I'm trying to spend no money.
-S-
dave wrote:
>
> hello,
>
> thinking about installing a 105 quality headset in place of original.
> current one is installed on a newly acquired bike found in ebay's
> archives. the bike is supposed to be a Gitane but so far i've found
> nothing on the bike identifying it as such
>
> head sets seem to be more complicated than most of the other
> mechanicals. according to my reading at least two 'races' must be
> removed prior to installation of new. race removal/installation
> tools are not part of my inventory (yet).
>
> so the question (s): would this be better left to the bikeshop? or
> is it possible to do yourself given some mechanical skill? if
> possible for one to safely attempt which tools would be advised? how
> does one determine 'stack height'? how may different thread types,
> that is italian, english, french and so on, be id-ed?
>
> hope someone might spare some time for this,
>
> thanks,
>
> dave dickerson, austin, tx