Treadmill Maintenance: Rear Roller Replacement
While running on my Smooth Fitness 5.25 running treadmill in the early morning hours a week ago, the rear roller completely blew out. The Smooth Fitness 5.25 was replaced by the 5.45 and most recently the 5.65, so you may want to take note of this blog entry if you own or are considering purchase of any of these three treadmills.
It had been several months since I had regularly run on my treadmill, since I prefer the local Illinois Prairie Path and Great Western Trail that are literally only a couple blocks from my house, but now it is mid-Fall, and while afternoon temperatures might be great running weather, sub-freezing temperatures are not unlikely during the early morning hours before work when I am most likely to run.
The treadmill that I had remembered to be initially incredibly quiet had grown to be annoyingly loud in a brief period of time, so I ordered the Deluxe Treadmill Care Kit, which was only $5 more than the standard care kit (although as I soon found out, both kits are incredibly expensive at around $50 each). Following the instructions provided in the included "maintenance instruction guide" did not alleviate the loudness (there was no noticeable functional degradation).
Working through the guide, it became clear that it did not provide the same instructions as the treadmill user's manual, so I made sure to address all the points made in both documents. The initial confusion began when both documents indicated how seemingly easy the side rails can be removed from the treadmill for cleaning, with absolutely no instruction on how to perform the removal, so after some deliberation I chose the brute-force method of removal.
In other words, manually pulling the side rails from the body of the treadmill. And when I say brute-force, I am talking quite an enormous pull to remove each that left me thinking I had damaged the treadmill to a point where reattaching the side rails would not be possible, all for the purposes of cleaning and lubricating the walking belt (the surface on which one runs).