I recently purchased an early 90s merlin road bike off ebay from a local guy, got a good deal I thought, $750 for the bike with full dura ace 8sp sti group, lots of nice extras like am. classic titanium seatpost. But in the process of refurbing the bike which has been sitting around a number of years I discovered the bottom bracket (which is the dreaded suntour grease guard pressed-in one) has a fair amount of play and needs new bearings. Now I have done a lot of research since into this (unfortunately I wasn't aware of this problem with the older merlin frames and should have done my homework, 20-20 hindsight) and have downloaded the manuals for overhauling it from merlin, asked merlin if they had the tools available (of course no), searched this forum, google, etc. to see if specifically i could find the spindle removal tool kit somewhere. Yes I contacted local merlin dealers (in the Boston area) by email to see if they had the tools and could do the service but haven't heard back from them. I changed the pressed in sealed bearings on my old Klein MTB (relatively EZ since you can whack out the spindle w/ a hammer) last year so am comfortable with doing this procedure and would prefer to do it myself to save some $ and because I enjoy it. Does anyone have the BB spindle removal tool set who would sell it to me at a reasonable cost or perhaps let me borrow it? As a last resort I figured out I could cobble something together from the hardware store but it will take a fair amount of work. And I'm curious how much it cost to have the BB shell threaded by merlin (if they would even still do this) by someone who sent theirs in and had it done. Unless it's very reasonable I doubt I would go this route anyway, since I wanted a nice road bike at a budget price to get back into road riding after having stopped racing 10 years ago. any advice, suggestions would be greatly appreciated thanks.

Would it be possible to just hammer out the bottom bracket spindle (and then remove the circlips and knock out the sealed bearing cartridges) like with a normal pressed-in bottom bracket? I don't care about the grease guard feature so if this was ruined I wouldn't care. Then perhaps after removing the grease guard stuff inside the bottom bracket shell I could just put the spindle, new bearings, and circlips back in?

I have a mountain merlin I bought 1991 and it has a grease guard bottom bracket. I had the steel spindle replaced with a titanium one back in 1995 and it cost me something like 100 bucks then.You didn't say what year is your bike, but with mine I believe a standard threaded bb wouldn't fit as the diameter of the bb is small.

Thanks for the info. I had read in the archives about some people sending their merlins back to be fitted for a threaded bottom bracket, which I thought was perhaps a regular bottom bracket shell tap/threader wouldn't be able to cut titanium. Now that you mention it I remember some people mentioning having a new bottom bracket shell welded into their frames and upgrading to the threaded BB shell, which I assumed was because of cracks, but probably is the only way to do it. It looks like I'll have to make a homemade spindle removal tool, it seems there aren't any around anymore, or at least that I can find.

For future reference I thought I'd post my experience in taking out the spindle and bearings out of my frame. I contacted Merlin and asked if the hammer method was OK in removing the spindle and they gave me the official line of that it is not recommended but if it were their own bike there shouldn't be a problem. So I carefully tapped it out with a hammer and wood dowel and it came out real EZ, much much easier then when I did the BB on my old Klein MTB, where the axle had started to get some corrosion and it took a real beating directly with the hammer face to get it out of the frame. Ostensibly one nice thing about the grease guard is that it keeps the spindle to bearing interface nicely lubed which is why i think pounding it out was trivial. removed the circlips and bearings with a smaller wooden dowel easily also. now i have to get the 6903s and put it back together, i don't expect any problems.