I had a grand plan to upgrade my 2011-vintage Specialized TriCross to a disc front brake. I've sourced a fork with disc mounts with the same size steering tube as the OE fork (
http://bit.ly/25xKLTk) plus a disc wheel, mechanical disc brake, brake mount adaptor and brake rotor. I already had a spare star nut, new brake cables and outers. Based on my previous experience of upgrading the fork on my MTB, I thought I was all set to go...
Unfortunately my optimism turned out to be mistaken. When I swapped the fork on my MTB, the headset bearings were a straight swap between the old fork and the new. I can't remember exactly what I did but it was very straightforward. When I dismantled the front end on the TriCross, however, I found that things were rather more complicated. I was under the impression from the bike's spec sheet (
http://bit.ly/1THO3YZ) that they were integrated: Specialized describe the headset as "1-1/8" sealed Cr-Mo bearings integrated w/ headset". Turns out it has caged bearings, with cups for the top and bottom bearing fitted in to the head tube. There is a crown race on the fork which does not appear to be removable.
To compound the problem, I managed to bend one of the bearing cages and lose some of the balls so the bike is currently unridable - I can't even put the front end back the way it was
I've done some reading around and it appears that it is possible (and maybe even recommended) to replace the OE bearings with true integrated bearings. Apparently it is relatively easy to remove the cups from the head tube using a drift. I can do some more research on the bearing sizes I'd need to procure, but I'm a little unsure about a few details, eg would I need to fit a crown race to the new fork, or is that built in to an integrated bearing?
Push comes to shove I'll hand the frame & fork to an LBS and ask them to sort the bearings. The rest of the fitting I'm confident that I can do myself. But it would be nice to be able to complete the whole job under my own steam.
Any suggestions/sage advice would be very welcome!