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A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

tegowerk.eu

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Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#151

Post by btach »

UnserMannInK wrote: post #61
dailykoder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bikes are for everybody. You can ride a beat up bike for years with just basic knowledge, l That is true. But what changed most sceptics, that i met, mind were bikes that actually worked. I understand the fear when people see the price tag and think they could buy a second hand car for that, but once they sit on a good bike they just enjoy it. And if they then learn how to do basic maintenance themselves so that it…

True, the price tag might buy you a second hand car. But if you factor in the maintenance cost of cars it comes in cheap in comparison. I’ve just had to replace the clutch in my car (~2200€), whereas having the whole transmission (all sprockets and the chain) in a bike fixed is around 250-300€. Less if you do it yourself. And being able to do it myself feels really good, I couldn’t agree more!

Ugh, that is why I have always done my own car work. Many potential downsides, but for me the upsides have outweighed the downsides.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#153

Post by dghlsakjg »

logifail wrote: post #149
fho wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the clutch ... It's 100+ €/h for a skilled worker who replaced that clutch.

> It's 100+ €/h for a skilled worker who replaced that clutch I'm pro-bike, but this issue also applies to having a bike repaired at a decent workshop. Our daughter's hand-me-down bike (previously "owned" by both her elder brothers in turn) had new brakes and brake cables fitted recently, and the repair bill was the best part of €150.

The difference is that a talented bike mechanic can get most jobs done in less than an hour. Its hard to imagine a bicycle job that would take more than 2 hours of labor, whereas most car jobs start at an hour and can stretch into 10 plus hours for more complex ones.

The equivalent job of replacing all of the brake lines and brakes on a car would be a multi-hour job with several hundred in parts alone. By comparison, having a competent mechanic completely overhaul and inspect the most critical safety system on a bike for €150 seems like a pretty good deal.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#154

Post by randcraw »

silisili wrote: post #28

There's a certain zen that comes with maintenance or building of everything, from bikes to radios to cars. I'm not sure if it comes from experience or age, but when it happens it changes how you think of things. Finding that zen leads to faster and better quality work. Maybe it's just an exercise in patience that feels zen like. My back's not got much in it these days, so I've mostly been supervising my wife who stub…

Zen and the art of bicycle maintenance... a la Pirsig? Maybe, as she works, you could read her passages from the book about bringing quality to life through wrenching bikes, of all kinds?

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#156

Post by Carlseymanh »

dailykoder wrote: post #31
leke wrote: post #20

I got into bikes after moving to a cyclists' town. I know the pride of riding something you've fixed up like the author mentioned in the article. Bikes are truly a marvel. My town and bikes have provided me with a higher standard of living and health than I would have had in some other town. Bikes are for everybody. You can ride a beat up bike for years with just basic knowledge, like changing an inner tube and oilin…

>Bikes are for everybody. You can ride a beat up bike for years with just basic knowledge, l That is true. But what changed most sceptics, that i met, mind were bikes that actually worked. I understand the fear when people see the price tag and think they could buy a second hand car for that, but once they sit on a good bike they just enjoy it. And if they then learn how to do basic maintenance themselves so that it…

I bought a 100€ used MTB almost ten years ago, still ride it weekly, and the only major work i did on it was swapping tires from tasseled to road ones. Still, I can smoke people riding ebikes since they are locked under 25km/h in italy. Spending thousands on a bike is understandable if you are really into it but not necessary at all

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#157

Post by bombela »

david-gpu wrote: post #110
criddell wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is maintaining 30 km/h important? Why not leave a little earlier?

Yeah, the person you replied to thinks of cycling as a sport, not as a form of transportation. That is the sorry state of affairs in North America and Australia. Edit: I see now that you are in TX, so this isn't news to you.

You guessed wrong! I biked for sport in France and the bay area. But also for commuting in San Francisco (so dangerous), and Palo Alto for many years.

My reaction was to the 50 km/h, as if the person was cycling at that speed. edit: maybe they meant that below 50 years old you don't need gears.

By the way, France has switched to a 30 km/h limits in towns. Pretty nice for cyclists feeling of safety.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#158

Post by scott_w »

Just a small thing about bikes being “harder” to maintain than they used to be. I really think they’re not! I tried to take the back wheel off a friend’s old mountain bike and realised it’s waaaay more complicated to take apart than a modern QR skewer or thru-axle. The only real fiddly bit is if you bought internal cable routing but that’s only really on mid-to-upper tier bikes. Even then, a modern frame is easier to route than a 10-year-old frame (speaking from experience!)

Don’t be deterred from learning it for yourself!

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#159

Post by npteljes »

The_Colonel wrote: post #140
stavros wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a shitty bike that I bought for 150 € ten years ago. It creaks everywhere, is hard to ride, and a thief once actually moved it out of the way to steal the bike behind it. I use it every day but I'm not going to get a better one, because I don't want to be constantly worried that someone will steal it. I want to use it as transportation, leave it wherever, and know that it will still be there because it's not w…

I love this aspect of old beaten things. A couple of years ago, I've found a gem of a bike. It looked maybe 15-20 years old and was clearly heavily used - frame was full of scratches and such. The color scheme was pretty ugly and was just a tad too small for an adult. But I noticed that all the components were actually decent - mostly Shimano XT, obviously very old models. After servicing it, it rode very well and I…

That's practically a sleeper! "Boasts high performance while having an unassuming exterior"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeper_(car)

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#160

Post by nemo8551 »

matsemann wrote: post #41
stouset wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an outgroup thing. It’s “normal” to be held up by traffic. It’s novel being delayed by a cyclist. Plus you’re doing something important and their leisure is getting my way! When a cyclist does something unexpected, it’s extremely dangerous; pay no mind that they’re the one in 95% of the danger. When a fellow driver speeds, rolls through a stop sign, or fails to yield it’s lost in a sea of normalized deviance. No…

Yup. I have coworkers driving to work complain to me about some cyclist they met on the way to work. Like, why..? I'm not responsible for that just because I also bike. It's not like I harass every driver I meet at work just because some driver killed a child again in the city. And all their interactions with stupid drivers? Quickly forgotten a moment later.

I’m a mountain biker, I even internally complain about some road cyclists.

The ones who take up far more of the road than necessary, granted because they can, and slow you down prior to traffic lights meaning you hit a red.

But when you hit a red, they swerve onto the pavement, across the junction with the pedestrians and then onwards beyond the red light while I’m still sat at the red. All while not dismounting from their bike.

In the UK, where I live they should stop at the light and not pretend to be a pedestrian. But they’re also entitled to the road, but when they ride in a manner that means I would have to veer well into the oncoming lane to get around them it’s just not worth it. A wee bit if there’s no traffic is fine, but not too much.

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