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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

#41

Post by matsemann »

stouset wrote: post #33
kqr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one surprises me because it seems far more common to me that cars hold up traffic than bicycles. When you look at images of traffic jams it's almost always other cars in the way, not bicycles. I suppose maybe it's a city/countryside thing? Cars are great at long straights, but they take forever to safely clear an intersection compared to a bicycle -- and they block most of the road while they do.

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.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#42

Post by victorstanciu »

pelorat wrote: post #40

During the pandemic I decided I wanted to build a bike too, the idea came to me after watching Berm Peak and Park Tools on YouTube, similar to what happened to this person. So being stuck working from home, I bought parts and tools to build a brand new full suspension mountain bike. Like this person it took longer than I wanted because I was missing some specialized tools (bearing and bearing press for the rear suspe…

Martin (ETOE) is awesome, his channel is where I learned to paint bikes from too.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#43

Post by AlunAlun »

I suspect what the author takes joy from is more the satisfaction of learning a new skill.

Like many things, bike maintenance eventually becomes a chore. Most of my (many) bikes over the last 30 years have been built from the ground up, including the wheels. And I don’t (or won’t) trust any shop mechanic to touch them. But now, the thought of doing any sort of maintenance fills me with dread - I want to ride my bikes, not spend hours fiddling with brake hydraulics and suspension seals!

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#44

Post by matsemann »

Back in time as a student, I had to stay in the student city over summer due to an internship. Everyone else left, so the evenings were quite free. I ended up buying a cheap old bikes and refurbish it completely. Like, take every single piece apart, clean, sand and possibly paint.

It gave me an admiration for the cleverness but also the simplicity of the design. Truing the wheels felt like an art, and I got so interested in the concept that I ended up writing my thesis around lacing patterns for the spokes on the wheels. It actually got posted to HN at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410813

I do all maintenance on my bikes now. Always a good excuse to buy some new gadget, right? This other week I applied new bar tape and bled my brakes. I originally wanted some repair shop to do it, but that would mean bike there, get to work somehow, then get back there and then be able to bike home. Seemed more hassle than just fixing it myself, given I'm dependent on my bike.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#45

Post by petre »

pelorat wrote: post #40

During the pandemic I decided I wanted to build a bike too, the idea came to me after watching Berm Peak and Park Tools on YouTube, similar to what happened to this person. So being stuck working from home, I bought parts and tools to build a brand new full suspension mountain bike. Like this person it took longer than I wanted because I was missing some specialized tools (bearing and bearing press for the rear suspe…

I've been building a new bike every year since 2018 or 2019. This year I took apart the alloy bike assembled in 2019 and moved the parts to a new steel Surly frame. During the pandemic I've built a steel hardtail.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#46

Post by Luc »

I was just thinking it would be neat to use an LLM to study how comments on a post change in tone as the sun rises over different countries and cultures. Also what articles make it to the front page etc.

At the moment the US is asleep, and I’m getting more of a European vibe from the comments.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#47

Post by matsemann »

dailykoder wrote: post #36
wpm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read: making someone drive slower to the next red light 100 feet ahead. At least that’s my experience in Chicago.

We should all just look out for each other. Mostly follow the rules, but don't let common sense go abroad. There are so many cyclists in berlin that just go in front of all the cars at a red light, even it's just one car in front of them. I know that this car can accelerate way faster than me and drives way faster, why would I want to block it and make the driver mad? Yes, if the road is congested I might pass the ca…

"We should all look out for each other" is unfortunately often code for "cyclists should yield at all times and have a sixth sense to avoid getting killed by impatient or distracted drivers".

I was biking in the cycle lane the other day, going straight. A car came up next to me, and suddenly turned right to get off the road. I got the tingles just before and suspected it, so I managed to break and avoid being right hooked.

I shared the video online, and most comments I've gotten is how I should've been more careful (I was, hence no accident..), how I should have avoided the car's blind spot (the driver pulled up and put me there, and should've known I was there..) and lots and lots of comments about how I just should be a team player and let the car pass.

Everyone used the "we should all look out for each other" to victim blame me..

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#48

Post by petre »

dailykoder wrote: post #36
wpm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read: making someone drive slower to the next red light 100 feet ahead. At least that’s my experience in Chicago.

We should all just look out for each other. Mostly follow the rules, but don't let common sense go abroad. There are so many cyclists in berlin that just go in front of all the cars at a red light, even it's just one car in front of them. I know that this car can accelerate way faster than me and drives way faster, why would I want to block it and make the driver mad? Yes, if the road is congested I might pass the ca…

Bike boxes are made for a reason: so that the motorists see the bike in front of them and don't hit it during a right turn.

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#49

Post by mo_42 »

victorstanciu wrote: post #24
mo_42 wrote: post #12

I had a similar experience during the pandemic. I got hold of an old frame for a road bike that I somehow liked. Even the paint was pretty bad so I went all the way of stripping the old paint, cold-setting the rear dropouts (thanks to Sheldon Brown's website) so that it will take the modern wheels, painting the frame, and assembling everything with new parts. It took me two years because I had to learn a lot how diff…

> Now, I have a very unique and beautiful bike (people on the street tell me). Well you can't just entice us like that without posting a photo! Here's one I painted that I am really proud of how it came out: https://tegowerk.eu/posts/nakamura-shadow-city-bike/

True, thanks for sharing. Here's the one: https://imgur.com/a/SsdVhCT

Re: A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair

#50

Post by lloeki »

vundercind wrote: post #30
iamthemonster wrote: post #8

Beautifully written, but I couldn't disagree more. Bicycle maintenance is an annoying chore to me that gets in the way of my enjoyment of cycling. I even have good bicycle shops near me that did maintenance far quicker/cheaper/better than I would do. It just all seemed like such a hassle. I finally ended up buying a belt-drive hub-geared hydraulic-brakes medium/fat-tyre bicycle and my maintenance woes appear to be ma…

Bicycle maintenance is what got me out of the habit of riding. You don’t ride for a little while and soon trying to pick it back up first means tires need a lot of air… oh that one’s going flat before the end of the block… Christ, it’s the rear one, there goes the whole afternoon expecially since I’ll for-sure mess up other stuff in the process. Guess I’ll do it next time. Then I don’t, and stop riding. It’s crazy th…

> You don’t ride for a little while and soon trying to pick it back up first means tires need a lot of air [...] Shit’s always going flat

I don't know what it is about this, I've owned bikes for 30 years to ride in a mix of conditions (from mountain trail to city) and I've had like 5 flats, tops. One because I failed to bunny hop a curb and blew the whole thing, busting the wheel in the process, and the others because I drove over something that punctured the tube.

My last bike I've had for about 10 years til it was stolen last year, at some point I left it unattended for like 3 years, and when I picked it up again it wasn't at perfect pressure, but certainly wasn't flat at all, far from it, and definitely ridable. I know because my el cheapo pump was bust and I rode it to the nearest shop.

By the time it got stolen, only the front tube had a change a couple years before because of a puncture (rode on shattered glass) but the other was still factory and perfectly fine at holding air.

This experience has been consistent with all my bikes, and friends that ride good hardware have a similar experience. Some others though, they keep on regularly being flat but from what I gather it's a) cheaping out on the hardware and b) being mind boggingly careless about what they ride over.

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