@prowrench is throwing down the greasy gauntlet. There is truth in his words. We already understand the gap between the professional cyclist and us civilians extends somewhere over the horizon. We can ride the bikes, wear nice kit and ride the race routes but that’s about as close as we can get. No one is paying us to ride. We are not Pros. But we can work on our own bikes can’t we?
Please also see the required supplemental reading, All You Bike Pricks.
VLVV, Gianni
You got a new bike a few years ago and something magical happened. You realized that when your legs aren’t languishing under a desk at the office or basking under the blue glare of the television that, by some unknown miracle, they can propel you to astounding speeds on your bicycle. You took heart, rode some more and you got quick. You joined a club, subscribed to every magazine and every blog, you learned The Rules and quickly ascended to the ranks of the initiated cyclist. Good for you!
You, the tinkerer, are one savvy fellow. You have examined the simple steed beneath you and with your god given mechanical prowess turned a few screws, fiddled with some barrel adjusters, squirted some lube here and there and tamed a few squeaks and calmed the wild mis-shifts that embarrassed you in front of your friends. You maintain your bike, your brother-in-law’s bike, your neighbor’s bike and the kids’ bikes from the neighborhood. Fueled with a few small successes and powered by the unlimited knowledge bestowed upon you by YouTube University and several forums you are now an expert mechanic. You can turn a wrench with the best of them…right?
Let me introduce you to an idea that may not have crossed your mind: You can’t.
Before you take offense, lend me your ear and I will try to help you to comprehend the vastness of all that you don’t know. As a professional mechanic of 12 years, I would like to introduce you to the subject of bicycle maintenance repair from the point of view of the greasy handed elitists who you have come to defy and will avoid paying at all costs.
Every morning I wake up, eat breakfast, get dressed and go to work; just like you. When I get to work, however, I am greeted by the aroma of tires and a spacious shop filled with expensive specialty tools and all manner of bikes. From the wobbly beginners’ bike to the bike you wish you had but probably never will, I work on them all, every day. Your hobby is my bread and butter.
I have installed thousands upon thousands of tires and tubes and threaded countless cables through more shifters and brake levers than you can begin to imagine. I have turned a million spoke nipples and skillfully negotiated the careful equilibrium of the perfectly trued wheel more times that you have tied your shoes. I remember to meticulously check the tension of every nut and bolt on your bike with precisely calibrated torque wrenches: a thought that you wish had occurred to you and a tool you wish you had. I wrap handlebars with confidence and great care so that the tape overlaps with an even, artful twist and tightens as you grip it instead of unraveling after your first few rides. I obsessively position every component just as it ought to be because every bike deserves to be in tip top shape and it is my livelihood to make it so.
I know you think you understand how your bike works. How hard could it be right? There is nothing hidden. Your bicycle sits before you baring all and yet you could take your bike to your neighborhood shop right now and they could find a thousand things wrong with it and just as many ways to charge you in order to fix it. There is a reason for that and the explanation is on its way.
It has taken me years to hone the skills involved in my craft. I can hear when your rear derailleur hanger is out of alignment by a degree or two and that has only come after listening to thousands of derailleurs ticking away in my work stand. You may as well be stone deaf when it comes to that. I know that dropping your front derailleur a millimeter or so and twisting it out just a hair will help it decisively slam and lock your chain to the big ring in the blink of an eye. You might as well be trying to pilot a spacecraft through an asteroid field with a blindfold on. The mechanics at your local shop have paid the price for the precious knowledge which you have supposed could come so easily. Rather than beleaguer you with further examples of how I am right and you are wrong, I will endeavor to make the process of outsourcing the sacred task of maintaining your bike a smooth and painless one.
Bridging The Gap
Successfully communicating with your local mechanics will be key to finding happiness in this process. Mechanics are a fickle bunch and if you haven’t figured it out by reading thus far, some of us might be a tad egotistical and maybe a touch insecure. I will do my best to set you up for success as you repent and and take your bike in for its first much needed, legitimate service.
First, take everything that you have come to know about working on bikes and stick it in your pocket. Mechanics know how to work on bikes and they don’t care much for hearing what you think it entails. From the moment the mechanic lays eyes on your bike, seeing your terrible attempt at wrapping bars, your grossly over lubed drivetrain or the hack job that you did running and ugly web of too long or too short cables and housing all over your bike, he will know, and it will go without saying, what it is that you have been up to. Don’t be too proud of your work because it will only result in heartbreak.
Second, bear in mind that time and expertise are never on closeout and it will cost you to have the pros lay their hands on your beloved bike and resuscitate it to full health. It will be important for your mental well-being to consult with your cohorts and settle on a mechanic that everyone can agree bills repair work fairly and is worth the money that you’ll spend. Since you have been maintaining your bike, you have been letting basic things go through the cracks. The mechanic will want to fix all of these before you get your bike back so your first visit could cost a small fortune. Take heart though, because once this is out of the way, subsequent visits will consist of simple adjustments mainly and will be relatively inexpensive.
Thirdly and most importantly, be kind. I provide whatever service is due to every customer based on what they pay, even if they treat me like scum. For the nice customer however, I always go above and beyond. As the owner of my shop always says, “It is nice to be nice to the nice”. Kindness is currency but even more importantly, currency is currency. A little gratuity goes a long long way at the bike shop. Cash or beer are customary.
Taking your bike to the shop can be a hard step for the committed and self-assured home mechanic. Before the sum of what you don’t know piles up and results in your untimely mid-club-ride death, consider my words and come to the light! Hang up your mail order toy toolset and take your bike to the pros. You deserve it. Your bike deserves it. A-Merckx.
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Great stuff! I do what I can (which is pretty basic to be honest) but accept my limitations before going to the professionals. Some things I doubt I'll ever feel comfortable doing - truing wheels for example. That is a skill and no mistake.
My LBS is staffed by spotty teenagers. And when I took my Di2's in they started looking for screws to adjust the alignment. Don't get me wrong. I buy my parts from them, and I fear the day the LBS loses out to the internet bandits. But you have to know your mechanic, not just blindly trust them because the owner of your LBS hired them and handed them a spanner.
So if you don't mind I am going to put my 30 years of doing my own bike maintenance up against them and only go near them when I need specialist one-off tools that I don't want to pay for.
And yes, maybe you can hear a noise and diagnose it in seconds to my minutes, or build a wheel better than me. But I don't mind spending those few minutes checking other things and only a micrometer would ever be able to measure the difference, no-one who rode it would be able to tell.
@Steampunk
This is a very important point. It's how I learned to do more than just the basic BS on my bike. I'd try to fix something, bring it in, when the mechanic had time I'd ask what I did wrong and how he fixed my error. Slowly, over the years I've built up quite a nice skill and tool set that allows me to tackle most any issue in my stable. There are things that I won't do, wrapping bar tape, pulling sealed bearings from hubs, rebuilding suspension forks, or building wheels. Everything else I can do and enjoy doing; but moreover I'm quite good at. I'm no pro, but I'm not going to have one of my Campy skeleton brakes come flying off at 70km/hr or rub on the way up the HC at 15 km/hr. There are certain things I won't pay to have done, nor will I go through the bother of bringing my bike in to my LBS, waiting for it, going to get it and so on.
In some ways this article smacks of this one, written by an uppity NYC bartender.
Bike mechanics, like any other service professional are a necessary evil. None of them, for any amount of money or any amount of "niceness" will care as much for your or your instrument's well being more than you do. Avoid them at all cost and if you must engage them treat them as you would a learning disabled child: short concise sentences, don't ask questions, don't make sudden moves and no matter what don't make eye contact.
@Kevin Morice
Yes. This is the rub. Many places are devoid of a decent shop with a great mechanic.I always work on my own bike, and like Steamy says, it's not going to get me killed. I do admit to botching some things. I'm not a great mechanic. I do fuck things up.
I was lucky. With the help of my friend and cycling mentor, I purchased my Peugeot PX-10 LE way back when, my first racing bike. We brought it home and before I rode it once, he showed my how to completely strip the bike down to the ball bearings. He didn't trust the French factory guys to do a proper job. We took it completely apart, regreased BBs, brakes, derailleurs, hubs and reassembled it. Besides blowing my mind it let me see just how real bikes work. Back then it was a necessity, we had to work on our own bikes. It would be two hours just to get to Boston to find a real bike mechanic.
But I like @prowrench's advice from the other side of the bike stand. It's good to be reminded we aren't Pros.
@Gianni Im lucky, Tucson has some really great shops. some of the best in the country.
A-Merckx to this. I'm lucky enough to know that I'm ham-fisted and also to have a fantastic shop fairly close to me. They have a truly excellent team of mechanics who are always happy to chat , advise and help. Not many visits go by without a tip going their way. Am I proud of my lack of skills beyond my daily and weekly routine checks; no. But I'm honest enough to know I'd be sunk without the professional mechanic.
You describe my wrenching to a T, but I must say that for all but one or two mechanics within 30 miles of my house, I trust them less than I trust myself. I can think of a sum total of one guy who might come close to the professional skills you describe. He gets all the work I know better than to do myself, and he knows me by name. This article is a good reminder to stop by with some beer.
this reminds me of this FB page and blog. written by a pro wrench here in AZ somewhere.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Yourbikehatesyou/244725472237310
Yes, indeed. Not all mechanics are equal. And, your thesis echoes Gladwell's theory in the tipping point, that somehow all those hours and hours of day in day out work you do on bikes will somehow make you a master. A quick Google will bring you with theory busters, challenging the 10,000 hours rule. Some people just never improve their art or craft no matter how many hours they put into it. Some people don't care to be the best they can be. A good mechanic, heck, a great mechanic doesn't need to toil over his craft for 10,000 hours, but that mechanic needs to care about what they do, and keep learning. Some do, such as yourself, perhaps, and some don't. But to call every casual home mechanic incompetent is foolish thinking and is exactly why many avoid the 'expert mechanic'. The attitude that the bike owner is by default and idiot mechanically.
Case in point, I recently had a friend go to a so called 'expert' mechanic at his LBS. He was experiencing drag on his brand new rear hub, a Hope Pro 3 mono. The mechanic attempted to repair it, lubed it up, charged a small fee, and sent my friend on his way. He called me, lowly home mechanic saying there's still drag. I took a look at it, diagnosed the issue and resolved it. The problem was the pawl seal wasn't pressed in firmly enough and created the drag he was experiencing. The 'expert' mechanic said, and I quote, "sometimes these higher end products just never work right."
It takes the right aptitude to be great. If you have it, then awesome, if you don't well leave my bike alone. But to generalize that since you toil over bikes all day gives you the right to call yourself and expert, a master, or more importantly that you're 'better' than the caring home mechanic, well then I challenge that thesis.
Passion is what leads to mastery. Passion. For many, a job as a mechanic is just that, a job. But since they are expected to be the 'expert' the dribble out nonsense like the statement above.