Friday, January 12, 2018

Bike Shops Can Still Piss Me Off

My daughter goes to physical therapy every other week to help with her walking.  Grand scale, it's not a big deal.  I only bring it up to explain how I came to be fixing this beast:

It's a Kettler trike with hand cycle.  When we started PT months ago, it was already "broken." The hand cycle would turn, but for unknown reasons, wasn't turning the wheel.  I didn't find out about the issue until a few weeks ago, when my daughter climbed on and tried to escape (be still my heart).  She could turn the hand crank, but nothing was happening.  I asked the physical therapist what was going on.  She told me it was broken and that she'd taken it to every shop in town (we have five), but every one told her they couldn't fix it.  One gave a lame excuse that "they couldn't get parts for it."  That shop had not actually done any disassembly or diagnosing.  I haven't spoken to any of the shops, but having worked in "normal" shops for a loooong time, I'm pretty sure I know what happened.  They saw a non-standard machine, knew it could be an ugly can of worms, decided they were unlikely to make any money on it and/or just didn't want to deal with the hassle, and bailed.  "Can't fix it, can't get parts for it, sorry for your bad luck."

I get it.  I understand the harsh economics of brick and mortar retail in general, and bike shops in particular.  If you can't make money, you can't stay in business, and many are not doing either.

HOWEVER.

So I told the PT that I'd been a mechanic for a long time and I'd be happy to take a look at it.  As I've often mentioned, I'm losing the grease under my fingernails and that makes me sad.  It seemed like a good project to exercise my mechanical brain a little, so I brought it home, and started digging in.

Giving the shops the benefit of the doubt, the first real obstacle I encountered was a non-threaded crank arm.  You see that, you wonder how it's gonna come off.  Prior to Campy Powertorque, it would've been even more confusing, because virtually all crankarms were threaded.  However, any mechanic worth his salt, especially one who's dealt with Campy, should know that pullers exist for all kinds of things without threads.  Luckily, my dad was a Snap-on dealer forever, and I knew he'd have something in the garage.  He did:

After getting the crank off, removing the chain guard was easy, and then it was even easier to see what the issue was.  The chain was loose, and because it hangs vertically, it wasn't engaging the teeth on the bottom sprocket.  The only tensioner is the upper jockey wheel, and it's only got about 1/2" of diagonal movement, which really doesn't amount to a lot of tension adjustment.

I guessed, probably correctly, that removing a whole link would be too much - even with the tensioning pulley backed off as much as possible, the chain would be too tight.  What to do, what to do...?

Luckily, I've been a misguided singlespeeder for a while now, and in the interest of getting my Leftiachi all tukt and shit, I usually have a half link lurking in a bin somewhere.  Bingo.  Full link out, half link in, master link back in, and the chain is tensioned perfectly:

So why does this make me angry at bike shops?  Let me enumerate the ways:


  1. All told, the fix took me probably 20 minutes.  It was really, really easy
  2. It seems the shops didn't even bother to try to figure it out.  If they had, they should've realized what an easy fix this would be.
  3. And that means they missed an opportunity.  At my old shop, the rate was $60/hour, and that was 10 years ago.  A shop that could've fixed this in the same amount of time as a washed-up old mechanic could've easily made money on this.  The PT office would've been paying, and while I'm not suggesting any shop pad their hours, you could've charged them 60 bucks and they wouldn't have batted an eye.
  4. They also missed the chance to become the shop for the PT's office.  That place has a whole room full of bikes.  They're all "weird," but they're all simple.  You get a PT's office bringing you bikes, and you've got a cash cow, not to mention the chance to work on something out of the ordinary every once in a while.  Maybe you don't want to take this on in June, when every fred wants his bike yesterday, but what else are you doing this time of year?  Let your mechanics dig into shit like this.  You're not gonna lose any more money that you would be otherwise and they get to stretch their brains.

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