Bike poll

[lethargic_man]

Took my bike to the bike shop yesterday. They said they'd never come across mudguard mounts slipping like mine had before. We discussed various solutions to get them to stay in place, but they said there's no 100% guarantee any of them would work, so I decided to buy a set of full mudguards as a replacement. (Anybody want a secondhand set of half-size mudguards, complete with tips for how to keep them from slipping?)

I left the bike there, as my second fall put the derailleur out of whack and they couldn't fix it on the spot; this morning I got a call from them saying that the front fork had been bent back, the wheel was not coming out easily and the brakes not working properly. None of this had I noticed, but I didn't want to risk the front fork breaking on me, so I agreed to let them replace it.

This is going to come to nearly £100 in total, meaning I'll have spent nearly £200 on the bike in the course of the last month, once you include my earlier taking the bike in for a new gear cassette and general service. That's two thirds of the value I spent on the bike in the first place! Sometimes I think it would be cheaper just to buy a new bike... but of course if I did that, it would only take a couple of years to be back to having to spending money on it again.

The one consolation is that the total I'll have spent on the bike in the last year is still probably less (probably, and only slightly less if so) than the money I've saved by not using public transport instead of the bike.

One for the serious bike users among you (anyone here other than bluepork, ewx and perhaps lethargic_fan?): how much would you expect to spend a year on bike maintenance? I don't mean for an typical year, but rather the average you get from putting together the years in which the bike is low maintenance with the years in which major repairs are needed. (Please also indicate if you're good enough with your hands to do the job yourself and save yourself the labour costs...)

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I don't keep records but I'm reasonably confident that I spend under £50/year on bike maintenance on average. Things I deal with myself: lights, brakes, tires/inner tubes. Saddles would probably fall into that list too but of my last two saddle replacements one was rolled into a collection of fixes and the other was fitted for free.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I'm a very lazy person with my bike, for instance I dump it on the bike shop when it gets a puncture because I am too lazy to wrestle wheels and tires off. I reckon I spend maybe 100/year (averaged out), including it's mostly-annual (I'm a bit slack) service (which last year cost 100 pounds but it did need new mudguards AND chain last year). [I cycle 5-10 miles most days, in all weathers; I think the bike is 4 or 5 years old]

I wouldn't expect a new, decent quality bike to start stacking up multiple-hundreds/year bills for some time (several years). I worry about the overall quality of a bike that came with cable ties holding on the mudguards! if your bike-budget is in the 200-300 pound range I think you could do a lot better than that. I also worry about your bike because even though I have had serious mudguard FAIL I have never had a mudguard actually stop the wheel before and I wonder if something else is wrong there.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the bike did not come with the mudguards. It did not come with any mudguards; I bought them at the same time as the bike, and the bike shop fitted them before shipping it to me.

FWIW, if I'd paid £100 for a full service last month, rather than half that for a most-likely-points-of-failure service, maybe they'd have caught the problem with the mudguards before it came to cause me grief.

[bluepork.livejournal.com]

> One for the serious bike users among you (anyone here other than bluepork, ewx and perhaps lethargic_fan?)

Not well phrased. I had to read that about 4 times before I meant you realised "Are there any serious bike users among you apart from those I know about already, those being bluepork, ewx, and perhaps lethargic_fan, who would like to answer the question, in addition to those named people," rather than "One for the serious bike users among you (bluepork, ewx, and lethargic_fan, don't bother answering because you're excluded on grounds of not being serious bike users)", which is admittedly, rather odd given you know how much I cycle, or even "One for any serious bike users out there apart from bluepork, ewx and lethargic_fan", excluding us from answering even though we are in fact serious cycle users, perhaps because you already knew what our answers would be, although that would also be strange because I don't recall ever discussing it with you. See what I mean?

I hope you appreciate me moaning about your poor English through the use of an unnecessarily long sentence.

Anyway, I digress. I'll now answer your original question.

I'm in the first year of owning a new bike, so right now, I'm not in a typical place regarding servicing costs, and the bike I just got rid of was in it's 22nd year, so I don't think that was typical either. I'm not sure that creating an average on that basis is very representative.

In addition, I would find it difficult to separate out the money I spend on maintenance from the money I spend on cycling as a whole. I'm a sucker for buying new kit and fancy accessories (£80 on a front light, for example), which, I suspect, puts me at the opposite end of the scale to you. I would never dream of wrapping my expensive new bike in tin foil to protect it from thieves, like you did. I did, however, buy fancy spindles which only unlock when they are upside down though.

The final difficulty is that I have attempted lots of repairs myself, which sometimes involve buying specialist tools. These are a one-time only expense on each occasion, and they have sometimes been followed up with me admitting defeat and taking my bicycle to a shop anyway. I undoubtedly save some money by doing simple maintenance myself.

So in conclusion, I've no idea.

I reckon that if your bike is in good working order, you might only need occasional new tyres, brake pads and puncture repair supplies, so you could expect to spend under £50 a year. However, if you get into the habit of crashing your bike, you are obviously going to need to spend a lot more. Also, I would expect to get a professional service once every year or two, at whatever the cost of that is.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Not well phrased. I had to read that about 4 times before I meant you realised "Are there any serious bike users among you apart from those I know about already, those being bluepork, ewx, and perhaps lethargic_fan, who would like to answer the question, in addition to those named people," rather than "One for the serious bike users among you (bluepork, ewx, and lethargic_fan, don't bother answering because you're excluded on grounds of not being serious bike users)",

Disambiguating that is what the question mark inside the brackets is for...

I would never dream of wrapping my expensive new bike in tin foil to protect it from thieves, like you did.

Me neither. What I did is wrap my inexpensive new bike in duct tape.

The final difficulty is that I have attempted lots of repairs myself, which sometimes involve buying specialist tools. These are a one-time only expense on each occasion, and they have sometimes been followed up with me admitting defeat and taking my bicycle to a shop anyway. I undoubtedly save some money by doing simple maintenance myself.

I don't have the time or inclination (though see my response to miss_whiplash below (once I've written it!); I also don't trust my own abilities, because I'm useless with my hands. I'll do simple repairs myself (I've had bike shops tell me they get people bringing in a bike to do the likes of replacing an inner tube!); anything complex I'll leave to the pros.

My attempts to adjust the gearing on my spare bike ultimately led to the gears being completely badly adjusted, and the gear cable so chewed up at the end I'd need a new one to do the job properly (and, having spent more money already on a bike I intended rarely to use (I'm not sure I've used it more than once!), I'm not inclined to spend any more... though, come to think of it, I do seem to recall seeing a spare gear cable kicking around somewhere...

[miss-whiplash.livejournal.com]

I no longer have a bike - my husband put it in the loft and then gave it away because (unsurprisingly) I didn't use it. However there are few moving parts on a bike and the operation of most of them is pretty obvious if you look carefully.

If it were my problem I'd buy a book on bike maintenance (or find an on-line one, there seem to be a lot about), read it from cover to cover with my bike within easy reach and then sort out the jobs I knew I could do do them and get someone with more experience to check them. In case I needed advice I'd look at forums and find one that was not frequented by idiots.

Most non-electrical jobs are a matter of careful observation and confidence.

The thing I learned in the labs was to do a 'thought experiment' first :-
Imagine the whole procedure step by step and work out the tools, spares and consumables I would need and have them to hand. Doing that keeps the job faster and means you have less time to forget how something went together.
Always have a stable, deep-sided dish on hand to put small parts in (ceramic cat bowl for example).
If dismantling something new, make notes, possibly photograph it and if parts that might be mixed up are involved either mark them (tippex liquid pen lettering is a good temporary marker; A goes to A, three dots to 3 dots, etc.) or lay everything out like an expanded diagram.
Last off, first on and in case of real difficulty in reassembling try holding it upside-down, often it is gravity that is the problem.

Seriously, I've cleaned out drum-brakes on my Suzuki, changed wheels on several cars, sorted out virtually inaccessible brake lights, fitted radios, treated rust, checked fluid levels, changed fan-belts and screen-washer pumps, replaced headlights and door-seals, re-hung opening windows inside doors, unjammed a sticking rear-door lock mechanism (OK all I had to do was dismantle the door and remove enough hair to knit a small dog). The only things I needed a manual for were to work out how to get at the the headlights to change a bulb, check fuse ratings and locations and change the fan-belt when the diagram in the book was a mirror image. A friend showed me how to clean the brakes and then watched me do it until I was confident.

It makes sense to learn the basics. Except on a motorway, I'd rather fit a spare than sit around waiting, as helpless as Penelope Pitstop, for hours for the AA to come and do it for me.

My last garage bill was £60 for checking over 2 cars, no parts. The one before was several hundred for removing bits of disintegrated gear-stick from inside the gear-box as an emergency job the day before I drove to Lyon. I pay for work I can't do myself.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I no longer have a bike - my husband put it in the loft and then gave it away because (unsurprisingly) I didn't use it. However there are few moving parts on a bike and the operation of most of them is pretty obvious if you look carefully.

There's more parts than appear at first sight, and they're not all as obvious as you might think. I'd been commuting to work by bike for a dozen years before I discovered the existence of the barrel adjusters on the handlebars for brake cable tension.

If it were my problem I'd buy a book on bike maintenance (or find an on-line one, there seem to be a lot about), read it from cover to cover with my bike within easy reach and then sort out the jobs I knew I could do do them and get someone with more experience to check them. In case I needed advice I'd look at forums and find one that was not frequented by idiots.

Well, I do simple jobs (repairing punctures, tightening brake cables, replacing brake shoes, replacing the chain, minor derailleur adjustment) myself; the complex jobs (derailleur adjustment if it's bent out of line, wheel truing, gear cassette replacement) I leave for professionals. The last thing I want is the bike falling apart because I've done the job badly. I'm hopeless with my hands, and know my limits.

Though that said, I've started rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which last I read in 1993, before I started cycle-commuting), and the narrator of that agrees strongly with you and disapproves of my mindset.

My bike came with a manual; I should dig it out and give it a reread...

[miss-whiplash.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite quotes (not that I can quote it precisely) comes from that book.

It's something like "Extreme calm and peace of mind should be sought before attempting assembly of Japanese bicycle".

A metaphore for life - that!

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

I added a lot of extras on my bike but I am hardly riding it. I really neglect it.