Bike Shop experiences

[Crackle]

Islabikes and Spa cycles have both given me excellent aftercare when I've had a problem, I've had good deals off Chester bike shop and Cheshire Oak Cycles and I use my LBS for simple spares, cables, oil, blocks etc... Anything bigger I get online. So far I've not found a bike mechanic more competent than me and there are only a couple of jobs which I might consider taking to an LBS. One of them is the headset, though I'll suck it and see first but sometimes a headset press is the only way to go. If I need something doing to a frame I'll seek out a framebuilder but these are getting rarer and rarer, used to be quite a few locally. If I'm feeling lazy I might drop a wheel in to have a spoke replaced but I normally tune the wheel myself.

 

[Hilldodger]

From the other side of the counter: Having to deal with customers who were utterly convinced that the bike or product they've dragged through the door is covered under warranty when it wasn't.

Like the guy who buckled his back wheel (dirt jumping a XC hardtail.. :/ ) so decided to unhook his V brakes to allow tha wheel to turn. It promptly swung underneath and into the wheel removing half of the spokes and ripping off the flange and ripping off the brake boss which ripped through the seat stay writing off the frame. £900 bike reduced to a pile of parts and scrap in a moment. I felt for him, I really did but I wasn't about to pay for his screw up.

Best bit was trying to contain giggles when folk came in having done something really dumb - like (genuinely) greasing rims to stop brakes squealing and then complaining that they didn't work!

Taking a bike apart and reassembling it wrong - front mech on the down tube. Chain run through it and everything.

"You've put it back together wrong".

"No I haven't".

"It's supposed to go on the seat tube".

" No it isn't".

And repeat.

We had one the other day.

"My back brake is jammed on!"

"Ah, that's because you've missed a spacer out when you replaced the wheel and you've squeezed the frame in"

"I haven't touched it and the bike has been perfect for months!"

"All we need to do is replace the spacer and all will be well. Do your gears work properly?"

"No, they've stopped working, too"

"Well, if we put a spacer on the rear axle everything should be back to normal"

"But it doesn't need a spacer!"

"OK, then there's nothing we can do"

"Right, I'm taking it to a proper bike shop!"

Where he did it all again.

 

[Arch]

We had one the other day.

"My back brake is jammed on!"

"Ah, that's because you've missed a spacer out when you replaced the wheel and you've squeezed the frame in"

"I haven't touched it and the bike has been perfect for months!"

"All we need to do is replace the spacer and all will be well. Do your gears work properly?"

"No, they've stopped working, too"

"Well, if we put a spacer on the rear axle everything should be back to normal"

"But it doesn't need a spacer!"

"OK, then there's nothing we can do"

"Right, I'm taking it to a proper bike shop!"

Where he did it all again.

The ability of people to deny everything or outright lie, amazes me. We get it with the recycling - woman rings up, very insistent and irate, to know why her box not emptied. Colleague takes the message and checks with member of staff who did the round (me). Checking our tickoff sheet, and my memory, which is more or less reliable, she'd had a load of unrecyclable stuff in it, so I took out the good stuff, and left the rest. So I ring her back, and as I relate the facts she goes from insisting that it hadn't been touched at all, through 'I read the leaflet, there was nothing wrong in there', to 'oh, ok, I won't put those things in again'. Every statement she made contradicted the last....

As for bike shops, I don't go in much, I do most of my minimal shopping online, and I haven't bought a bike from one since my Apollo from Halfords, 15 or so years ago. But I've found Bob Trotters to be fairly unhelpful, something others have confirmed. One guy said he went in to buy a brake cable and was told "You'd be better off getting it at Halfords...."

 

[goo_mason]

Although Halfords normally take a kicking, there's one guy at the Hermiston Gait branch here in Edinburgh who has helped me out a couple of times in the last few years at zero notice and then he's spent time and effort and waved me off without wanting payment. He's dropped what he was doing to cut a spoke to size, cut a thread on it, put it on my wheel and true the wheel back up - all at no cost. He's also fitted a new gear cable with no notice and didn't take payment (as it was under a year old on the C2W Scheme, although I had obtained it from a different branch and he had no idea if I was just making that up or not).

It's a help when the shop's just up the road from work - any problems that have happened on the way to work which involve parts I wouldn't carry with me as standard can be resolved without much of a walk.