Speaking for myself at least - that wasn`t the intention.

I would like to put some perspective on the situation though and again - I`ll only speak for myself. My own training wasn`t trial and error or experimentation - it was professional courses and a long line of clinics and seminars. The objective is to eliminate all risk of doing damage to any mechanical parts, any chance of compromising the safety of any customer, and getting a top quality job done in as short a time as possible.

There`s no doubt in my mind that if I asked for volunteers to provide bicycles so that inexperienced mechanics would have something to train on by trial and error - every reasonable rider would hide their high end bike in the closet and even people with department store bikes would be reluctant because ........

But for some reason lots of inexperienced mechanics have no problems volunteering their own bikes (regardless of how much they cost apparently) if it saves them a few bucks and its themselves doing the `learning`. Unfortunately for every `right` way to do something there are usually at least a half dozen ways to do it wrong and statistically - the chances of finding the correct way the first time around are pretty slim.

And although there are a number of reference books available like the Zinn book advertised on this site or the Park Tool Big Blue Book that would address most of the questions commonly asked on this site and take a lot of the risk out of the learning experience - for some reason most posters aren`t buying them and seem to prefer to take their chances.

I have a background in business analysis and risk management but even without that it makes sense to me that rather than gamble, when anything of value is at stake - it makes sense to eliminate all possible risk. I`m not sure why not everyone feels the same way but clearly they don`t.