Originally Posted by
cny-bikeman
It does not work that way. You don't become a mechanic by reading a bunch of books or forum posts, or according to how many years or how many bikes. And you will never "know all this stuff."
At a first glance a bicycle is a simple machine but the devil is in the details. I used to be pretty smart and had good understanding of how everything worked, but there are constant detail changes being made in bicycle components. Not only that but the rate of change is faster than I can absorb. The longer I mess with bicycles, the more new things I'm finding that I don't know about so the dumber I'm becoming.