Originally Posted by
kv501
If he can't afford to re-tape bars once in a blue moon this is the wrong hobby to be in.
We're in tech, so he obviously makes plenty for a retape job. But the problem isn't paying. It was reliability and time. He had already taken the bike to multiple places to get the shifting fixed. They were not competent with new, under the bar brifters. And being I host a free clinic at work because I support a "bike-to-work" lifestyle on my 5000 person campus, I have lots of tubes and small parts, but I don't carry cork tape or many grips for that matter. I'm just a volunteer and I just provide a free service for my fellow co-workers.
The issue here in Silicon Valley is affordability and competency. You have a lot of folks who can sell you a bike, but few have the actual competence to fix it properly in a timely manner. And so people pay and pay and pay, and get very little value for bike service, and so they often quit biking to work. Our last bike clinic, I had 8 appointments booked in our short 2 hr slot. I serviced a couple of BSOs, and some really nice bikes, including one CF with Dura Ace. We get all kinds with many very nice bikes. The new fangled stuff is the hardest to service because it is so new and we witness how new it must be, because even the shops they bought their bikes from didn't do a very good job adjusting the components. And while some of us are into new fangled parts and we do have some exceptional engineers that all bike, few of us have ever serviced under-the-wraps brifters. I'm riding SS/fixie and friction barcons most of the time so I rarely ever see any of the new stuff except at these volunteer clinics, and most of those road biker dudes call me a retro-grouch (I ride bridgestones, duh). But I'm the lead mechanic that supposedly has the most experience, and I get the (not so) fun part of trying to figure out how the heck the Shimano engineers did something. It's not a pleasant task, especially when a little investigation reveals that for a little better engineering, they could have made a component far more serviceable. As the thread is titled: "Spawn of Satan." Yeah, sometimes, I have to agree. Not all Shimano engineered things are great. My fishing reels are mostly Daiwa, Abu Garcia or Penn. Not Shimano.