What part of "every part of your bike is either worn out or mangled and your bike may injure or kill you" makes me an *******?


Today a young lady came in the shop to ask me to chop the ends off her riser bars. I said I'd look the bike over and see what I could do, so I put it in the stand to check it out. I could tell when she walked in the door that the bike was hurtin' somethin' fierce. I put it in the stand and tried to shift and the brake levers moved. It's a Gary Fisher MTB, a Marlin or something I think. When I say the brake levers moved, I mean they were floating around the bars, not anywhere close to clamped to them. So she says she tried to fit the levers on some drop bars and it didn't work (yeah...). So we move on, and we talk about the shifting, which isn't really working, and I suggest that she might be better off investigating other bikes, used, new, whatever, either will probably be cheaper than getting this thing even close to proper function. She doesn't want proper function she says, how much will it be to get the brakes to work. I quote her a slightly lower than full everything cost for what she needs done, 'cuz we don't usually charge the $5 for cable installs anyway, and she says she has cables and brake pads at home, and we agree that I'll do the work if she brings the parts. Then I look some more at her bike. I tell her the brake levers might break, as they really aren't designed to be stretched that way and bending them back might just cause them to snap, I show her that her suspension fork is bent backwards significantly, her headset is so indexed it barely turns, etc. She's spent the entire time the bike was in the stand and I was talking looking at me like I'm telling her she's an ugly ***** and saying dirty things about her mama. I don't get it. Why the **** do you give the look of death to someone who is trying to help you not die because you've abused the **** out of your bike?



Can anyone tell me what the deal is?


I mean really, a simple, plain explanation that any number of parts on one's bicycle are very likely to break causing injury or death in the kindest words I could come up with were met with this wall of icy death!

Ugh.