-holiday76

I lent fender1's Ritchie to some kid for $50 for an indefinite period.

cyclotoine

I try to have a loaner in the fleet, but right now I do not. Something like my touring bike I will let a friend ride when I am with them. Some friend's asked me if I would loan my mountain bike to someone I don't know who was in town visiting.

"He's a mechanic and really good rider from Vancouver" they said.

Now I was also a mechanic and I know lots of bike mechanics and there are all different kinds. A mountain biker from Vancouver immediately sets off alarm bells of someone pushing my bike past it's limit (a cross country bike) and I am a gentle rider. I most certainly would not lend out my $4000 mountain bike to someone I had never met to go do shuttle runs on the steep technical trail riding area. That they asked was fine, and they had no idea how out of the question it was. Everyone I know around here rides their bikes into the ground, I am most certainly not going to lend me bike out. Same goes for my irreplaceable vintage bikes like the Gazelle or Marinoni or my 2002 Marin Treviso... no way hose. I will lend out a tool to a good friend especially if I am thinking I want to upgrade, if they break it, no sweat, I will get a better version. That said I am not going to loan something like cutting tools. I picked up a nishiki continental this summer in great shape. A real nice bike, a perfect loaner.

Michael Angelo 

I have a 1976 Schwinn Varisty as a loaner.

rootboy 

Won't you loan me a Mondia?

TimmyT 

Yeah, I've got it now. I paid that kid $100 to get it from you.

Dawes-man

Yeah, I'll lend friends bike, motorbikes, tools… wouldn't occur to me not to. Often give stuff to friends, too. I gave a friend the frame from my BMW race bike a couple of weeks ago. A couple of years ago I gave this to another friend coz it fit him perfectly - it was too small for me:

[IMG] Mercian Superlight frame by Dawes-man, on Flickr[/IMG]

[IMG] Seat lug by Dawes-man, on Flickr[/IMG]

The same friend once lent me his highly tuned 1980 R100RS for a week (a sweet machine!) and his Ducati 900ss racer to try out on the track, where I crashed it. We are still good friends and he subsequently made all the signage for my school as a gift when I moved into new premises.

The only problems I've ever had with lending stuff is when the people I've lent to weren't friends. I remember lending a neighbour some tools to repair his car and he brought them back filthier than they had ever been. The idea that you could lose a friend by lending them something says to me that you'd have to be crap at choosing friends.

rootboy 

That is the operative word, Dawes-man. Friends. A friend knows to take care of a friend's tools or other items. Is respectful and careful with them and returns them without having to be asked. I'd loan one of my bikes to a friend. Thank goodness I don't have any that ride a 60 cm! HA!

SJX426 

I don't get asked very often and wouldn't care to loan tools or bikes. My rule is that I will loan something if I am willing to lose it. I don't ask for loaners either. Sometimes I get offered a loaner. If I take it, I try to give it back in equal or better condition as a thank you for the loan. Tools, I will buy. If i need it once, it is likely I will need it again. Although I try to practice the "golden rule", I have learned the hard way that most don't. What I value highly others think of as disposable and they are the end of the line.
Being a C&V kind of person, I think nearly anything can be fixed or repaired, which has led to having a ton of small parts stored hear and there. I think that I could find a use for it some day. I am begining to realize the day will not come or it is beyond my days left.

I suppose that would be a good way for my family to deal with all the stuff I have that they don't know how to identify, once I am gone, they could just "loan" it out! Like a safety for a Winchester M54.

cobrabyte

NO. Unless it's a "bike person" and all the bike people I know already own bikes. My "non-bike people" friends & family don't get to borrow my bikes...I've seen how they treat bikes and it's not pretty.

rootboy 

I don't feel too comfortable borrowing things either. So I don't ask. A member here has offered me the use of a very fine, and quite rare, Italian bike if I ever get down to his neck of the woods. While I greatly appreciate the generosity, I'm not sure I'd feel good about riding it. What if I fug it up?

BTW, if one of my neighbors asks to borrow a tool, I usually just offer to bring it over and do the job for them. It works out well.

ColonelJLloyd 

I agree with Dawes-man.

This bike has been on loan to a friend for close to a year. He commutes on it rain or shine and has no car. He had an endo early on and wrecked the rear fender; we repaired it well enough. He's put more miles on it than I have probably. I don't think I'd be much of a friend if I let this bike hang in my basement while my friend waited at the bus stop on the way to work and walked home late at night after bus service has stopped.


Untitled by ColonelJLloyd, on Flickr

RFC

I find this to be a very strange and revealing thread. Silly me, I've told my sons that they and their friends can ride anything in the ManCave. What a fool I must be! They are all good people and if something happens, I'm much more concerned about their wellbeing than some silly old bike.

Bikegeek1968

I have loaned out pretty much every bike I have owned at one point or another, but it has always been to someone I have known for many years. Usually it is a friend who is visiting from out of town and could not bring a bike with them. The only bike I don't load out is the one that is my main ride, or a team bike that is not mine, I just get to use it for the race season.

I do have a small rental business where I rent out modern road bikes, and for the first few months I was very nervous every time one of them went out. But after nearly a year in business, I have yet to have any bikes come back in bad condition. Just a little dirt, the typical road nicks are all that has happened to the fleet.

Maybe I have just been lucky, but all of my friends and clients seem to have followed the campground rule.

Italuminium

I've lend a bike to a guy that's the most un-bike person ever. Any form of physical excersize really. But he's the last person in the western world to carry a meticulously ironed handkerchief in his pocket (and does all the the ironing himself). I trust people like that

RubberLegs

Yes....but carefully, let a nephew (teenager) ride one a ways back....who normally rides BSO MTBs....we were out riding, and he took a corner WAY WIDE and went off roading...I was afraid he was going to taco the front wheel or do an endo....fortunately, the ground was firm enough....MUST remind borrowers that road machines stay ON the road, and are NOT good at CURB jumping! :-O

cobrabyte

I've bought, rebuilt & given bikes to friends to get them riding, but if someone asks to borrow my bike and I ask "sure, do you know how to use a downtube friction shifter?" and I'm met with a blank stare...then no, you're my friend, but borrow someone else's bike lol

Ex Pres 

Never really had the opportunity. To almost everyone around here, I'm just the crazy guy that shows up with a different old bike each time. Very few are interested in anything that's not new.

seedsbelize 

I lend them freely to my next door neighbors, who commute by bike and have only one each. Of course, I don't lend them my road bikes. I lend them my tools as well, both bike-related and power tools. But they're right next door.

editi: My bikes are tools to me. How many people would you lend your chainsaw to? In my case, maybe one or two.

mobilemail

Even if my friends were small enough to ride my bikes, they generally avoid any discussion of riding with me because they think I am some deranged, megamile maniac. Word got out that I would ride more than 20 miles at a time.

lasauge 

Thanks to all the previous posters, this thread is an interesting read.

I've only had one opportunity to loan out a bike (because, naturally enough, the people who I am interested in riding with already have their own bikes), and that was for such a short ride that going through the whole process of switching out pedals, adjusting the saddle position, dealing with the friend's complaint that I run my brakes too soft, and then resetting everything after the ride was such a hassle that I'm less likely to loan a bike in the future. I'd be willing to loan bikes for a whole day, or for multiple days, but it's just silly if you have to spend as much time adjusting the bike for the new rider as it's going to be ridden.

Dawes-man

As lending out tools has been mentioned in the same breath as lending out bikes in this thread I'd like to recount something that happened to me today.

I've just today got round to starting work on an H.R. Morris frame that I acquired earlier in the year. I decided to fit a Baylis Wiley bottom bracket but found the fixed cup wouldn't even begin to thread in. So I had a look to see how much a bb tap would set me back. The Park Tool version is $790 and the locally made Hozan a heart-stopping $1000.

There's an LBS that I know but wasn't sure they'd have a BSC size tap so after getting some bread in a nearby shop called in to check before taking the frame in. It's a shop I've been using for around 10 years for control cables and the like and once got a call from them to ask me how to get a cotter pin out, as they know I like old bikes. That was actually on my wedding day. I'm on pretty good terms with them.

I went in and asked if they had the tool and the owner got their Hozan out, saying, 'What, do you want to use it?'. Very surprised indeed I said, 'What? Do you mean I can borrow it?' and he said, 'Yeah, we wouldn't usually but as it's you, that's fine.'

I took it home and tapped the threads (dead easy - it was just paint as the frame hasn't been built up since it was re-enamelled about 10 years ago), then thoroughly cleaned the tool and took it back, together with some beer as a thank you present.

All is well in this small part of the world.

Drillium Dude 

I will - no chit. That would take care of it

Even if you can't ride it, perhaps you could find someone who could. It's just gathering dust here...

PM/email me if interested.

DD

dvsjes28

I never lend out any of my Treks. I let my buddy use my Bikesdirect Mercier though on occasion. Im hoping one day he buys it from me.

RobbieTunes

I'm with RFC.

Often, while I'm working on someone's bike in my garage, they're looking over my bikes.
I tell them, generally without looking up, to "go ahead, ride whichever one you want."
In a mercenary way, I have their bike captive. In another way, it's just a bike.

One guy was gone an hour, with flipflops and cargo shorts, on a Soma Competition with lugs, Kuwahara tubing, Arabesque, and a B-17. He came back, spied a rear rack along the wall, and an hour later, we got back from another "shakedown" ride and he took it to the Outer Banks, where he spent the summer sleeping on a hammock, working at a snowcone shope, and taking the Soma up and down the Outer Banks. Over time, I've replaced the front wheel, one set of pedals, and I think he still has it. Some "loaners" are meant to be. Last I heard, it was in Asheville, where it fits right in.

Nothing says "welcome to my world" like the nearly unconditional belief that, once they're on a bike, everything will be OK. Infectious.

RobbieTunes

You lent out an 853 Serpens?

Dude, that's devious.