An Equal Opportunity Offender

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Friday, March 5, 2010

This blog is about bikes and how people abuse them. More importantly it is about the technicians who spend countless hours trying to resurrect a bike even when the owner has no intention of letting the bike live. It is almost daily that a customer asks us blue collar workers to make a bike work that is totally fucked.

The inspiration for this blog was a Santa Cruz Blur LT. The repair started with a fork service. I dropped the lowers on the 32 Vanilla only to find the stanchions in dire straits. The fork had been void of oil for so long that the bushings had left a complete impression on the stanchions, down to the grooves which could be seen on the uppers. The chain read so far past 1% that it could easily have been the worst chain ever. The rear brake was having issues, upon purging the master cylinder, the only thing that came out was a pure black sludge. Both derailleurs had more play than, well you get the point.

This Santa Pooz was on the same ticket as the FSR XC featured a couple of posts ago. The fork on the FSR was salvageable, but the custy chose not to service it. Even after knowing that his Vanilla was fucked and he wouldn't be spending the money on it.

The point is, people abuse bikes. Then, in turn, they abuse bike techs. As bike wrenches we are expected to take a high performance object that is totally fucked and return it to its perfect, new condition. It's usually the custy who does not wish to pay who has the highest expectations.

For all you techs out there, this blog is for you. It is a forum to rag, reem, poke fun of, rant, relieve anger, destroy all expectations and basically get even with these people.

This is about us. If you have something to share, would like to post regularly, shoot me an email jlukasbrink(at)gmail(dot)com.

Out.

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