Tag Archives | bicycle maintenance

The essentials to bike maintenance – Allen keys and a bottle of wine! Slow changing gears, brakes that don’t bring a bike to a quick stop and strange creaks coming from near your pedals. Everyone recognises the symptoms of a bike in need of attention. Most people would love to have a bike that runs [...]

Doing your own routine bike maintenance has many benefits. You can instantly fix your bike, without relying on the timetable of the local bike shop. You can save significant amounts of money on bike shop repairs. It can also be reassuring to know that if something goes wrong, you can fix it. So why don’t [...]

Maintaining your bike becomes a whole lot more fun after you’ve purchased a bike maintenance stand. Otherwise, bikes have an annoying habit of constantly tipping over to one side, just as you are about to make an adjustment. Fortunately, the price of the maintenance stands has come down significantly over time, so that they can [...]

If you ride around on a single speed bike or a BMX, then once every one to two years you need to replace the freewheel cog. It became apparent that my freewheel needed replacing on my bike after I kept hearing a clonking sound, each time I’d be applying a lot of pressure to the [...]

Not all Londoners have access to a brand new, top of the range bicycle. Many, have a 10 year old hand me down mountain bike from their sister. One such person is my friend Laura. She recently asked me: What do you think of the bike? As someone who knows a thing or two about [...]

If you want to be able to look after your bike yourself, you’ll need a basic set of tools to start off with. Allen keys Also called hex keys, Allen keys are an essential for bike maintenance. Everything from adjusting your brakes, to tightening your seat post, will require an Allen key. Hexagonal ones are [...]

This is one of those little bike maintenance tricks that I just had to share! For a while I struggled with punctures on my single speed bike. The problem was, it was difficult to pull the wheel back to get the chain adequately tensioned and at the same time secure it in place. It’s one [...]