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 as smoothly as the day you bought it, without any weird noises and responsive brakes and gears. The sort of bike that leaves you to enjoy the pleasure of a bike ride.
Many people try to learn how to maintain their bikes themselves by looking on YouTube. There are a huge number of videos on there, on nearly every bike maintenance topic. However, none of them tie everything together, in to an easy to follow, step by step system.
Therefore, while you can dive in to different topics, you never get an overview that allows you to run through your bike, spot any issues early on and easily resolve them.
Today, we’re making the London Cyclist online bike maintenance course available for free.
A complete system for bike maintenance at home
Inside you’ll discover:
- How to run through the entire of your bike in 5 minutes and identify any issues you need to look at
- How to adjust your gears so that they instantly respond and how to replace gear cables.
- How to adjust your brakes so that when you pull your brake leaver 2/3rds of the way down, your brakes are fully engaged and your bike comes to a quick stop. We also show how you can easily replace your brake cables and brake pads.
- How to spot when your chain and cassette are worn and how to replace them.
- How to quickly repair a puncture at the road side.
- How to true your wheels so that they don’t wobble side to side.
- The basics to bike fitting
- Plus how to service your pedals, headset, crank and bottom bracket.
Easy to follow, even for those who hate DIY
If you are a little like me, and even putting up a photo frame on the wall seems scary to you, then you’ll be pleased to see how easy the course is to follow. This is largely thanks to Tom, an instructor from the London Bike Kitchen, who has taught 100s of cyclists before. He knows the typical questions people have and can explain bicycle maintenance in a way that even a complete beginner can understand.
Who the course is for
- If you want to save money on bike repairs
- If you want to spot problems on your bike, before they become an issue
- If you want a squeak and creak free bike
- If you’d like to be proud of maintaining your bike yourself (and you are willing to accept that your friends will start coming to you for bike maintenance advice!)
Feedback
“What I especially liked was the mechanic was very soft spoken, easy to understand, and did not talk down, as you see in many YouTube videos. I just wish I had access to these videos years ago when I got into bicycle maintenance. Great course!” Steve, New York
“Clearly explained and thorough enough for a novice to follow, without feeling that steps were being skipped. I think Tom from the London Bike Kitchen is the perfect person to front this maintenance course – he has a great manner: always clear without ever being patronising. I particularly loved the fact that I could easily browse the site and watch the videos using my iPad. This is really handy for portability when performing the maintenance, but also great for lazing on the sofa and dipping in and out of the videos to learn something new.” Daniel
Videos
The videos can be accessed via the Bike Maintenance Vimeo Album.
For convenience, here’s a list of the videos:
- M-Check
- Gears
- Brakes
- Front derailleur
- Seat post
- Chain
- Pedals
- Headset
- Cassette
- Crank and bottom bracket
- Wheel truing
- Wheel hubs
- Puncture
- Bike fitting
If you’re looking to maintain your bike on the go then our Bike Doctor iPhone and iPad app is a great guide to have with you in your pocket.
Sorry I would really love to join in but I am boycotting paypal at the moment because of their alleged tax-dodging activities mentioned in various media. I don’t know if it’s true, but I am holding back my money from them until I find out more.
Good luck though it sounds like a good idea.
Thank you k8. I’d love to use another payment provider but many of them are US based. If the software we use starts to accept SagePay then I’ll get that integrated in as an alternative for people.
I must admit it was the bottle which first caught my eye… 😉
Thank you for all you do, Andreas. This site is a fantastic resource.
I have Campy parts on my go-fast bike – what makes them so much different to maintain?
The bike I ride most, and the one which needs more maintenance than all of the other bikes I own or have ever owned, is the Amsterdam. Between the full chain guard, the drum brake and the skirt guard, even something as simple as changing the back tyre is waaay too complicated for me. I dunno. Maybe mine was just made on a Monday, but I think it should be called the AmsterJag instead. Very pretty, sweet disposition in the saddle, but a high maintenance kinda ride.
Will this course help me with this bike?
Cheers!
Campy parts have slightly different maintenance instructions – there’s no doubt the course will be useful to you but you may need a slightly different set of tools.
We don’t currently cover hub gears (which I imagine the Amsterdam has) so I don’t think the course will be useful for that. However, I am planning on adding this soon. This will make the course more useful for cyclists on bromptons and dutch style bikes. Perhaps we can include something about removing a rear wheel if you’ve got a Dutch style bike!
Yep, it has hub gears, and at the moment it also has a clunk which happens every third pedal rotation, and more on hills. And thank you. A bit on removing that rear wheel would be very useful. At the moment it’s so far beyond me it might as well be rocket science.
I purchased this yesterday and emailled last night saying I had problems with the video streaming. Today Andreas has already put downloadable links up which work well.
I really appreciate the helpful response. Now I just hope to be able to set up gear indexing in the same unflappable way as Tom (but somehow I doubt it !)
Happy to help and don’t worry you’ll be fine – come back to us with any questions if its not clear!
Absolutely brilliant set of videos. So clear and concise and thorough. THIS is the resource that I’ve spent the past few years wishing I had. Thank you Andreas! This is excellent.
Brilliant work by Tom too, a really good educator!
Looking forward to the disc brake update!
I’ve taken in many repairs that could’ve been fixed with the basic steps outlined above, seems like a great idea for people who like to be self sufficient.
I like how you encouraged us to DIY bike repair and to not be afraid of getting some grease on ourselves. I was thinking of buying a bike to travel to work instead of driving to add more activity load to my life. I will definitely give your suggestion a go but have a lookout for a bicycle repair shop just in case I come across something too hard for a newbie like me to fix.