Riding a bike for leisure, I never really thought about proper bike maintenance, yes I’d give the bike a clean oil the chain and that kind of thing but proper maintenance. Nope, nothing, and to be honest I didn’t really notice any difference, yes I broke a chain a few times and might have had to change some V brake pads but that was it.
Then once I started commuting I realised pretty early on that I’d need to take a little more care on my bike, I remember one evening cycling home and feeling the brakes rub non stop on the disk, turns out one arm of the pad spring had snapped. I’d had the pads on for a while though about 900miles so wasn’t too annoyed. A quick change for some new ones, a week later they’d worn through, melted like butter. Anyway off track slightly. Pro Bike Garage is a great little app, available for Android, and at time of writing in Public beta for iOS what this nifty app does is link to Strava and keep track of how long or how far that component has been ridden for. Then the app has a couple of neat functions, firstly you can add a service interval to each component, lube chain ever 100 miles, check brakes every 50 hours of riding, secondly, value for money, a perfect example of this was a bottom bracket I purchased from China, “ceramic” GXP for £13 including postage, and and Uberbikes steel bottom bracket for £39, the Uber bike failed in 2 months having done 900miles, the one from China is still going after 1,500 miles. I love the fact that I’m able to keep track of how long my components last, from a commuting perspective it’s important for me to make sure that what I buy will last. Understanding how frequently to maintain and then being able to compare how long each element has lasted for is fantastic. If like me you’re a geek for apps and also need a regular prompt to service parts of your bike, head over the probikegarage.com and give it a try.
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Mike GaskellI started commuting around May 2017, mainly to save the £45 a week train fare and get ready for the Dunwich Dynamo. Archives
August 2022
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