Book in for a maintenance course and learn to keep your bike running smoothly. You’ll love having it running well and you can be pleased with tuning it yourself and knowing how to do it in the future.
Bikes are pretty simple machines and you can do a lot of maintenance yourself. Just cleaning the chain, lubricating pivot points and keeping the tyres inflated to the correct pressure make a big improvement in the comfort of riding. You can also learn the simple procedure for changing brake pads and adjusting your gears.
Many bike shops offer maintenance courses, so ask at your favourite shop. There’s a selection of courses listed on the Bicycle Victoria website covering Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Try these links for Brisbane, Canberra and Perth.
Tip – Set up a simple home workshop
A few key tools and a space you can work in is all you need for a home workshop. Bikes have greasy parts and inevitably get grimy from road spray, so a garage or shed is a good venue. The living room in front of the telly is not. Have rags available to wipe your hands and wipe the bike clean as you work on it.
A maintenance stand is a big help because it lifts the wheels off the ground and puts the bike at a convenient height. However, you can approximate a stand by tying a rope to a roof beam and looping it around the saddle.
Your home toolkit for bike maintenance can be as simple as:
- Tyre pump (a floor pump is most practical)
- Toothbrush or chain cleaning gadget
- Citrus degreaser or other biodegradable degreaser
- Chain lube
- Rags
- Bearing grease for greasing threads
- A set of allen keys (hex keys) including sizes up to 8mm
- A pedal spanner (narrower than an ordinary spanner).
This post is for day 20 of Ride On‘s June riding challenge.
Connect with Ride On on Facebook or Twitter.
Ride On content is editorially independent, but is supported financially by members of Bicycle Network. If you enjoy our articles and want to support the future publication of high-quality content, please consider helping out by becoming a member.
Your link to bike maintenance courses in Perth is not working. Check out http://dismantle.org.au/products-page/courses/ we run maintenance courses out of a community bike workshop in Fremantle. We are a not-for-profit org that believes in the power of bikes as a catalyst for positive lifestyle change.