Bicycle Work
May. 21st, 2017 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogAt Aldi, I saw a bicycle work stand for $30. This is the sort of thing you clamp your bicycle onto so it's held off the floor for easier maintenance. A lot cheaper than decent ones I've seen online, so I figured it was worth buying. I biked home with it, in it's four-foot-long box, held over my shoulder with one hand and steering with the other.
Today I set it up and used it for the first time and was really impressed! It's a nice, metal stand with five sturdy fold-out legs, a telescoping center tube that will extend to around 6 feet, and a nice clamp to hold the bike. It makes any kind of mechanical work *so* much easier. And it folds down small enough to fit in our small basement storage cube in the condo building. I've wanted a bike repair stand for years, and I'm so glad I bought it!
I had the bike on the stand to install the front fender I removed last time I put it into a car. I'd forgotten that one of the pieces went bouncing off into the grass and got lost, so I'll have to get a replacement bolt first. Unfortunately, I also found that I have a broken spoke on my back wheel. I thought that might have happened yesterday when I went over some rough streets and noticed the brake was rubbing a bit.
Wheel work is really intimidating to me. It's one of the most, for lack of a better term, abstract, or least straightforward, things one can do on a bike. All the spokes should be under approximately equal tension, and tightening or loosening one affects all the others, and sometimes the wheel is bent in a way that requires spoke adjustment that seems counter-intuitive to me. But I think I'm going to go buy a replacement spoke and a nipple wrench (yes, this is what spoke tension adjusting wrenches are called because the spoke attaches to the rim with a thing called a nipple) and give it a try. I'm pretty sure I can at least get the thing installed and then *try* to true the wheel. And if I can't get it right, there's a bike shop just a block away.
Today I set it up and used it for the first time and was really impressed! It's a nice, metal stand with five sturdy fold-out legs, a telescoping center tube that will extend to around 6 feet, and a nice clamp to hold the bike. It makes any kind of mechanical work *so* much easier. And it folds down small enough to fit in our small basement storage cube in the condo building. I've wanted a bike repair stand for years, and I'm so glad I bought it!
I had the bike on the stand to install the front fender I removed last time I put it into a car. I'd forgotten that one of the pieces went bouncing off into the grass and got lost, so I'll have to get a replacement bolt first. Unfortunately, I also found that I have a broken spoke on my back wheel. I thought that might have happened yesterday when I went over some rough streets and noticed the brake was rubbing a bit.
Wheel work is really intimidating to me. It's one of the most, for lack of a better term, abstract, or least straightforward, things one can do on a bike. All the spokes should be under approximately equal tension, and tightening or loosening one affects all the others, and sometimes the wheel is bent in a way that requires spoke adjustment that seems counter-intuitive to me. But I think I'm going to go buy a replacement spoke and a nipple wrench (yes, this is what spoke tension adjusting wrenches are called because the spoke attaches to the rim with a thing called a nipple) and give it a try. I'm pretty sure I can at least get the thing installed and then *try* to true the wheel. And if I can't get it right, there's a bike shop just a block away.
