My top 3 ways to ruin your bike and get an expensive repair bill

As a teacher at London Bike Kitchen, and doing my own bike maintenance work, one of the first things I talk to people about is how much money maintenance can save you. It’s tempting to tell people that cycling is ‘free once you buy the bike,’ but this quickly becomes untrue if you let maintenance problems build up, and let your more expensive components become unduly damaged and worn ahead of time. This is a short blog about the best ways to ruin your bike through lack of maintenance, which hopefully you’d use more in a what not to do sense. But it’s more fun to talk about it this way!

Learnings and feelings after 6 months of cycle educating in London

The other day at London Bike Kitchen, where I teach as a freelance tutor, I ran a ‘introduction to maintenance’ class for two people who were several decades older than me. Correspondingly, they probably had in the order of 40 years more of experience regarding riding bikes than I did, since I only really began cycling properly (in the sense of leisure and transportation) in around 2017. Writing this, I’ve been teaching classes like this, or working as a community mechanic, for about 6 months now, and thought a blog post about what I’ve learned and how I’m feeling about it may be interesting to you.