My September Rides (week 35)

Failure to maintain a bike is a risky business.
Usually you get away with it; sometimes you won’t.


I saw a man cycling over Waterloo Bridge one day this week (he actually overtook me) he was on a Brommie I think. He was standing on the pedals but not really ‘going for it’ which looked a bit odd. Then on a second look I realised he didn’t actually have a saddle on his bike. The stem was there and indeed the saddle mounting bracket but as for a seat – none; amazing.


One can only imagine what has caused this rider to set off on his machine in such a state of disrepair. The chap did not look like an oik – that is if it possible to identify an oik simply by what he looks like. If he has returned to his bike at the nearby station and found the saddle stolen then surely at that time of the morning – 7.45 – it’s straightforward to go to a nearby cycle-hire rack and take a ‘Boris Bike’. If it’s a matter of getting the machine to the bike shop well ‘Evans’ is just outside waterloo Station!

So then I turned my thoughts to the general situation of cyclists using their improperly maintained bikes. My colleague at work has been commuting between Victoria and Holborn on his little stunt bike with NO BRAKES. I find this absolutely unbelievable. (He hasn’t said as much but I have a feeling he must have had a near miss because getting brakes fitted has suddenly shot up his list of priorities, thank goodness.)

My experience of bike maintenance is separated into two distinct partitions in my cycling life pre giving up, and post.

repair me!

As a child and adolescent I never really owned a bike that was sufficiently complex to warrant spending money – which I did not have much of anyway – on maintaining it. Any repairs were done by my dad initially and when I was older; me. I don’t believe I owned anything less sturdy than a tank. A delicate adjustment could usually be achieved with a few well aimed blows with my father’s club-hammer. A pipe wrench was sufficiently adaptable to get the wheels off or any other nuts and bolts undone. By my early 20s I did have more complex bikes; I tried to apply my old bike maintenance practices to them with a variety of results, not all good by any means I might say.

When I returned to cycling, as I have detailed elsewhere in my blog, it was as a result of finding an old derelict MTB in a skip. I decided that I did not have sufficient skills to do all the work that I thought would be required to bring it back to working order; new handlebars, new brakes, new crank, bearing and pedals, new cassette, and more. I went to my local bike shop – Deens Garage in Beckenham. He quoted me a very reasonable price and did the bike up beautifully. I have never looked back all bike maintenance for me is done in the bike shop.

Failure to maintain a bike in proper working order is a risky business. Usually you will get away with it; sometimes you won’t. There are plenty of examples on the blogs about cyclists who have come to grief because of a mechanical failure. And not just brake failure either. A chain snap at a vital moment as you kick down to avoid a collision, the handle-bar securing bolt shearing at speed, being just a couple of examples.

I am not the best person by any stretch of the imagination to be lecturing you about keeping your bike in good nick. My bike maintenance program is highly suspect – just ask Deen’s. But I have never used a bike without a saddle, and wouldn’t even contemplate riding with out brakes.

Finally my stats:

Rides this week: 5
Rides per week: 3.3
Public transport days: 0
Oyster costs: £0
Annual Oyster costs: £571.20*
Commuting miles this week: 116.98
Commuting miles this year: 2809

*includes some non-commuting journeys

Nice to see the rides per week back to 3.3

TyT 3924