Report from bike maintenance course & adventures of a new mountain biker

So I've been taking a bike maintenance class through the UAF (University of Alaska Fairbanks) summer program, and thought you'd be interested in getting a rundown of the curriculum.

This was a 5-week class, once a week for 3h (6-9pm). Erroneously it said in the booklet it was 6-week, so we met a 6th time more for fun; more about that session below.

First of all the instructor: Simon Rakower is well known here for being an excellent bike mechanic and wheel builder, cold-weather cycling specialist. He used to have his own bike shop and sell and I think manufacture special cold-weather rims. Now he works at my favourite LBS, where I bought both of my bikes (and my cross-country-skis, and sundry clothes and shoes...). What was invaluable about Simon is that he is the complete bike geek and speaks from many years of experience and study, plus has an eminently reasonable and down-to-earth attitude. Any bike is a good bike for him, I imagine - certainly better than no bike, and can be made to work better.

The class was so popular that three sessions were run every week. I was in the Wednesday group, which also meant I could catch up on Thursday when I once had to miss a Wednesday. Each group was nominally about 12 people, but about 8-10 showed up each time, a nice mix of college students, university staff (like me), people from town and from the big military base next door. Each was supposed to bring a bike, and we mostly worked on our own bikes, or those of our classmates. I brought my new Kona Sutra, so for some things I helped someone who was restoring some 25 year old banger rather than take apart my own hub or whatever.

1st session: Fixing flats. Pretty classic lesson with explanations of wheel and tire sizes, tubes, and much more. Each participant took out their rear wheel, got the tire off, took the tube out, and put everything together again. We also learnt about fixing stiff chain links. At the end we got a first intro to chain lubing and drivetrains.

2nd session: Drivetrains, drivetrains, drivetrains! Adjusting derailleur tension front and rear. Limiting screws. Lubing, evaluating, replacing cables. Cable housing types and fixtures. We all got to evaluate and adjust our own drivetrains. Mine was in a pretty good shape, so I got to work on a "known problem bike" and it felt GREAT to diagnose 5 problems and fix 4 of them.

3rd session: Brakes and wheel truing. This was an instructive session for me, as I started out trying to do just a little little improvement on one of my Avid disc brakes and ended up with a very long fiddly session adjusting it from scratch around many different axes. Phew. The wheel truing I did in a group of three this time (as I was tired).

4th session: Ball bearings. This was probably the funnest session of all. There was quite a bit of mini-lecturing involved at first -- intro to bearing types, the various bearings in a bike, how to service them. Many participants had brought real a banger-upper of a bike and Simon supplied new balls and grease and we set to work. I ended up working with two different people, taking apart, cleaning and re-building one bottom bracket and one hub. On the way we learnt about taking off crank arms and bottom brackets and putting them in again, and adjusting ball bearing tension for cup-and-cone bearings.

5th session: Wheel building! We got one demonstration, and each a practice wheel made from cheap components, which we took apart (rim, hub, spokes, nipples -- we left the hub intact) and put together again, then trued and rounded. Very zen.

6th session: So this was supposed to be just a "we meet up if you feel like it, maybe do a little bit of mechanics, and then go off for a ride -- bring a mountain bike". It got more complicated than that. Second part of the story.

Well, I didn't have a mountain bike yet! My Kona Sutra is much beloved and has grown to 600 km or a bit more by now. But the trails around here are spectacular, and a little too rough for a drop-bar tourer (though I ride on the gravel roads to get to the main road). It wasn't really in my budget, though, but Craigslist just refused to work out for me... so I went to the LBS for a lower-end or older model. And my preferred bike shop guy (not Simon, who's not on the sales floor) came up with a 2009 Specialized Rockhopper in my size, for 80% of the original price. I liked it, and was sold. This was the very day before our last class:

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I rode the bike that night on the local trails for 6 miles through mud and puddles. Yay! Then the next day I rode it to class on the UAF trail system and promptly had an encounter with a major stick. I arrived at class with the derailleur wrenched off and twisted, the chain somewhat twisted and everything in a sorry state. On the second-ever ride! (I was also horribly bitten by mosquitos on that section of the trail when walking the bike.)

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But no time like before bike maintenance class to wreck your bike, and nothing like wrecking your bike to get to know it, right? Simon just handed me *his* bike, I rode down to the LBS, got a new derailleur hanger, rode back up, and made it my class project to repair my bike.

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It needed some help from Simon bending the derailleur itself, and some adjusting of the disc brake, but we were back in business. And I got to ride down the famous bicycle bumps behind campus for the first time. Hair-raising.

What an awesome class! The town I lived in until a year ago just started a similar program, but it's just a little too far to drive every week. So fun that you got to fix your new bike immediately after the stick attack!