UBI April 14-25

[DebW]

I'm back home, so time to post some info on the UBI course and answer questions if anyone else is thinking of going. Also some pictures of the UBI classroom.

I did the two week "Professional Repair and Shop Operation" course. In this course, you work on shop bikes only, never your own bike (you are allowed to work on your own bike at any of the extra hours, 5-7 pm on Tue and Thur). The shop bikes have never been ridden outdoors but are overhauled constantly, which means that the grease you get on your hands in class is only clean grease, never black dirty grease, and even the chains are clean. An interesting change from working on normal bikes. There were 4 instructors for the course, who alternated the lectures. A second instructor was always present during lectures, and during our hands-on exercises there were always three instructors present to help and check our work. They were quite punctual, always starting on time and keeping to schedule. For the hands-on exercises, there was always a time limit, and when it was up you went back to your seat for the next lecture or demonstration and caught up later or during an evening session. So sometime you were done early and had a few minutes to wait, but you never waited indefinitely until everyone was finished. They tried to give us a break once an hour - sometimes it was the end of a practical session which allowed some catch-up time, but if we'd been working on something a long time, they insisted that everyone stop working for 15 minutes. There were a couple days when we listened to lectures for 1/2 a day, but most often the lectures never lasted more than an hour, followed by a demonstration and a student hands-on exercise. Most exercises were to disassemble something, at which point we returned to our seats for a demonstration of the reassembly, and then did the reassembly ourselves. Each sub-assembly that we disassembled and reassembled had to be checked by an instructor and checked-off in our student sign-off sheet. They were particular that we did things to professional standards: brake pads exactly centered on the rim, derailleurs adjusted precisely, absolutely no play in bearing assemblies. We even got checked off on cleaning our workbenches and putting our tools back in the proper places at the end of the day.

The pictures show the instructor bench and lecture area, one of the 8 student benches, the bikes we worked on (one road and one MTB per bench), and our class photo from the last day. We were assigned a new bench partner every day so got to know most of our fellow students. If anyone wants more detail on the curriculum or the background of the instructors, I can add more.