About the Great Balkini

The first step, when you have your new bike, is to spend every bit of 20 minutes just looking at it. The mechanics, at first glance, look intimidating. But maintenance is really just a mind game. Look carefully. Your bike has no secrets. Its intricacies are all exposed to the focused eye. You are looking at an ultra reliable, incredibly durable and energy efficient machine that requires amaizngly little effort to operate.

Despite their near perfection, bikes are largely dismissed as a source of transportation. Outgrowing your bike, in our society, is a rite of passage toward adulthood. Of the 65 million adults who still ride recreationally, all but a teaspoonful are in mechanical denial. They maintain their bikes about as often as they administer CPR.

That’s too bad for two reasons. First, they miss out on the pure joy that comes from understanding the inner workings of something simple, sleek and sexy. Second, a maintained bike is a safe bike. The road offers enough surprises on its own. Why travel on tired, dangerously sloppy equipment that rides as badly as it sounds?

Those who ride for fun on marginal bikes leave their brains behind. The rider, who is also the vehicle's motor, is often too focused on his own physical problems to notice the shortcomings of the bike. But riding junk, like rowing a leaky boat, is survival, not recreation.

Your mantra should simply be -- keep it clean. Your goal is to continually return that bike to the pristine state it was in when you took that first long slow look. A clean bike offers a comfortable, maintenance-free ride. The more seamless the ride, the better rider you become. The better rider you are, the more fun the road is.

Wipe clean the frame and its parts after every ride. Running your hands over the machine also assures that everything bolted looks right and feels tight. This simple post-ride activity should become as habitual as repacking a parachute. Your bike, like your parachute, will usually work, even when stricken with all sorts of maladies. But why take the added risk?

Most bike parts suffer only slight stress while working. The wheels are the Achilles heel. Too many jolts and the wheels lose their "true" and cease to be perfectly round. Incorrectly inflated or worn tires go quickly flat. Slowly accumulated neglect of wheels and tires, the most common rider error, eventually adds up. The penalty may seem abrupt and, as with the badly packed parachute, can prove disastrous. That disaster is 99% preventable.

So take a rag to the wheels after each ride. Conduct a quick tire and spoke check, especially if you know something sketchy happened on the ride. Spin them, and if they appear even slightly warped, be wise enough not to ride again until your friendly neighborhood bike shop makes things right again. For the self-reliant, truing your own wheels is not hard. Buy a book and a $5 tool. You can reduce the damage to your wheels by sitting lighter on the bike and watching where you’re going.

Over time, parts work loose and cables stretch. That’s why good bike shops offer a free checkup on the new machines they sell. Most do it more than once, so take advantage. This is one of the last free services left in America and bike shops are famous for it. Selling bikes is a lifestyle business and is too much work to attract many chiselers. Sure, shop owners like money, but after years of trying they still can’t figure out how to charge for a world of expertise and 20 seconds work, especially on a busy summer’s day. Better to earn your trust and sell you a new machine down the road.

Short of impact, nothing fails on a bike without neglect. In our advantaged society, most sporting goods are tossed out long before their useful lives are over. Yard sales are littered with perfectly good exercise machines and neglected golf clubs, skates, knee pads and helmets. In other countries bikes can last a lifetime, but not here. Our bikes, like so many other recreational aids, mysteriously grow old before their time.

Other than properly inflating tires, lubricating the drive chain is your only routine maintenance. Road bikes are easily kept up because they ride on relatively clean surfaces. Sand and mud are not issues as they are with off-road vehicles where the maintenance is continuous.

In dry weather clean that chain every 300 miles or monthly. Just lean the bike against something secure and rotate the pedals slowly backwards, passing the chain a few times through the rag. Then make another slow backward pass while drizzling a paraffin-based lubricant like White Lightening on each link. Dry lubrication is a quiet technological breakthrough and a blessing when transporting the machine.

That's it. For everything else, visit your friendly bike shop. Repairs there are downright cheap compared to any other mechanic’s services. Very nice people populate most shops and they can make almost any bike work. That is why, in almost every other large country, bikes are the chief means of transportation.

Here, sadly, we often fix bikes just enough to get them moving. Such low standards would never fly in the ski industry, for example, where safety standards are much higher, Ski shops are not allowed to sell or work on downhill bindings, even in perfect condition, once they have passed a specified age. Poverty is not a factor on the ski slopes of America as it is on the road.

So cultivate a good relationship with your local bike shop. Most don’t care where you bought the bike. No need to lie. Your bike will whisper its own story to any trained mechanic. Defective equipment is almost as uncommon here as it is on a 747. So don't confuse things with fabricated stories. Tell the mechanic the unvarnished truth as you would your own doctor. If you never maintain the bike, say so. If you hit a pothole, admit it. Whatever you do, don’t get righteous or threatening. Bike shops and bars have a habit of banning dishonest customers. It is their right to do so. And if your bike guy is less than forthcoming with you, go find another.

Copyright (c) 2005 by David Balkin. All rights reserved.