If your are a DIY shop.  let them bring in their bike. A derailleur is a derailleur, a brake is a brake, Cable routing may be a little funky on internal routed bikes. It took me two hours to install my first internal down tube cable. Now I can do it in less than a minute. Some splitter brake or split derailleur cables may need a professional. But the adjustments are all the same for a Huffy to a Pegoretti. Let them come in and learn how to adjust their bike.
 
I had a $6,000+ bike and I had a novice mechanic who had taken my wheel building class. He had been truing wheels for a few months after the class. I asked him if he wanted to work on a $3,200 wheel set, He said NO!!! are you kidding. I said no I was not kiddiing, get your butt over there and true the wheels. He needed to stop being afraid of things because of their value, he needed to see things for what they are; they are only bike parts! and he is a trained mechanic. He had a grin on his face after he trued them. He smilles and said that was easy.
 
For you all, they are only bikes, and the owner is only a cyclist wanting to learn how to work on their bike. TEACH THEM!
 
Christopher Wallace
Holistic Cycles
Oak Park IL  (Chicago)


-----Original Message-----
From: Brian <brian@slobikekitchen.org>
To: Thethinktank@bikecollectives.org
Sent: Thu, May 27, 2010 4:10 pm
Subject: [TheThinkTank] Working on expensive bikes in your shop.

Hi again.  Thanks for the replies to the previous thread, hopefully people found the responses useful.  Selling expensive bikes wasn't my question though, perhaps I left my question too open ended.

Retry:

If a customer walks into your shop with a $5k carbon fiber road bike and wants help doing xxx.  Do you have any shop guidelines on what is "too risky" in terms of possible damage to the bike?  Perhaps it depends if there is a professional mechanic in the shop at the time, etc...   Perhaps you don't care what people do and it's all covered under "we are not responsible"?

We've debated it among ourselves at SLO Bike Kitchen.  Part of our thought is that it's their bike, we are just there to help.  The opposite argument is that they expect us to know everything, and it's sometimes/usually hard to keep track of every step someone does, which may result in them doing something unfortunate while unsupervised.

In our case, we are 100% DYI w/us to help and we have no professional service side to the shop.  We are also 100% volunteer.

Thanks!
Brian
SLO Bike Kitchen
www.slobikekitchen.org
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