Yesterday I had two inquisitive young men, a mountain goat of a hill-riding teenager, and an encouraging dad cyclist come into the shop in search of possible components for single-speed bike building school projects. This, of course, warms my gearhead heart. Start them while they are young, and they can ride and service their bikes with confidence the rest of their lives. If you are planning to help young people put together their bikes this winter, here are a few tips:
- Your generous donations of bits and bobs to the bike builds may need to be augmented by a few well chosen components. Kids generally need much shorter cranks and much narrower handle bars than adults. Smaller wheel sizes can make a world of difference in handling as can smaller frames. Also, kids have smaller hands, so make sure they can actually grab and use the brake levers.
- The UCI has different maximum gear ratios for those Under 12 (52T x 18T max) to professional adult bike racers. This is so the kids don't blow out joints during youthful hammerfests.
- Chain line, chain tension, and rear wheel spacing and alignment in single-speed and fixed gear frames are not negotiable. They are big safety and performance considerations. Read, read, read. Then ask a bike mechanic to show you if you have any doubts.
Photo by Erik Silverson
- Give kids a fast Internet connection, a dollar store calculator, a metric ruler, and watch them go to work. Park Tools and Sheldon Brown have great information on their websites. Thorough and accurate is better than fast and sloppy.
- Kids, let your parents have a minute to think. You figure out the appropriate crank length you need based on your own inseams measurements and how wide your handle bars should be. This is why you take math class, so you can manipulate professional atheletes' statistics, work on your bikes. Read all of the instructions on the web outloud to your friends; take some notes, and explain clearly to someone else what it is you are doing and why. Listening to Vinnie's cousin Jimmy, who once worked with a girl, who worked in a pizza parlor next to a bike shop, is not research.
- The bikes have to be safe. So, have the bikes safety checked and adjusted by a certified bicycle mechanic before you let a young one race around on their first major bike project. Trial and error is a great way to learn. But you can get going pretty fast on a hoopdee bike and end up in a heap. Broken bones do not foster a love of cycling. If you get the bike adjusted professionally the first time, ride it, and take it apart to clean it, when you put it back together you will know how it is supposed to feel. If you assemble it incorrectly and don't have it checked, you may continue to do the same incorrect thing everytime you reassemble your bike after overhauls, since it will be all you know to do. (If you learned from your mother who learned from her mother, that is all well and good if your grandma was a kick-butt bike mechanic. If grandma was an eye surgeon who worked on her one road bike, once a year, your very smart family may have been passing along incorrect bike repair information for three generations.)
- Remember, kids, your local bike mechanic is on the clock earning a living by servicing and repairing many bikes each day for customers who were in line ahead of you. And this job is not going to get any easier or get done any faster without coffee. So, if you are going to hang out in the shop asking a million questions, make sure to bring at least two of the four food groups from the nutrition pyramid you learned about in health class, coffee and cookies.
