tube-changing school

I wish they were lookin' at me with such rapt attention, but they were listening to Princeton Freewheeler Club President talk about the Trenton Bike Exchange. From left: Dmitri, Joe, Rick, and Melissa. Those red bars in the lower right are the current robes that my bike, the Yellow Maserati, is wearing

I'm running a pair of bike-maintenance classes at the Trenton Bike Exchange for the club. The first session was on changing your tube, and I found this was a more complicated task than I'd thought when I first tried to teach The Excellent Wife (TEW) how to do it. Those of us who've been riding for a while probalby minimize the difficulty, but it turns out that there are a number of steps just to getting a wheel off (and more for the rear than the front); even how to put the bike down engenders some discussion. Doing it at the exchange means that we can use stands and each person can have a bike to work on, which is much better than the "sit around and discuss" model that's prevalent in these classes (it's better, of course, if you bring your own bike, as Rick did, but I know that's not always possible). By the end, they'd all used tire levers and pumps, we'd killed a couple of CO2 cartridges just for the experience, and we did some quick talk about chains and cassettes.

There will be another on May 21; this time about brakes and shifters. Class is already subscribed, but half of the subscribers didn't appear. Next time, I'm gonna push for part-payment up front.

Ira and I talked about doing something like this at one of the all-paces rides. I thought that, if the weather were nice, we could do it instead of the ride (or maybe under the shelter at one of the picnics); Ira thought a short one after might work better (but we went almost 2 hours last night). What do you think?