wrenching at the tour de franklin

One of the earliest charity rides of the season each year is the Franklin Township Food Bank Tour de Franklin. They offer distance rides 62 & 50 miles) for those who want them, but also family-friendly short rides, out of the Franklin High School and along the canal at Blackwells Mills.

I used to lead a team of Freewheelers on these rides, but the past three or four years I've manned a tune-up and repair station. I don't charge anything except parts (at cost, and I don't always get that), and I work on any bike that shows up, which means, for example, that I worked on carbon fiber bikes and carbon fiber wheels at one point today; at another point I was doing the adjustments on bikes bought at WalMart that weren't done by the store.

Oh, yeah. Since I'm planning to post this to Facebook, the first picture has to be attention-grabbing. This one's pretty good:

It's a team that came back in the drizzle at the end of my shift, at about 11:30 am. But I digress.

It's my contention that any mechanic can work on modern, high-end bikes where the standards are well-known (and reasonably well adhered-to); it takes a wise hand to work on those old beater toy bikes on which nothing was designed to work together and parts may no longer be available. So I am just inordinately proud of the fact , for example, that I was able to get six out of one guy's seven-gear cluster to respond to the shifterl when he came in, he could use three gears.

The riders who really know what they're doing rarely drop in except to borrow the pump (I keep two pumps going pretty much all day). My first customer had just bought this, and I adjusted his brakes and shifting and lubed up his (badlky rusted) chain:

The carbon bike belonging to the fellow below had few problems, but he wanted just to make sure stuff was working right. It mostly was.

I didn't get a picture because my hands were a mess afterwards, but one guy brought in his bike with tubeless tires. He'd heard a hiss in the car, and it turned out the tire had lost the bead of the wheel. I didn't have the specialty pump that seats the tire back in the bead again, so I put a tube into the slime-dripping wheel, bade him farewell, and went to the lavatory to wash my hands. Remind me that tubeless isn't an infallible technology if I ever start gettning cranky about tubes, OK?

I don't stay for lunch, but the rider feed is pretty good:

Yeah, bagels, but the careful eye will also be able to pick out hard-boiled eggs and orange quarters. The food team is below.

The weather was predicted to be just awful (worse than ti actually turned out), and the area around the entrance bore witness; there were many fewer bikes than previous years.

(The niftiest-lookin' ol' geezer was riding that Kestrel, above.)

I'm not volunteering at the Bike Exchange any more, so I decided to put up my own sign for Mad Horse Bikes, which will be the name of the bike business that I'll probably never have.

I doubt you can read it on the left sign, but the motto is, "A man in a passion rides a Mad Horse". I stole it from Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac from 1749. I'm presuming the motto is in the public domain by now. (The graphic is from a Creative Commons site; they say I can do with it what I want. So there.)

It's a lot of time on my feet, and I'm tired. But it's the right thing to do, and I get to play with some very nice bikes, and meet some very nice people whom I otherwise would not.Do you know any charities that want to hire a bike mechanic?