Customer service - pha what a joke.

[Tumbleweed]

I still recall your post on the kid going missing' date=' thankfully that had a happy ending. [/quote']

 

yeah, luckily, despite eveything else, he's growing up to be a decent kid.

 

[dollar]

I second - Paul at Procycles in Benoni. By nervous of Ian - he can be grumpy - particularly when you ask him for a screw on cluster from 1975 

[Lotus]

A couple of people have suggested this, and it bears repeating:

Learn to service your own bike.

 

The best resource on the web is www.parktool.com where you'll find detailed information on repairing almost any bike or component. Seriously, it's much easier than you think, and you will wonder why you never did this before. Not only will you save a fortune on service bills, your bike will be safer and more reliable too. There is nothing quite as satisfying as a perfectly shifting groupset that you tuned yourself (especially as you hear your fellow riders mis-shifting and grinding chains going up Alpe d'Dainfern!).

 

You don't need much in the way of tools to do most tasks (and the Park Tool site will tell you what you need for each job), so there's not much investment needed. Pretty soon you will be able to set up brakes, change chains and clusters, re-cable and generally keep your bike running quietly and smoothly.

 

Every time you give it a wash (and you really should do it often and well, especially if it's carbon to check for cracks), you can give the indexing a quick (like 1 minute) once-over and you're good to go. In reality I find that the shifting doesn't seem to go out at all now, but at the slightest shift hesitation I fix that sucker as soon as I get home. The other bonuses are that (1) other faults can't creep up on you when your bike is in great shape, and (2) you don't have to put up with any BS at the LBS on the eve of the 94.7!

 

As far as component prices are concerned, they are still expensive this way BUT (1) a lot cheaper than they are on your service bill and (2) on a well-maintained bike they last a lot longer.

 

At this point the only job I can't tackle is wheel truing, but maybe one day..

 

 

 

[Gasping]

If you guys are sure about Procycles, then it is all good for me. I do like going there and Ian convinced my 13 year old son to buy a MTB to commute to High School next year instead of a trick bike. He already has one, so thank you to "surly" Ian for that.