Too Tyred to Care

There are two ways to look at today’s story.

You could consider that I decided to check out the service of a local shop to do one of the most common repairs that they will see. Loads of people either don’t know how, or choose not to fix punctures and ship the bike off to the shop for the easiest of repairs. I set out to see how much this simple fix would cost, and how efficiently my local big-chain shop would do it. The answer was very efficiently. Taking a wheel and tyre in just an hour before they were to close they fitted a new tube and I was out of the shop well before they wanted to kick me out. At 7PM this is excellent as there was clearly a mechanic there to do it and to do it well. It was a tight tyre and rim combination and there seemed to be no bother with fitting the new tube.

The price, however, was surprising. At nearly £19 for the inner tube and the fitting this seems incredible for just a few minutes work. It was a real lesson in how important it is to do this type of thing yourself to make cycling a cost-effective way to get around. I guess in one way this is how bike shops make their money, and I sort-of support it, but as a cyclist it just makes it clearer that knowing how to do basic fixes will save you time and money and a dirty feeling as you ride on the bike next knowing you didn’t fix it yourself.

Of course, I said there was another way to look at it. It may, of course, be that rather than a brilliant mystery-shopper type investigation, this happened because I gave up and got fully frustrated with refitting a very tight tyre without pinching yet another tube, and that £19 might have been cheap if I’d otherwise had to buy a whole load of new tubes. I’ve talked about the trouble I’ve had with these tyres before but this time it was just too much and I gave in. I hate myself a little for this, but at least I have the bike to ride to work today.

A