At home I have a big pile of bike maintenance books. I’ve got links to resources such as Sheldon Brown, bookmarks to YouTube videos and eBooks.
Whilst I’ve never been very good at anything technical, I always wanted to be good at bike maintenance.
I could picture having a bike that runs perfectly, with no squeaks. I could picture my family and neighbours coming round and helping them with their repairs.
However, every time I’d try, I’d end up getting frustrated.
The bike maintenance guides never explained things clearly.
They never seemed to have all the information I needed in one place.
They’d miss out on crucial little details.
I’d take my bike to the local bike shop and they’d say “These brakes are on back to front, they have directional indicators”
What? Why on earth wouldn’t the author include that little detail!
I felt silly, like this is something I should just know but I didn’t. Maybe it was just me?
Eventually, it put me off maintaining my bike. As I didn’t have money for the bike shop, it fell in to disrepair.
Around about that time, the first iPhone appeared. I thought – wow, this would be the perfect little device to have a bike maintenance guide on.
Bike Doctor was created with one important difference to anything else out there: Even a complete beginner could follow the repairs inside the app.
How did I know that?
Because I was a complete beginner.
When I created Bike Doctor I knew only the basics to bike maintenance. Using all the maintenance books, videos and resources I’d collected, I would attempt repairs. Inevitably, things would go wrong and then I’d look up where I went wrong. Afterwards, I’d include those extra details inside the instructions, as if I went wrong there, someone else might too.
Instead of writing the guide as a pro bike mechanic who’s been doing this for years, I created it as a beginner.
Over time and after many revisions, this created a really easy to follow set of instructions.
Every guide I created, I ran by a local bike shop owner, who’d check through the instructions.
When we first launched, I got this feedback:
I read somewhere about truing wheels and it said don’t bother unless you are a pro, but I’ve just sorted my wheels out a treat. The app paid for itself straight away!
5,431 downloads later and after being featured by Apple, we created an Android version of the app.
We kept adding repairs and now, 14,233 downloads later, we’ve launched our iPad edition!
To get a copy of the app just seek it out in the app store or follow one of the links below:
Tour of the app
To find the relevant repair you can either use our bike view or you can select from one of the categories.
You flip through the guides until you find one that interests you.
Then you follow the step by step instructions to complete the repair.
