How we write repairs for Bike Doctor

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Have you ever had this experience?

You pickup a bike maintenance manual and have a flick through. It feels good right? All that knowledge, on your fingertips. You promise yourself that this is it. You’re going to be good at bike maintenance, you’re going to crush bike maintenance, your neighbours will be coming round with their bikes and you’ll be able to fix them in minutes and they’ll stand their in awe of your superior skills.

One day, your brakes are sounding funny. You eagerly flip open the bike maintenance manual. The adventure begins.

First of all you have to locate the relevant repair for your type of brakes. The book isn’t always very well organised, so it takes you a while. Then, you flick back and forward as there are a few sections that are relevant, you can’t just instantly get started.

The illustrations are lacking in places and not particularly clear, but you battle through the first few steps and you get your brake pads off.

Then, it’s time to put in the new ones. The manual left out the detail that some brakes have direction indicators. You wonder why you are expected to just know that, and the author didn’t just add it in. It would only be an extra sentence and it would have saved you a lot of trouble.

As the new pads go in you wonder about the order of all the spacers. You flick back through the book but there isn’t any detail about this. You hazard a guess, fiddle around for a bit and get it working.

You pull the brakes and they’re squealing. Looking at the repair you don’t find any reference of this. What the?

Eventually, you turn a few pages back and see that there’s a section about squealing brakes. You make the adjustment to your bike.

A 5 minute job, has turned in to a 20 minute job thanks to the time it takes to find the relevant information, bad illustrations and the important bits that have been left out.

This is an experienced shared by more people than you would think. The end results is frustration. People end up giving up before they can discover the joys of bike maintenance.

Here at Bike Doctor we do things differently

We believe that bike maintenance is simple and anyone can do it, as long as they are given well designed instructions.

Here’s a typical experience of using Bike Doctor:

You find a problem with your bike, whether you are out cycling or at home, you can access Bike Doctor. You quickly find the relevant repair using our Bike Map or by searching for the problem.

The introduction gives you a great background as to when you need to do this repair and what the benefit is of completing it.

You can see a clear list of the items you’ll need to complete this repair.

All the information you’ll need is in one place.

You flick through and follow the detailed instructions that don’t miss out any critical information.

The pictures for each step mean it’s easy to see what you should be doing.

5 minutes later, you’ve replaced your brake pads and learnt a load of new things about your bike. There’s a big smile on your face.

We put a lot of thought in to our repairs, so you don’t have to

With easy to follow repairs you:

  • Don’t get frustrated and give up
  • You save money in bike shop fees
  • You spend more time on your bike as you are not waiting for it to be repaired
  • You learn more about your bike which makes you fall even more in love with cycling
  • You can help others with any bike maintenance problems they’re having

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