Looking after your bike

It's important that your child’s bike is well maintained and adjusted, to ensure safe and efficient cycling. Bigfoot Youth CC coaches and helpers carry out a safety check at the beginning of each session, and if a bike is found to be unsafe your child may not be able to take part in the coaching session.

Where possible we will try to carry out minor adjustments to enable a child to take part in the session, but it is not fair on other riders if we spend coaching time carrying out bigger repairs.

We're always happy to provide practical advice on bike maintenance issues, and where necessary we can provide you with an information sheet detailing any repair work that is needed. This can then be used as a reference for home repair, or taken to a local bike shop and passed to the mechanic.

What to check for

The main faults we see on members’ bikes are:

• Tyres under-inflated

• Brakes poorly adjusted

• Saddles incorrectly positioned

• Poorly adjusted derailleur gears

• Loose nuts and bolts

• Lack of lubrication (chain, gears, brake cables)

If you would like advice on any of these maintenance items please speak to one of the coaches on a Saturday.

Further help and advice

There is no shortage of good advice on line. YouTube is full of informative bike repair videos. Some other recommended on-line bike maintenance resources include:

www.parktool.com/blog/repair-help

Park Tool make high quality bike tools, and their website contains a lot of useful information on repairing your bike.

si.shimano.com/

Shimano service information site provides PDF service manuals for most Shimano components (gears, brakes, etc.).

www.sheldonbrown.com/

Everything you could ever want to know about bike maintenance!

We would also highly recommend the The Bike Book published by Haynes, widely available.