Been having a few problems with my bike recently. The front wheel always goes flat too quickly despite having changed inner tube a few times, the chain skips over the gear rings occasionally and the brake pads drag slightly on the wheels in motion. Need to decide whether it's worth paying to have it fixed or just get a new bike. It only cost me ~£100 second hand a year and a half ago but I really liked it, it has such a light frame. Yet it seems like I could easily end up spending almost that much fixing everything.
If I were to get a new bike I'd probably want a road bike, seeing as short city commutes are my main use at the moment. I'd definitely rather have some gears though as opposed to anything singlespeed/fixie. Can anyone recommend some reasonably solid bikes for this purpose? I don't want to spend loads but I want something reliable.
The problems you describe are all eminently fixable by a competent mechanic, more than likely without the need for any replacement parts. Dragging brakes and misaligned gears can be sorted with just a few tweaks of an allen key, if you can find a bike shop you trust or can be arsed reading a guide on how to do it yourself.
As to a new bike, there are hundreds of decent bikes on the market and a lot of variables to consider, the most important being how much you want to spend. You won't get a decent road bike for less than £300 these days, and you get a meaningfully better bike up to the £600-800 point. If you give me an idea of your budget and what priority you place on speed vs comfort then I'll have a much better idea of what to suggest.
After a puncture, my front tyre kept going flat. I kept searching for whatever sharp thing there was left in the tyre that was puncturing tubes. Turns out, you need to tighten the valve core into the metal housing. Who knew? I do now...
If you're even remotely competent, I'd suggest getting a bike toolkit off ebay, and fixing it yourself. Doing that made me love my bike again, and be much less worried. However, as '36 said, a local bike shop will have it running fine again, for an insultingly small amount of money.
>>2835 Worst case your wheels need truing, but if you have rim brakes you just need to adjust your calipers a bit; if you have the matching allen key, it only takes about 20 minutes if you've never done it before. The gears can probably be fixed by "reindexing" your rear derailleur (I assume that your front one is friction shift). Again, this is an allen key job though having somewhere to suspend your bike (as opposed to just flipping it over) helps. Buying a new bike just because routine maintenance parts like what you mentioned are causing problems is throwing money at the wrong solution.
>>2836 Cheers lad, took it to a bike shop the other day. Apparently the chain was fucked (not rusty guess it was just worn) so I got a new one put on. The gears themselves are a bit worn and he warned me the new chain could still skip because of that but it seems fine in all but the very smallest gear at the back. Had the brakes adjusted and a new inner tube put in, apparently the wheels were a bit wonky and one was slightly buckled so he righted them up a bit somehow. Not particularly cheap but it rides like it did a year and a bit ago which is great. The tyres are absolutely rock hard now, maybe before I just wasn't pumping them enough?
>>2837 >tighten the valve core into the metal housing
Some valves I've seen have a nut that screws on outside the wheel rim, is that what you mean? Generally the cheaper schrader tubes don't have this though.
Both presta and schrader valves should be supported on the rim with a nut. Presta valves have a threaded core that needs to be unscrewed before pumping and then tightened, rather than the sprung pin on a schrader valve.
Tyres generally need to be pumped harder than you might expect. If the tyre noticeably sags under your weight, it's too soft. The harder the tyre the more efficiently it will roll, so you want the tyre to be as firm as possible without the ride quality being impaired.
Thats probably true. If you can afford either a pressure gauge or a decent pump with one in (I recommend the Topeak Joe Blow, the yellow one - thirty quid in Evans or Wiggle), then you'll be set. It's very hard to judge otherwise.
>>2844 Nope. 'C' had flats on it, and needed to be screwed in a bit with pliers. Since doing that, tyres stay up for ages, rather than 2 days.
The eventual clue was when C came out when I unscrewed B.
>>2847 I completely agree, a track pump is always a good investment (mine's a Lifeline jobbie which cost a touch under £20) but as long as you don't go for the cheapest tosh you can find they all work OK. For any complete newbie: on the tyre wall, it'll give you a pressure range the tyre supports; if you're riding on the road or anything other than sand, you want to be pretty close to the maximum pressure. Off-road biking has it's own rules, but let's not get into that.
>>2843 > apparently the wheels were a bit wonky and one was slightly buckled so he righted them up a bit somehow
It's the "truing" I mentioned above. Unless it was actually damaged, it means adjusting the tension on individual spokes to straighten the rim. Skip this if you know what spokes do. The spokes are under tension pulling the rim this way and that. The spokes have a butted end on the axle side and a threaded end on the rim side. Spoke lugs (you can see them poking out of the rim) screw onto the threaded end and anchor them to the rim. Those lugs can be tightened or loosened to adjust the tension and since the spokes attach left and right of the rim centre at the axle end that tension ends up pulling the rim in their respective direction (the rim is quite flexible, so with the tension it is by no means "straight" by default). Re-truing a wheel is tedious work, but oddly satisfying. The wheel is strapped into a truing stand which has very precise callipers and once minimum tension is achieved those callipers are used to make sure the wheel runs perfectly even. Spoke tension should be as even as possible and thankfully spoke production is quite a precise science theses days so counting the turns done on a lug is enough to compare actual tension. You can do this at home, but unless you enjoy tedious mind numbing work (I do) don't.
