Springtime is upon us! Maybe not so much in terms of beautiful sunny days and dry trails but definitely in terms the volume of bikes going through our workshop! As well as our regular flow of repairs and renovations of donated bikes, the yearly giant spring influx of bikes to repair has well and truly begun. From the ‘I’m getting fit for summer and to accomplish this I urgently need to start riding the bicycle I’ve been neglecting in my damp shed since it’s third ride during the first lockdown’ to plenty of ‘The weather says it’s not going to be raining to the point that I need to bring a packraft on a ride tomorrow but I need my brakes bleeding, and a new chain, and maybe a full set of frame bearings, can you fit me in?
Oh yes, there’s been plenty of those to keep us busy, but keeping us even busier than that is our local troupe of 14-15 year old mountain bike street urchins. You know the types, perhaps you even were one, god knows I certainly was.
Back when those school holiday days were seemingly almost endless and when the sun did eventually retreat behind the horizon there was always a friend or two to carry on the fun with, sleeping over at each others’ houses, planning the next day’s adventures and watching our old (new then!) Sprung, Mud Cows and Dirt videos on repeat until the tapes wore out.
Not a problem that our little squad of bicycle vagabonds have to deal with in this age of endless new content, forever saved to the digital cloud in glorious high definition.
The method of media consumption may have changed but the net effect is still the same. Every day the kids come in excitedly chatting about the latest thing Sam Pilgrim has bolted two wheels to and sent himself flying through the woods on and how much it’s hyped them up for going doing something daft on their own bikes.
And so we come to their bikes. Again compared to the bikes we all grew up with these kids sure have got it sweet. They have a selection of rad little mid travel trail bikes that they keep in various different levels of trailworthiness.
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At the top end of the bike maintenance scale we’ve got Charlie and his Boardman. Charlie cleans his bike fastidiously after every ride. It’s always spotless when they all meet up at the shop in a morning, then totally caked when they return after a few hours in the woods, only to turn up gleaming like a brand new bike again the next day!
Then we’ve got Roddy and his 2014 Specialized Stumpjumper Evo. Roddy’s bike is never really clean, although he promises us it will be from now on after its giant rebuild! We’ll see…
Roddy bought his Specialized just before Christmas on Facebook Marketplace and brought it in to us mid-ride one day when just about every bearing in his swingarm had collapsed. We did him a frame bearing replacement for just the cost of the bearings as he’d already blown his savings on the bike and I was feeling extra festive and charitable in the run up to Christmas. There was a litany of other problems with Roddy’s Spesh, not least the snapped shifter mount that had resulted in him just zip tying the shifter to the bar. I did what I could to make him a bit of a better solution with an old SRAM lever clamp and a few washers and tidied up the rest of his bike as well as possible on zero budget and sent him on his way with a list of further work needed.
It was this job that endeared the urchins to us, they’d been in before plenty of times but had always been a little reserved. I always used to find bike shop staff super intimidating when I was a little grom. These ‘cool’ guys that knew everything about bikes but most definitely didn’t want to be spending their time talking to an excitable kid asking constant questions. This is not the way I want things to be at Happy Days, we’re here to spread the knowledge and to feed the next generation of riders with a love for cycling in all its many forms! I hope no one ever feels that intimidation coming into our shop, our whole reason for being is to make cycling easier to understand and more accessible to every single person who comes through our door.
Since that initial fix on Roddy’s bike at Christmas the collective of groms hanging around the shop has grown weekly, reaching critical mass during the Easter holiday where we had between two and seven kids hanging around the shop at several regular daily intervals. I wish I’d kept a full list of jobs we’ve done for these kids since the start of the holiday but since they’ve all been ‘er, I just broke this can you fix it right now for me so I can carry on riding?!’ type jobs no such list exists but let’s see what I can remember.
At least six separate brake bleeds, one because an unknown urchin was pulling on a brake lever of a bike in the workstand with no brake pads fitted and pushed a piston out. Three urchins were stood around the bike but no one knows who pulled that lever!
- 2 crank replacements
- 2 BB replacements
- 1 replacement pair of wheels
- 1 fork service
- 1 set of bottomless tokens fitted
- 1 rear shock replacement. Replaced a busted RockShox Monarch with an old Fox Coil from old MK1 Orange Patriot Lt that’s over a decade older than the kid riding it! Longer stroke than his original means he gets a travel boost too!
- 3 chains
- 2 single ring conversions
- 1 full drivetrain replacement
- 1 headset replacement
- Half a dozen spokes across a few different wheels
- A few tyres and cables and stuff too…
Not bad for two weeks’ riding!
Thankfully a good 50% of this stuff came from donated items, my basement full of old bike bits, or bits that I’ve harvested from other repairs meaning that we’re able to cut the kids some mega discounts/give them plenty of freebies to keep them going. Which I know they appreciate but I often think their parents appreciate even more.
We’ve developed a good rapport with most all of the urchins’ parents now and they understand that our main goal is to keep their kids riding for as little cost to them as possible. The young un’s often don’t want to tell their parents when something breaks on their bikes and would try and make do with whatever bodges they could muster to stay rolling until whatever’s broken gives up completely and they have to finally come clean. Now they bring it to the shop and if it’s something that I absolutely can’t fix for free then they get me to call their parents to explain what’s needed. This method obviously works well for them as we ended up doing a full strip and rebuild on Roddy’s bike after a good chat with his dad! And far from being angry that his bike was broken again and costing him a load of money his dad was totally stoked that Roddy and his mates are enjoying riding their bikes so much and not sitting inside glued to computer screens!
Even on the wettest day of their holidays when all the other urchins had decided that a couch and a PS5 beat a day on the bikes getting saturated, Charlie and Roddy braved the elements and rocked up at the shop on their way to the woods. However I’d had an idea to not only give them a super fun day riding but also to give Roddy’s freshly rebuilt whip another day or so of grace before it gets caked in the finest grit and slop the Calder Valley has to offer.
The boys had been talking about how fun my customised 16″ wheeled kids bike that I have hanging in the workshop looked and kept mentioning how much they wanted some little bikes of their own. Well outside the shop on our £20.00 rack we had two old shopping bikes, a Raleigh and a Triumph. These bikes have been in and out of this shop on the £20.00 rack for months now with zero interest, they were both heavily rusted and worn. Totally inappropriate but somehow also totally perfect for a day of daftness and laughter, sliding around in the woods!
We inflated the tyres on each bike and after a quick (and seemingly pointless) bolt check sent them on their way into the increasingly heavy rain then we sat back in our nice dry shop and got on with sorting some bikes out for our proper paying customers. Peace at last!
A few hours later we were greeted by the soggiest, grinniest little street urchins you can imagine!
We kitted them out with some dry clothes from our clothing donations (thanks Rhys and Amanda!) and prepared to hear about their days exploits. Practically yelling and talking over each other so nothing could be understood from anyone. They left soggy sock prints all over the shop as they bounced around with excitement, both eager to recount their shared stories of ‘insane drifts!’ and how many times they fell off, or their brakes had stopped working completely. Saddles and handlebars had rattled loose, and more that I can’t remember from all the excitement.
Either way they’d had an awesome time and made some proper memories so I was super stoked, they were even more excited when I posted the few videos that they sent without any foul language (kids these days!) on the shop’s social media and I think they were set to explode when I told them I’d be writing this about them!
So I have big plans for our little squad of groms and any other budding riders in Calderdale that need a bit of help to keep rolling. Some kind of team of some sort, not a team based on skill but more enthusiasm for bikes and riding, not a race team (but fully supportive of any members who do want to race!) more of a team of cycling evangelists, spreading the good word of bikes wherever they go.
A plan is forming. Watch this space…
