Anyone done a Cytech Home Mechanic course?

Has anyone done the Cytech Home Mechanic 2 day course? Is it any good? lots of glowing testimonials on their website don’t really convince me it’s worth paying £299 for. Mate fancies doing it and wants to rope me in and must admit although I’m not as inept as him, I’m not that capable a mechanic either.

2 day mechanic course? It took me 4 years to get some proper bits of paper. Sounds like a right rip off.

£299 for 2 days? Does seem a tad steep 🤨
And by a tad I mean rip-off.

What will you get in 2 days really? It’ll either be lots of stuff with no depth or detail, or a few things in more depth.

No way they’ll take you through anything advanced in that time. Forget wheel building or brake bleeding, etc. Most other jobs on a bike are just common sense.

In fact everything on a bike (maybe bar suspension servicing) is down to common sense and practice….and having the right tools.

You’d be far, far better spending the £299 on decent tools!

I’ve just done the taster for the Theory Course online and got 100% without reading any of the instruction. This isn’t a reflection of my mechanical genius.
I’d recommend getting stuck in yourself and looking at the Park Tool instructional videos if you get stuck. Fixing/building bikes isn’t hard, it just requires a bit of patience/common sense when you start out.

The problem with these courses is they sometimes give you a new bike or a bike that’s been recently put together and not used. It’s nice and shiny.

In reality, the bike you get will have not been touched for years, used in all conditions and be muddy and oily and maybe wonky.

The bolts are seized or rounded off etc.

I agree with @ajantom. Buy some quality tools and watch some YouTube videos or get a Saturday job in your lbs.

I did the cytech 2 , 2 week course for just under 1k in Manchester.

That was worthwhile, however £299 for a couple of days I’m not so sure

I’d skip that tbh – either do a proper course for a few weeks as mentioned above, or buy a load of tools and watch some google videos on specific jobs / office videos / park tools guides.

I’d probably buy:

Decent bike stand
Brake bleed kit
Wera Allen set (coloured ones)
Wera Torx set (coloured ones)
Wheel truing stand
Torque Wrench
Headset press
BB press
Miscellaneous bits and bobs that fit your bikes

Oops I thought you meant car mechanic. Why don’t you just use YouTube to get the knowledge?

youtube and the park tools videos along with a decent set of allen keys, cable cutters, chain tool and chain whip will see you right

In fact everything on a bike (maybe bar suspension servicing) is down to common sense and practice….and having the right tools.

Are you new here?  Half the folk on this forum can’t even set up a front mech.

Are you new here? Half the folk on this forum can’t even set up a front mech

No, but I forget how inept some people are sometimes 😆

Are you new here? Half the folk on this forum can’t even set up a front mech.

A healthy majority of the forum members wouldn’t want a front mech (on an mtb anyway)…..

Having taught bike mechanics there are a lot of people out there who want to learn but know zero about bikes. I am not talking ‘basics’ like fixing punctures, I am talking about knowing how to first remove a wheel, how to operate a quick release lever and the like. Actually learning this and then moving on to fixing a puncture is a major breakthrough as it means they can then go out without fear of being stranded or relying on someone to pick them up. So for them there is a great deal to be learned in a couple of days – the sort of things some of us take for absolute granted and have accumulated over a lifetime of cycling. Tyre sizes, wheel sizes, different types of brakes, how they work, hub vs derailleur blah blah blah…it’s an endless list

So £299 might be good value for them. For the more competent then specific course like wheel building are undoubtedly better. I would also second the youtube/park tools tutorials plus good quality tools.

If you and your mate chip in I’ll come to your house for 2 days and teach you absolutely everything you need to know. Let’s call it £500.

When i worked in the bike shop as a mech i started to offer a free one sunday afternoon per month for all new (inexperienced) bike owners to come in and spend a few hours going over the basics such as QR’s, wheel removal/puncture repair/tyre replacement, basic brake set-up/replace etc…etc and how to adjust all the contact points in a safe and secure way to ensure optimal comfort – proved very popular and after the first few sessions we saw a reasonable increase in bike sales and footfall through the shop (due to word of mouth) which more than made up for the organisation of such a session. I would much rather folk learned to do the basics for free, and remove basic mech sales/repair from us so we could focus on more involved repairs/upgrades.

I helped my friend at the lbs run some beginner courses. One was for a woman only club. They were sick of asking their husbands all the time, some of which didn’t know what they were doing but because they are men attempted anyway.

We taught them about punctures, tyre tread direction, putting the bike in the bottom gear first etc, basic gear tunes, safety checks. Like @vader says, they just wanted the confidence to be able to get home rather than having to phone someone to be rescued.

I think some of them would be lost on a two day course!

If you want a qualification, then it’ll be the first part i guess, but if it’s to learn the basics, as others say, spend 300 quid on tools and watch youtube, if you struggle then join a local club/group/etc, get out and about and ask for help in learning, always a few folk who know bikes well that are happy to help out, share tools, etc.

I tend to do everything, bar full suspension services myself, that’s down to cost though, tools are pretty expensive things if you want the whole lot, but you can get some decent starter kits for 100 quid and then build on that, again for 300 quid you can get a good amount of bike specific tools to do the jobs.

😂

A healthy majority of the forum members wouldn’t want a front mech (on an mtb anyway)

That’s because they can’t set them up properly…

Are you new here? Half the folk on this forum can’t even set up a front mech.

Doesn’t this reinforce the point of doing a course?