Horrendous mountain bike maintenance costs

A long time ago I used to be able to drop my bike off at a friendly mechanic whilst I was at work but it’s not a (cheap) option these days. If there’s something needing doing that I don’t feel confident in doing then my mechanic of choice is in the opposite direction to my commute 😥

On the other hand – I’ve never been inclined to do anything on cars beyond checking water/oil/cleaner levels and tyre pressures. We don’t even wash our car, the only time it gets a wash is when it goes to the garage!

I’ve just read through this thread, blimey! 😯

When I first bought an FS bike, I was warned about the potential servicing costs (my mate forked out more to service his Spesh Enduro than I did on a full service on a V6 Alfa Romeo), so I decided that if I needed a bike shop to do a repair more than once then I’d buy a tool and learn to do the job myself. Obviously, there have been exceptions – rear shocks and pivot bearings – but pretty much everything else can be done at home.

I’ve even learned to build my own wheels, which has saved me a fortune over the years.

Looking back over the past two years, aside from whimsical upgrades my Stumpjumper has required the following maintenance:

1 x bottom bracket (Old BB drifted out with own Park BB tool, new BB installed by me. Total cost £70)
2 x Reverb bleeds (Kit bought online for £13, plus one litre of Shimano oil).
2 x set of Hope M4 pads. I went for the high end option with Nukeproof pads at £26 all in. Bosh.
2 x Purgatory Grid rear tyres. It’s very flinty round my way. £70
2 x pints of Stan’s – approx. £26
1 x Hope chainring – £35
2 x replacement gear cables and outers (£bobbins)
1 litre of DOT fluid scrounged from my local garage (a box of Jaffa cakes left on the passenger seat of my car during it’s annual service).

Although I upgraded to 11 speed XT a year ago, the cassette is good for another summer. I need to factor in the cost of a shock service (£95 at Mojo, I believe) and at some point in the next year I’ll probably opt for a bearing service.

If the OP’s local fixer-upper is any sort of official Specialized dealer, then I’m sure that Specialized UK would be very interested in this.

A Specialized FSR shouldn’t be ruinously expensive to run.

OP – You’re being fleeced bud.

If you have a dry garage or shed you can do the jobs in then for me that’s half the fun…..love having a go myself and learning how to do stuff on the bike. I only tend to pop to the LBS if i don’t have a specific tool.

It doesn’t take long to fit new cables, rotors and stuff like that.

your mechanic is taking you for a very expensive ride OP
thats way more than i would be inclined to spend on maintenance.
my old bike frame was bought 2 years ago…in that time the only maintenance costs its accrued are for replacement brake pads and a new bottom bracket. the headset was feeling gritty last summer…so i stripped it down, cleaned it and re-greased it and it was good as new…your guy would have suggested a new headset.
your best investment will be to get the tools needed to keep your bike running and then finding the time to do the work.
i can appreciate you dont have the time….i’m in a similar position.
due to my working hours i dont get a chance to go to any bike shops let alone my LBS during the week. most evenings are taken up by the wife and kids and household jobs etc.
the only time i get to go to the bike shop is on a saturday but even then its got to be planed around everything else.
i use the shop fr the major jobs that are beyond my skillset or of o need parts that only they have or if i need them quickly. i do most of my bike pruchases online as i’m not made of money either.
buy the right tools and learn how to do as many jobs on the bike yourself, get yourself booke donto a decent bike maintenance course.
you also need to make the time somehow to do the work yourself. i do most of my work on a friday night when the wife and kids are asleep.

as for where you’ve been done over…the discs didnt need replacing…isopropyl alcohol and some sandpaper would have sorted it. the forks if they weren’t right the first time then the mechanic should have sorted it out on the next visit FOC. i’m stuggling to work out how he never noticed the circlip missing on the second visit but no the first.
shimano transmission should last a lot longer than a few months
i’ve never had an issue with spoke nipples corroding that badly. my dh wheels have taken a right hammering over the last 13 years and they’ve never started to corrode like that.
the brakes should have gone straight back to shimano for a warranty job

OP, as others have said – your bike mechanic may be overcharging you. Ultimately, it depends on how you want to spend your spare time/money. Some people like tinkering, others don’t – but I think it would be worth your while picking up a few of the basics eg replacing tyres, brake pads, replacing chains, spotting problems, cleaning & lubing, checking for wear, and understanding what it takes to do the rest. Most of these are 15 minute jobs that don’t require expensive tools. Then at least you’ll be able calculate if you think the mechanic is worth it – and it will make a better decision. 20-30 mins proactive maintenance on your bike each week could save you a lot of time and money.

I was once caught out with a puncture with my Brompton – and the bike shop wanted £20. I figured I was happy to walk/fix it later for that amount. A few weeks previously, the same shop had charged £40 to replace tyre (including nice marathon tyre), fix a puncture and true a badly buckled wheel. I could have done the job myself – it felt like good value so I went for it. Two different experiences, two different decisions – but both based on being able to mentally work out the real value to me.

You might also be inordinately hard on bikes or simply have a lemon. I have both been hard on bikes in my early days (something seemed to break every ride for a time) and had the odd lemon.

Otherwise, I’ll echo the recommendation to cut your losses and get either a hardtail/fully rigid bike. You’ll still have a lot of fun – but nowhere near the running costs.

Unsure why you are complaining about prices…you’ve said yourself you’d rather pay someone else than do the work yourself…you’d save time and money by diying…money as you’d be doing the work instead of paying someone else; time as you’d do the job properly and have the bike with you rather than in a shop.
Those costs are terrible, some should be one-offs though.

….and using Rebound Suspension….as I found out to my cost, they (or I think it’s just the one guy, Jason) are a joke.

No surprises that work needed re-doing 🙁

My brother just spent £450 on a full service. which sounds insane but its front/ rear shocks, bearings, bushings and drivetrain. The drivetrain wasn’t RRP either. It’s also the first work (other than a BB i fitted) that’s been done in 9 years.

RE: corroding nipples aluminium nipples will corrode. Especially if left dirty. Or washed with corrosive fluids.

Don’t use washing up liquid, car shampoo is better. Muc off and similar need to be rinsed off well.

Sandblasting and mineral oil soakdowns by the sounds of it…

😆

I was expecting more jet wash at the garage, followed by storing it in a pond, followed by ever ride I do is a wet Dyfi Enduro*.

*Every time I’ve done it – bar one – it’s killed an external bottom bracket.

Muc off and similar need to be rinsed off well.

Muc Off and similar are degreasers, usually watered down. Usually. In other words they attack muck and grease, and paint and rubber if left to fester.

Time poor doesn’t mean you need to be taken for a ride. A quick Google would tell you Deore dics aren’t £50+. If you at least look at the bike occasionally you should have a rough idea of maintenance needed even if you don’t have time to carry it out (eg did the full drivetrain really need replacing or could the chain have been changed earlier/ bike be cleaned better/ etc). A very minor investment of a minute here and there could save all this hassle even if it still goes to the LBS for time consuming jobs

Deore dics aren’t £50+.

Including labour they could easily be.

£2.50 to undo and tighten a bolt? 🙂 Or, is the time (10 minutes?) it takes to unscrew and tighten 12 bolts worth £30 when the drive was probably more time consuming? Question for the OP I guess

Yep, by binning them and buying more. They’re priced to be replaced, not fixed.

Wow, replace your brakes, rather than bleed, or swap the hoses? I’m sure we all do that.

You’ve got me interested in my own expenditure OP.

I reckon it’s been about £550 last year for my BFe, but that’s including an XT groupset and a new fork damper, pretty typical year otherwise.

I know you said you don’t want to mess about fixing bikes, but bleeding a break probably takes about 20mins. Basic fork service is maybe 45 mins.

Find yourself a better mechanic or learn to fix stuff.

What gets me isn’t so much the cost (although that is extortionate!) it’s the frequency of it going back and forth! Sometimes every other day it’s back to your mechanic “mate” who diagnoses another problem, half fixes it, charges you and then invites you back within the week to get some more work done on it.

At this point I’d suggest taking a step back and a logical look at the bike. Take it to a reputable shop and get the entire thing stripped down to bare frame, cleaned and assessed. Sometimes with bikes it’s quite common that if one thing needs replacing, another 2 or 3 things can need doing as well especially if the bike uses weird “standards” or proprietary parts but the bike shouldn’t need to be going back once or twice a week for tweaks.

The issue with the forks for example – I had a set of SIDs serviced by TF Tuned (who had always been excellent) and, very uncharacteristally, they failed within 2 rides of being returned to me. So I phoned TF, explained it and they immediately offered a full repair, FOC to rectify the error (if indeed it was an error and not simply bad luck on my part). Superb service – they even paid postage. So I’d certainly never expect to get the forks serviced then have to pay extra for a missing circlip a couple of days later!

I had an S-Works Epic for about 6 years and it never needed that much spending on it in repairs in spite of it being raced regularly. It only needed one full bearing rebuild in that time.

But why were discs replaced in the first place? Contamination – that’s not a real reason is it?

DezB – Member

Wow, replace your brakes, rather than bleed, or swap the hoses? I’m sure we all do that.

If they’re needing bled regularily then they’re borked so with shimano, replacing is probably good economic sense. I’d replace parts in my formulas, because they’re awesome, but I wouldn’t necessarily bother with lower quality brakes these days.

molgrips – Member

But why were discs replaced in the first place? Contamination – that’s not a real reason is it?

The mileage here is enough to wear out a cheap disc legitimately (especially if it’s an entry level monkey metal disc, and double especially if someone’s put sintered pads on a rotor that doesn’t like sintered pads). Not to assume that they definitely did need replaced, but it’s possible.

OK, let’s just break this down:

1st July £52 new discs
7th July basic repairs £5
9th July new freehub body £30 + £25 fitting why was this not picked up during the “basic repairs” 2 days previously?
31st July £11 new brake pads why was this not done at the point the discs were replaced?
1st Aug £31 attempt by mechanic to fix contaminated brakes including new pads – surely this should have been part of the service the previous day??!
4th Aug £30 forks repairs
14th Aug £15 more forks repairs ciclip had come off – see my previous post, this should have been FOC work to fix a problem that occured only 10 days previously when the forks were “fixed”
14th Aug £15 brake bleed
19th Sep £4 new spokes
26th Sep £55 replacement headset bearings and wheel trueing & re-nippling some of the corroded spoke nipples – again, there is no way that the bike should be going back a mere 6 days after a spoke replacement / wheel true for more re-truing, that shoudl all have been picked up in one go.
26th Sep £15 new pads – AGAIN?! Do you ride with the brakes permanently on?
28th Sep £80 full fork service got sick of having constant fork problems despite several repairs done by the Hag Fold mechanic so went to someone else (Rebound Suspension in Horwich) and the problems still came back very soon later (and just had it fixed again by local mechanic for £52 a couple of weeks ago but tha’ts another story altogether).

14th Oct £220 replaced entire drive train and replace bottom bracket
17th Oct another basic £17 repair not recorded what it was – it needs a basic repair 3 days after having a full drivetrain replacement?!
17th Oct £36 new brake bleed kit & mineral oil, funnel – attempting to fix on-going brake problems myself
17th Oct 2x new brake calipers £50 plus new brake lever £20 in attempt to do repairs myself
3rd Nov 2x new tyres £40
Strangely no record of any repairs done for rest of November, December & January, IIRC I was just riding and putting up with the shit performance of the forks and brakes rather than throwing more money away trying to fix them.

The mileage here is enough to wear out a cheap disc legitimately

Really? I speculatively replaced 9 year old discs last year in the hope it might improve braking a bit. It might’ve done, slightly, hard to tell really.

£2.50 to undo and tighten a bolt? Or, is the time (10 minutes?) it takes to unscrew and tighten 12 bolts worth £30 when the drive was probably more time consuming? Question for the OP I guess

If he’s charging an hourly rate and being a jobsworth, once he’s into that hour…

That’s nuts. I think it’s a case of saw you coming, you obviously do have enough money to burn on the bike or you would have stopped by now.

I’m permanently superskint and in two years and 3000km of steep Scottish slop I don’t think I’ve spent much over £300 on my full susser, one linkage bearing change (the only thing I’ve paid the bike shop to do), one rear disc, couple of chains/rings and a cassette (all bought on the cheap in sales), fair few sets of superstar pads bought at discount, three second hand tyres from friends and ebay and a couple of wtb vigilantes when they were £15 on CRC, I think that’s it.

I find keeping drivetrain very clean makes a huge difference to lifespan and I almost never use muc off or anything, I think it kills bearings. Hope BB and headset last amazingly and worth the outlay in my experience.

I’m not surprised to hear about you breaking spoke nipples: Mrs. T. had a Specialized Camber – just after she got it, she was breaking spoke nipples (all 9 stone, wheels-on-the-ground of her). 2nd time it happened, the shop was persuaded to replaced them all (with brass) under warranty. Seemed to be a ‘known issue’ with certain Specialized wheels. (These were crappy, coloured, aluminium nipples on a 26″ factory wheel, btw. It looked to me like the spokes were too short.)

I will do all that for £500 saving you a couple of hundred quid and getting me about £400 profit. You are having your pants pulled down by somebody who knows you wont check/sort stuff for yourself and i am sorry but i dont believe anybody here cant find half an hour in there month to put a small amount of effort in, nobody is that busy all the time.

Bikes are not complex machines. Spend money on tools, not someone else’s time. Never has it been so easy to find how to guides for almost anything. Once you know your way round with a set of spanners, you’ll be more inclined to stay on top of maintaining your bike rather than letting things get beyond servicing.

I speculatively replaced 9 year old discs last year in the hope it might improve braking a bit.

I’ve worn discs to the min thickness in far less than that. Depends entirely on how much, how and where you’re riding.

Least we know where all the wealthy, BMW driving bike shop owners live. Not far from grannyjone.

10/10.
DTaylforth got a new log in? 🙂
Or ..
Get a new bike mechanic ,crazy legs has it.

DTaylforth got a new log in?

funnily enough that was exactly my reaction too…

The longer the op is absent, the more I’m convinced of shenanigans…

I have to say that I suspected some sort of trolling on first reading but the OPs previous posts back up much of the story. It’s easy to forget that we’re not all mechanical wizards or even that we all know enough about bike mechanics to know when we’re being bullshitted.

How a steel disc can get contaminated is beyond me. The pads are porous and if they get coated in brake fluid are dead, but a disc and just be cleaned with solvent.

As others have said your mechanic is on to a sure thing.

Imagine you go to your local car garage to get your cars brakes fixed. They fix them and you pay. Then two days later they need to go back with more problems – do you complain or ask to pay again?

I’d much rather be riding than stuck in the garage

Wouldn’t we all, bit too the tune of £1644pa? For the sake of spending 10 mins sloth an Allen key and a pump once a month?

[Edit] who am I kidding, I love Tinkering with my bike. Bloody thing is running like a dream and I’ve got no reason to play with it other than ride it at the mo. I’ve not stepped foot in a shop (to get work done) in years.

I’m getting 3,500km out of a Shimano 11 speed cassette. Three chains swapped at 0.75 in that time.

That’s riding in the peak with not great bike cleaning.

As for re-truing new wheels. No chance that should be happening. I’ve two pairs of wheels that have been hammered over 15,000km between them. True as the day the were handed to me and still perfect spoke tension. built by big Matt at 18 bikes

OP, I’m in Hindley, where’s the Mechanic based mate ?

I don’t know of any Bike Shops locally apart from Mike at ML, Birkett Bank

Rob Hilton – Member
Singlespeed hardtail FTW!!

Rigid if you think you can take it.. +1 brother

fifeandy – Member
Depends from person to person doesn’t it.
Using myself as an example, I take bike to work then drop it in the shop on the way home – costs me a max of 15 mins. I then get to ride another bike and dinner is just a bit later.
And as for the wet afternoon – i’d rather be staring at a wall bored out of my skull on the turbo, taking a nap, reading a book, playing the computer, doing the hoovering – pretty much anything than cleaning/fixing bikes.

It certainly does, personally I’d rather be cleaning/fixing than pretty much anything. Each to their own I guess.

Singlespeed hardtail FTW!!
Rigid if you think you can take it.

. +1 brother[/quote]
Only if you can’t manage to maintain anything, given how even those I know with very little knowledge seem to do much better than the OP it’s not hard. Rigid Singlespeeds are just admitting defeat unless your a complete masochist or live somewhere really dull.

It certainly does, personally I’d rather be cleaning/fixing than pretty much anything. Each to their own I guess.

I see both sides, both are valid but for lots of reasons people don’t have time, space, tools or inclination to tinker with bikes. At the moment my quick 30 min frame swap is at 2 days as I can’t find my HTII tool (Hope BB lasting too long) or my 20mm axle adaptors for my front hub. I could have dropped frame A in the shop Monday and had them whip out the BB and then Frame B today on the way to work and ordered the bits and been riding tonight. Instead it’s going to be a road spin.

Holey Moley, it looks like Kwik Fit entered the bike servicing market.

Not read all the commets but stuff like this makes me want to finally do the mobile mechanic stuff.

They keep going bust near me as no one trusts a mechanic – wonder why reading the job list 🙁

OP, as others have said most jobs are easy enough with a basic toolset and once you get used to doing the work they can be fairly quick to do, so doesn’t intefere with riding time that much.

Quite a few of the more reputable shops near me will run basic maintenance courses, possibly worth a bit of research in your area.