The Stoke is an occasional opinion series highlighting the things that get us stoked about mountain biking. 🤘 👍 👏 🙏
Today is International Repair Day, a holiday I didn’t know existed until Ritchey Bicycle Components wrote about it this week. Of course I’m always stoked for an excuse to celebrate, especially when it involves an idea I fully support, like the right to repair.
The right to repair, in case you aren’t familiar, is the idea that consumers should be allowed to maintain, modify, and repair items they own without relying exclusively on the original manufacturer. International Repair Day is coordinated by the Restart Project, which advocates for the idea largely for environmental reasons.
The thing is, I think the bike industry — unlike the automotive and tech industries, to name just two examples — does a pretty awesome job supporting our right to repair. And why shouldn’t they? We’re all riders, after all, and bikes are simple machines. I have no idea how my iPhone works, but I can tell you a bike’s chainring connects to a chain, which in turn drives the rear wheel. Simple.
Brands like Ritchey and Wolf Tooth are outspoken on riders’ right to repair, and others, like Park Tool, invest in educating riders on how to repair their own bikes. We take it for granted that even the biggest bike companies like Shimano and SRAM make all their tech docs widely available to anyone, and not just their certified mechanics.
Now sure, there are examples of proprietary bike designs and cheap bike shit that’s riveted together with no chance of being repaired at home once it breaks (and the cheap stuff always breaks). But imagine if our bikes were locked down like our iPhones, and a chain snaps during the ride. If it were a bricked iPhone instead of an immobile bike, we’d be borrowing a friend’s phone to make an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar.
Now that I think about it, maybe this is why bike companies are going bankrupt all the time. They’re playing too damn nice. Meanwhile, many in the tech industry are raking in record profits by selling devices that can’t be repaired. [Note to bike companies: I kid. Please do not take repair notes from the tech industry.]
The environmental piece of repair is nice, but frankly that’s not my motivation. For me, it’s all about time and money. Time on my bike. Time I don’t have to spend schlepping my bike to a repair shop. And the money I save by repairing my bike rather than tossing the whole thing in the trash when it stops working.
Lately, I’ve found myself wanting to spend more time on the bike as the world around me moves toward inscrutable black boxes where the inputs and outputs are clear, but what’s happening in the middle is a mystery. A bike, on the other hand, is a fully transparent machine, with nothing to hide (gearboxes and internal cable routing notwithstanding).
So here’s to the designers and builders who are working to make bikes more accessible. Easier to repair. Simpler to upgrade.
Let’s celebrate!
And if anyone needs me today, I’ll be retaping my tubeless mountain bike rims and replacing the hub bearings.
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1 Comments
1 minute ago
The tide is coming and we already see cracks in the wall.
Wireless shifters, derailleurs, and dropper posts, batteries, e-bikes, firmware. Good luck repairing them.
Suspension components that may not be upgradable or repairable after about 5 years.
You have all those cracks on one side and yet on the otherside we still have:
angled head sets, offset bushings, disc brake conversion parts, drive train parts, reducers, hub endcaps, conversion axles, bearings, cables, pawls, and seals
It is odd that I was just able to repair a 30 year old Shimano shifter but at the same time I can't upgrade or really do much with some of the suspension forks I have in the garage.