Being a qualified cycle mechanic

[xpc316e]

I am a Road Safety Officer and spend quite a lot of time working with children and their bikes. I often make what I view as common sense safety adjustments to some of their machines before they use them on our courses. My employers take on this is that it is fine to perhaps adjust a saddle for height, but no more, because of liability issues. If I can make a brake work with two minutes tweaking I reckon that it would be senseless not to.

I am pushing to go on a proper course run by an outside agency, so that my running repairs will have some stamp of worthiness. Has anybody else had experience of this problem, how it was resolved, and what establishment you used, if any, to provide the training.

[Philip Benstead]

I am a Road Safety Officer and spend quite a lot of time working with children and their bikes. I often make what I view as common sense safety adjustments to some of their machines before they use them on our courses. My employers take on this is that it is fine to perhaps adjust a saddle for height, but no more, because of liability issues. If I can make a brake work with two minutes tweaking I reckon that it would be senseless not to.

I am pushing to go on a proper course run by an outside agency, so that my running repairs will have some stamp of worthiness. Has anybody else had experience of this problem, how it was resolved, and what establishment you used, if any, to provide the training.

There are numer of courses you could go on, it depend on a number of factors

1 How much you are perpared to pay
2 where do you live
3 how long do want to be on the course
4 how much detail you want to go into

I have been a course at downland cycle in canterbury for 5 days 11 to 5

it cost about 350 and was very good.

http://www.downlandcycles.co.uk/courses.htm


it was better than say than Cycle training UK course in London which if you went on 2 couasesd would take 2 days,

http://www.cycletraining.co.uk/training ... aintenance

on the other hand it was not as good as ATG course in Alyesbury which cost about 1200 but last about 10 days?


http://www.atg-training.co.uk/index.php ... -Text.html

There are other courses , but I have given you a ideas what is around.

If you want a chat about this telephone or email me

[Punk_shore]

Hi there, just moved across from the tea shop section.
Is it not so much how the instructor fixes a bike as to how he/ she inspires his/ her pupils or their parents/ guardians to maintain it.
If I need practice, I just scrounge a couple of thrown-away bikes and try to make them roadworthy. Cycle industry courses seem geared towards the latest specialist components.

Kind regards, Punk_shore

[xpc316e]

Hi Punk_shore, I understand your comments about enthusing children and adults alike to maintain their bikes well, but for my employers the main problem is liability. I have been maintaining my own bikes for in excess of forty years, but they are frightened that should a child have a crash on a bike that I have 'adjusted' or 'fixed' they will be liable. I understand their position, but they in turn need to understand mine: I think that it is criminal to ignore a non-functioning brake on a child's bike on the grounds that if I were to make it work, the County Council might be liable if a crash were to occur.

As I see it, the only way forward is to send me on some sort of course to give me a professional qualification at some level.

[bikeboy]

The bottom line on this one is; if you are a national standards qualified instructor you may make any "adjustment" to a bike but you are not supposed to "fix" anything!

So you could, raise or lower the height of the seat or oil a chain. You would not be allowed to mend a spoke or replace a brake.

Personally I think the world has gone cotton wool mad and just a few years ago you would not need to question your own skills and would just get on with it. And just for the record if I were out with a group and the only way to get back was to fix something..... well you can guess what I would do!

[Punk_shore]

Thanks for broadening the opinions.
To take a "blue-sky" approach, should all bicycles be tested for roadworthiness prior to an initial classroom session. That would give a week for any defects to be remedied.
Don't forget, we all need to resort to a trade cycle repairer sometime.
I gave up counting after having adjusted 6 different types of cycle brake.
Anyone needing ideas on how to introduce cycle maintenance to 8 year-olds, please contact me.

Kind regards, Punk_shore

[wheelygood]

A good way around this problem may be to link up with a local qualified bike mechanic. I do this for a local school. When it comes around to the NS time of the year we go along to school and carry out the bike checks free of charge in return for a bit of publicity. If anything needs doing on the bikes we can price this out then carry it out so that the instructors then know that the bike is roadworthy from the start. We don't mind putting a bit of our time in foc as we always pick up work as a result even if it is not on the kid's bikes, their parents often come to us as well! Once you have a 'captive' bike mechanic cherish them - they are worth their weight in gold!

[worthers]

I'm an NS instructor and I recently signed up to take a Cytech 1 course in June. I often find myself having to tweak trainees cycles or carry out minor repairs, so I hope that the course will make me feel more confident, proficient, and in a way qualified to work on trainees cycles. And who knows - maybe I'll enjoy it enough to take levels 2 and 3 sometime...

[rbrian]

Get a friend to turn up to one of your courses with a badly adjusted bike. Say, in a loud voice in your boss's hearing, that the bike needs adjusting. Your friend refuses, then crashes, then sues your boss, thus creating a precedent that you should adjust all the bikes first, so as to avoid liability.

[Phil_Lee]

I would think there would be a far higher risk of being held liable for injuries caused as a result of NOT repairing a clearly malfunctioning bike, if the capability was there to fix it.
The only real problem is in deciding what is beyond safe repair, with the skills/tools/time available.
Fixes that would be acceptable as a "get you home" for a skilled rider may be entirely inappropriate for a learner.

[cycletech]

Hi,

Also a list of places for training http://www.cyclefix.net/links.html

Martin