Bike servicing

heathrow86
Posts: 228
Hi has anyone had there bike serviced at Evans, On Your Bike etc? Are they any good and what do you get for £80+? Thinking of doing it as I no longer have the time or tools to do it.
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I wouldn't pay £80 for something I could do in two hours myself. I guess the £80 is labour only to adjust/replace cables, grease bearing and adjust gears and brakes - any parts needed (chain, cassette, brake blocks, cables) will be on top of that.Carlsberg don't make cycle clothing, but if they did it would probably still not be as good as Assos0
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I agree. I'd buy myself a maintenance manual and a multitool, do the work myself, save money and know it's done properly. If you can operate a spanner and a screwdriver you're there.0
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My LBS did my bike at the beginning of the year for £20 summat.
Granted, it didn't need much work - and was more a peace of mind checkover.
Most places wanted loads more as a standard charge. Keep trying places, and negotiate.0 -
Breakdown of what's covered by Evans, and additional charges:
http://www.evanscycles.com/servicing/wo ... price-list
£12.50 for fitting a tyre!!! :shock: :shock: :shock:Carlsberg don't make cycle clothing, but if they did it would probably still not be as good as Assos0 -
Slow Downcp wrote:Breakdown of what's covered by Evans, and additional charges:
http://www.evanscycles.com/servicing/wo ... price-list
£12.50 for fitting a tyre!!! :shock: :shock: :shock:
Shock is right! I didn't realise how valuable my meagre skills are.
Do they really believe it's necessary to strip completely a every 12 to 18 months? And what is the reason for stripping and re-fitting a headset? You don't need to strip it to know if it needs replacing. And as for charging £25 to repair a puncture in hub gear rear wheel - words fail me.
I've been an amateur mechanic all my life - motor cycles, cars, sailing boats, model boats and aeroplanes and pedal cycles. Maintenance on pedal cycles isn't exactly super difficult. The only thing I've never done myself is build a frame or occasionally needed help when I don't have a special tool. I think if I'd paid myself I'd be a much richer man
No wonder there are complaints that cycling is expensive. It must be if you can't/won't do your own repairs.
GeoffOld cyclists never die; they just fit smaller chainrings ... and pedal faster0 -
Slow Downcp wrote:Breakdown of what's covered by Evans, and additional charges:
http://www.evanscycles.com/servicing/wo ... price-list
£12.50 for fitting a tyre!!! :shock: :shock: :shock:
I'll do it for £100 -
..i think I'll cycle over to Geoff SS when i need a service...he sounds handier than me..I have no mechanical skills at all but am planning to slowly improve my bike DIY on a cheaper bike off ebay - before letting loose on my Spech Roubaix Comp..0
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Yeah, practice is what you need. Like Geoff I've never liked paying someone to do something I can do myself, and I've always owned classic cars ('65 Morris Minor was my first car - it was already 40 years old when I got it when I was seventeen) so I've become pretty adept at fixing things (like new driveshafts overnight at the side of the road because I refused to pay £300 to get it towed away, entirely reasonable I think
).
If you want to learn how to service your bike, buy an old bike for £50, and a copy of the Haynes Bike Book, buy a few tools and take it apart and put it back together again. There might be a few differences between a £1200 carbon fibre racer and a crummy old ebay special but most of the theory is the same, and it's good practice too.0 -
What an outrage!
How can cycle mechanics and shops expect hardworking people to pay thousands of pounds on buying their bikes/parts and still want their wages to be paid when we let them work on our bikes?
I have never heard anything more ridiculous, the cheek of these people.0 -
night_porter wrote:What an outrage!
How can cycle mechanics and shops expect hardworking people to pay thousands of pounds on buying their bikes/parts and still want their wages to be paid when we let them work on our bikes?
I have never heard anything more ridiculous, the cheek of these people.0 -
I'm mechanically useless but still manage pretty much everything myself. I don't have STI gears yet so don't know what that will be like and I don't touch wheels, bottom brackets and (proper old fashioned) headsets as I don't have the tools. Spent just over an hour on Saturday replacing my whole drive train and the only problem I had was that my chainring bolts have seized after 10 years plus of neglect in the shed. There's not much in routine maintenance that's complicated but then the OP didn't say he couldn't do it himself just that he doesn't have the time or tools anymore.0
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night_porter wrote:What an outrage!
How can cycle mechanics and shops expect hardworking people to pay thousands of pounds on buying their bikes/parts and still want their wages to be paid when we let them work on our bikes?
I have never heard anything more ridiculous, the cheek of these people.
I agree to a point - but £12.50 for swapping a tyre???Carlsberg don't make cycle clothing, but if they did it would probably still not be as good as Assos0 -
Slow Downcp wrote:night_porter wrote:What an outrage!
How can cycle mechanics and shops expect hardworking people to pay thousands of pounds on buying their bikes/parts and still want their wages to be paid when we let them work on our bikes?
I have never heard anything more ridiculous, the cheek of these people.
I agree to a point - but £12.50 for swapping a tyre???
Worse than that - for what is literally no more than a 2 minute job, its £12.50 for fitting a bottle cage (excluding part). :oops:
Can I franchise out bottle cage fitting? :twisted:0 -
Presumably it's £25 per hour with a minimum half hour charge. Let's face it, anyone who can't be bothered to fit a bottle cage themselves deserves to be ripped off0
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Easy.
If you don't want to do it yourself, talk to your Local Shop, pop in if you can.
You'll save loads on the service because they'll do what needs to be done, rather than whats on a listRichard
Giving it Large0 -
I agree to a point. Evans is expensive but in the same vein as taking your car to a main dealer. They have massive overheads so have to rip you off to some extent.
However, how much do you guys get paid an hour ? My LBS charges about £80 for a full service which is a full strip, lube and reassemble etc. I could easily do that myself but I couldn't do it in less than 2-3 hours, which would cost me more in my free time (and I'm mechanically minded).
For someone who isn't mechanical in any way, stripping down a rear mech, BB or headset and relubricating could take a fair amount of time so equates to the same thing. Ok bike mechanics ain't rocket science but even learning the stuff takes time.
There was an article on Watchdog where the idiot journo on the BikeRadar website was slamming £100 bikes because they were unsafe. The shocking thing was that a bunch of guys tried to assemble a range of bikes and some of them couldn't even tighten a pedal onto a crank :roll: For these kinds of people, servicing is a no-brainer as you can imagine the kind of trouble they'd get into stripping down a BB0 -
I agree, I wanted to write that, but you found the words
You can do a lot of damage and mess things up if you are not sure what you're doing, and then have to take it some where to get it fixed, which pushes the costs higher than geting a bike mech to do the original job
To me, I'd rather go to a decent shop and sort it.
Not everyone has the know how, confidence and time to mechanic their own bike. (I fall in to the time/confidence bracket)
That Evans scheme is fine, but I'd rather support small business.Richard
Giving it Large0 -
I see no issue with people paying £80 for a service.....but by charging £12.50 for fitting bottle cages, on principle alone, I'd go elsewhere if I needed to use a shop service. This type of charge screams greed...
Do Evans (and other shops) give you the option of supplying your own parts or are you stuck with forking out for their high rrps?0 -
Agree, that's pretty scandalous for two bolts.
But even more shocking is that people must be paying it otherwise they'd revamp their pricing :shock:
Sadly though it's up there with main dealer car service charges. I've heard outrageous stories of BMW/Audi/Merc prices0 -
The bottle cage and tyre change prices may be to try to put people off getting them to do it, a bit like when a builder gives you a silly quote for a tiny job. If you pay it, great it's worthwhile but if you don't well £5 in the till isn't worth the hassle.0
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As with anything, shops offer a range of products and services to cater for each and every pocket.
You want a tube fitting in a bike shop? Then you're either so mechanically incompetent that paying £12.50 in Evans etc (our shop charges £7.50 labour) is worth every penny to avoid all that dirt, dog crap. skinned knuckles and the risk of pinching a new tube OR or you're simply bone idle!
If you want it doing cheaply then, sure, learn how to do it yourself or take it to Old Man Bloggs cycle shop where I'm sure he'll do it for you for 2s6d and throw in a cup of tea and a bacon sarnie too!
If however you want to take it into a modern, well laid out cycle shop with a large floor area, good lighting, heating (overlooked in many a cycle shop!) and knowledgable staff to help you then I'm afraid you'll have to pay the relevant cost.
A lot of premium cycle shops get used to hearing "How much!!? I could get a car for that!!). To which I usually think (but never reply!) "Quite right Sir/Madam. You could get a particuarly shitty second hand car for exactly that amount!"
What nobody seems to account for is that when you go to a car main dealer you may be looking at cars between £10,000 and £20,000. This is a lot of money, but is equivalent to shopping for a £200 to £600 bike. Neither is a cheap vehicle but neither is a world beater either. To see that £200,000 supercar you either have to go to a very special car dealership or be lucky enough to have tickets to see Top Gear being filmed! Bike shops have to be everything, the standard main dealer and the supercar showroom, which is why you may well see bikes priced at £3k, £4k and even up to £10K in some shops. Just remember, these are the Gallardo's, 360's and Veyrons of the bike world and, whilst we all want them, they aren't meant for every customer!!
Going back to the main topic, I do think charging £12.50 for fitting a bottle cage is excessive. BUT, and this a BIG BUT(T) like Beyonce's!! Would the customer of mine who bought a £5000 Trek Madone 6.9 and and overtightened his bottlecage to the point of cracking his £2000 frame have thought so?
Had I charged him £12.50 and overtightened to the point of cracking his frame, then it's the shops responsibility, and, aside from me getting a rollocking (and most likely the sack) we would have had to cover the new frame cost as by doing the work we are under contract. As he did it himself the best we could do was offer a crash-replacement frame at cost from Trek (still another grand to pay!).
If you want to buy the premium products, whether it's an Aston Martin DB9 or a Storck Fascenario, then please expect to take it to a premium dealer with all the correct training, tools and experience (not neccessarily older staff BTW) for servicing.
Bike shops seem to suffer from a "Thats easy, I can do that attitude" from customers who may have once changed a tyre with some spoons when they were 12 years old.
If you think a shops advertised prices for labour are excessive, that is absolutely fine by me. Go and shop around for a better price, but don't try and haggle. Prices aren't random figures we pick out of thin air!! We charge £25 to remove an old headset and fit a new one. This job takes an average 45mins. We face the frame (tool cost c.£600), press fit the new cups (tool cost c.£300), assemble headset, refit forks, front wheel and brake. Then adjust , test ride (another 5mins) and readjust. Please tell me that isn't worth £25!!
I could easily take out my kitchen scissors and have a go at my wife's hair but to get it done by a professional costs £40-£50 a few times a year, and that's a cost I have to live with.
In short, you get (or at least should get) what you pay for.
Remember, you are entitled to shop about and a reputable shop should be confident enough (not arrogant though) for you to go and look at competitors servicing etc.
It is always your choice where you shop but you have to have realistic expectations. It's your prerogative to agree a price beforehand (if not displayed). If you don't agree a price and then feel that you have been overcharged, ask politely if the charges can be explained to you, If you are still aggrieved then ask to speak to the relevant person. Always be polite and you are more likely to come to satisfactory (for both parties) compromise. Arguing never helps anyone.....
...rant over for now! How long did that take?
:? :?Second is losing!!0 -
Interesting if long post
I agree with you almost entirely appart from the £12.50 charge for fitting bottle cages. There is just no justification for that at all given that most bottle cages are about £10-£20 in the first place.
Your example is fine but if I just spent £5000 on a Trek Madone 6.9 I would have also taken two £70 carbon bottle cages to go with it. I wouldn't *expect* to have them fitted for free but would feel a little agreived if you then asked me if I wanted to pay for you to fit them for me0 -
^^ a very good post, I think.
I used to work in a shop that sold bikes (not a 'proper' bike shop mind you, the most expensive thing we sold was about £600) as 'chief mechanic' and I used to get the 'it's only a bike, how hard can it be?' attitude from so many people when they were told how much labour charges were... we charged £7 labour to fit a tyre or tube which I thought was very reasonable considering that the customers often didn't bother to clean the dog turds off (and were always surprised when I asked them to take it away and clean it or I'd charge them another £3 to jetwash their tyres before I started)
It really is a case of put up or shut up. A car mechanic will charge at least £40 an hour, so a tenner to fit a bike tyre is pretty reasonable, I think. And fitting a really tight tyre on a carbon fibre wheel is a much harder job than wanging some cheap no-name rubber on a 26" Argos special - so the tyre fitting service has to be priced to encompass both extremes of tyre fitting.
Also, the time it takes to physically change the tyre should be less than ten minutes but the whole job from the customer walking in, chatting to the staff, getting out and putting away tools, storing the bike, phoning the customer, to the customer walking out again takes a fair bit longer - that's why there's always gonna be a minimum labour charge for things like that.
Incidentally, I have also worked as a car mechanic and it's much easier to fit a car tyre than it is to fit a bicycle tyre - I doubt many people would think twice about paying £12.50 to get a car tyre fitted though.
And after all, a bike shop is a business, and it's an excuse to charge extra. If you don't wanna pay, then don't - do it yourself or take it to the £5 cuppa tea bloke at the market who'll use metal tyre levers on your carbon Zipp wheels.0 -
I was brought up living 'over the shop' of a small retail radio (TV wasn't introduced until I was 9
) and general electrical shop so I'm well aware of the vicissitudes of dealing with the public. Suffice to say I didn't hang around long when Comet et al started selling stuff cheaper than Dad could buy it from the the wholesalers.
However, if I buy 4 new tyres for our camper van to replace the 14 year old perished ones I don't expect to pay to have them balanced and fitted. And when I did just that last year that's what happened. Why should I buy 2 new tyres from a cycle retailer and then pay a further £20 to have them fitted? It takes about 20 minutes (30 minutes top) to do the whole job start to finish.
btw I've fitted tyres to cars and motor cycles as well as pedal cycles - pedal cycles are much the easiest IMO - no special tools required for a start.. The hardest is some motor cycles because wheels often aren't quickly detachable
As for the benefits of plush show rooms - give me an old fashioned bike/motor cycle shop any time with staff whao look like the actually use the products they sell and have dirt under their finger nails.
Mind you, having said that, I don't think I've ever had any of our bikes repaired/serviced by anyone else but me.bar operations needing expensive special tools occasionally.
GeoffOld cyclists never die; they just fit smaller chainrings ... and pedal faster0 -
A lot of car tyre places will break down their charge into tyre price, fitting and balancing labour, and old tyre disposal fee. It's not uncommon these days. Plus if you take your own tyres somewhere and have them then obviously they'd charge.
I do think that £12.50 is expensive, but I don't think it's unreasonable given the quality of bicycles they get and the fact that you're paying for the time of a proper CycleTech-or-otherwise qualified bicycle mechanic. Like I said, it's far easier to fit cheap tyres to a cheap bike - that's why the bloke at the market doesn't charge as much.
If you buy expensive new tyres, a good LBS might not charge you for fitting, but some might - it still takes the mechanic time and wears his own personal tools. If the labour charge is just for changing a punctured tube, I don't think you can complain, seeing as otherwise they'd be spending 20 minutes labour plus tool use plus storage etc just for a £3 sale on an inner tube. The cheap bike shop or the bloke down the market might not charge £12.50 or even £5 for it, but like I said, he's not employing a proper mechanic or working on £3000 bikes either.
You are correct in saying that a car tyre is much harder to fit than a bicycle tyre, but only if you don't have a tyre fitting machine! Have you tried the old aerosol can/lighter fluid trick?0 -
As an aside, I bought a bottle cage (£6.99) in Evans last year and as a cycling newbie asked if it was easy/straightforward to fit. The chap put it on the bike for me there and then, no charge.0
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Vauxhall once phoned me when the car was in for some warranty work to see if I wanted a rear bulb changing, but that it would cost £18 if I wanted them to do it. Course I didn't, but in a way it made sense; their justification was time taken to establish that the bulb had failed, time to get a new one from stock, and the time to fit. The better alternative was that I knew a tail light had failed so next time I was out & about I picked one up and fitted it outside the shop.
Obviously these times are inflated to the nearest ¼ hour and there wouldn't be a sequence of trips to stores for a bulb, then a filter, then a cable etc. But bigger companies, like Vauxhall, Evans and plenty of others will have pre-determined times allowed per job, rounded to the nearest part hour, and which are probably reported back up the head office as normal management reporting.
It's up to the individual store whether they 'lose' that time as a nod to customer relations, or whether they charge the stroppy argumentative git loitering at the counter.0