Sunday, May 30, 2010

What the Fork

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I may not be as big a pussy as I thought. After a few months of riding my bike and never really feeling comfortable on it I decided to take it in and get it looked at. And what do you know my front fork is AFU. With the front wheel mounted and viewed from the front it is apparent,even to an idiot like me, that the wheel is not in the center of the fork. So it was not my imagination that made me feel like the bike was not stable, that there was a weird vibration. The bad news of this story is that the bike shop that I originally took the bike to after my crash was not the shop that discovered this problem. Even though they had the bike for about 2 weeks. They replaced a completely trashed front wheel. Yet obviously did not bother to fully check out the fork it was attached to when I did cart wheels on the damn thing at nearly 40 mph. I'm not a bike mechanic, that's why I pay someone else to look over my bike, to do the tune ups and replace parts etc. And in doing so I trust them, basically with my life, to do a good and thorough job. Not just sell me a wheel that I'm sure they marked up 100%. I won't do business that shop again. Which is really their loss, it where I bought that bike for a little over $4000 and tires and shorts and god knows what else. Bottom line I was a good customer and they let me down not just with bad customer service, that was never a problem, but poor quality control.
Back to the good news part of this story which I'm fairly excited about. The shop that discovered the problem is new, the owner, is not new. He used to own Two Wheel Transit and now has a new shop in Brown's Addition called simply Steve's on Cannon. As anyone who has ever dealt with Steve knows the guy knows bikes. I'm glad he's back in business.
As for the shop that let me down let's just say I won't be headed up north to get my bike serviced ever again.