Scaary stuff.
Those are the customers. Here's a "Stoopid Bike Store" and clueless customer story. I wish I had taken pictures. Sorry.
I just got done fixing some of it tonight, then just got so disgusted and tired maybe I'll do the rest tomorrow.
My son has a friend staying over tonight. His friend brought over his new bike that he'd gotten from a national chain sporting goods store. It's a 24" Diamondback kid's bike. Brand new shiny bike. He's very proud and he should be. It's a new bike, he's just out of 3rd grade and he's got tons of cool adventures ahead of him.
But the store must have just taken this thing out of the box and handed it to this poor kid's family who unfortunately just didn't know...
- One front brake caliper was broken so its spring return wasn't working. (The spring tension screw would have been set into a piece of plastic, but the plastic ring was broken and the screw AWOL.)
- The brakes were useless anyway. Every pad was set wrong. One front pad was so bad that it dove down below the rim and was stuck that way. The kid's family at least recognized that one huge problem and was going to bring it back to the store to have that (only that) fixed.
- The rear brakes were set so loose they barely grabbed the rim before the brake handle hit the handlebar grip.
- The rear derailleur stops weren't set. At all. And the shifting was set wrong so gear 7 was off the end of the cogs and into the rear dropout and at the low end the shifter's gear #1 was the cogset's gear #2. The rear dropout was all scraped up from the chain having been run off the gears.
- The chain had so much cheap lube on it that it had spattered all over the chainstay.
- The front derailleur still had Shimano's tuning instruction sticker on it, and if any one of the morons at the sports store had bothered even to look at the front derailleur they would have noticed that the thing was sitting way too high and they were supposed to at least take off the sticker. The derailleur wasn't straight with the chainline anyway. And the sticker was making a noise against the large chainring. "Hey! I'm here and I'm not supposed to be!" Nobody seemed to notice that either.
- This is just aesthetic, but the front wheel's quick release skewer was in backward. That was just sorta the telltale "Wow. They just totally have no clue at that store." Well, that and the fat red sticker dangling off the front derailleur.
So I fixed the brakes as much as I could, tuned the rear derailleur, wiped the chain & chainstay, and put the front skewer through the axle in the right direction. I thought I was done then I noticed the front derailleur problem. Maybe I'll do that in the morning and actually look the whole bike over. Who knows. Maybe the QUILL STEM is loose. Sheesh!
You guys who work in real bike shops must have some worse horror stories of Big Box Store bikes that get wheeled in for repairs.
