I have got LOTS to talk about this month at Happy Days! Medical drama, ultimate stress, things that I’ve fixed, things that I’ve broken, but first off let’s start with young Jack!
Jack was brought to us originally as a volunteer by one of the charity directors that’s a family friend of his. I wasn’t setting my hopes too high for him before he started, but he blew me away on his very first day with his enthusiasm and willingness to listen and learn. I’d been told he was ‘into bikes’ but there’s definite levels to how ‘into’ something you can be and the level of ‘into’ that is required to work in a bike shop is ‘VERY INTO’! Luckily for us it turned out Jack’s interest in bikes ran deep, he’s proper bike people.
Having him in the shop was awesome, he was like a helpful little shadow to me, clearing my clutter before it even had time to touch the worktop whilst still taking in the vast majority of the constant barrage of information that I was conveying to him. We quickly took him on as our shiny new Saturday boy (stealing him from his previous employer – sorry to the Halifax Giant store!) And over the past year he’s proven himself to be an absolute asset to the shop.
Anyway fast forward to a few months ago and Jack had just finished his GCSE’S (he did great, which seemed to surprise him more than anyone else! So biggest of big ups for that, Jack!). He asked us if there was any chance of him doing an apprenticeship as a Bike Mechanic at the shop as he didn’t feel college was for him. Sadly for Jack we just didn’t have space in the shop’s budget for another employee.
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At this point the shop was staffed by me, Jonny and Drew (and our amazing volunteer Noah) and there just wasn’t space for anyone else.
I see a lot of myself at 16 in Jack: I was never a particularly good student in school, I could never apply myself to learning from textbooks and if I didn’t find a subject interesting or a teacher engaging I struggled to concentrate. When I left school I had no clear idea what I wanted to do. I ended up wasting a few years at art college before I got to grips with what I wanted from life. Years that I sometimes wish I’d put into learning a trade (a proper trade, one of the ones that makes money!) I instead wasted a couple of years pursuing something that I had no real interest in because I thought it was what I was supposed to do.
Doing my due diligence to make sure he knew what would have been in store for him if this was the career path he followed, I tried to explain to Jack that if he were to go and train as a plumber or a sparky he’d be able to afford all the shiny parts he wanted, and that the life of a bike mechanic is never going to be one of riches and luxury. It does however come with a high level of job satisfaction and there’s almost never a day when you don’t want to go to work. Not to mention trade price on parts! He countered that if he got sick of shop life it’s only a two year apprenticeship, he’ll still only be eighteen by the time he finishes it. If he wants to he can go and train as a sparky or something else then! But all this was moot anyway as we didn’t have space to take him. I was gutted that we couldn’t sort Jack out especially after all the great work he’d given us and the potential that I saw in him.
But then! SERENDIPITY!
I mention that word a lot but it almost seems like since I got my job at Happy Days I’ve been followed by glorious serendipity. Maybe it’s a positive mindset and outlook that helps the universe align itself so stuff just kind of seems to work out the best way possible, or maybe it’s just some kind of enormous cosmic coincidence, but for some reason at Happy Days if you hope just hard enough for something it seems to almost always come out just like you’d hoped.
I’ll explain.
Drew had been with us for about nine months when Jack asked about an apprenticeship. We’d taken Drew on as part of a Jobcentre restart program aimed at getting people back into work. Basically the Jobcentre funded us to have Drew for three months but he’d proved his worth admirably and we kept him on as a proper employee. He became our ace bike washer/ donation wrangler/ cheeky fag break haver and he was great! However he wasn’t proper bike people like young Jack and bike shops need proper bike people!
So the Jobcentre’s plan seems to have worked. Drew had been restarted but he wasn’t gonna settle with his easy job at the bike shop. Apparently getting back to using tools had sparked a fire in him we didn’t even know about and he’d been applying for other jobs as a car mechanic (which he had originally trained as). Which brings us back to serendipity.
A few days after we’d had to give Jack the disappointing news that we couldn’t offer him an apprenticeship, Drew came in one morning and announced to us that he would be leaving. He’d found a new job with Calderdale Council fixing their fleet of vehicles – this gave us the perfect space to be able to offer Jack the apprenticeship he wanted. SERENDIPITY!
So now Jack’s out of school and straight into full time work (I tried to warn him), and the shop has another ball of bike based enthusiasm wrapped in a work shirt and a pair of Fox shorts! Once Jack knew he’d secured his place in the shop he could began planning how to spend his first big boy wage. And he had big plans…
A lot of folks might go and have a big blowout with that first big wedge of cash they’ve earned, buying frivolous things they don’t need just because they can, not young Jack though. He’d decided that if he’s gonna be a top class mechanic he needs a toolkit that reflects that, so a good chunk of that first wage has been invested a real nice shiny new toolbox. Not only that he’s also got some even nicer, even shinier tools to go in it.
I helped top it up with a few bits and pieces from my home kit, which are soon to be supplemented by one of Park Tools more comprehensive pre-built sets. (If it ever comes back into stock… Supposed to be back in a week ago, now showing Feb 23! #prayforjack )
The pride he has on his face as he makes sure everything is in the absolute perfect position when he closes it every night is so heartwarming to see, and the tools he’s bought are all top quality so it truly is an investment that’ll be useful to him his entire life whether he keeps fixing bikes or not.
Approximately every twenty minutes for the last three months my phone has buzzed with a ‘do you think I should get one of these or one of these’ texts from Jack with just about any tool you can imagine (and some you probably can’t!). So I imagine at this rate in a year or so his box will probably have just as many extra flaps/hooks/clips hanging off the sides as mine does. I’ll make sure to keep y’all up to date on Jack’s progress but there’s plenty more gone on this month so I’d best move on!
I was nominated for a Singletrack Award in the best writer category which was pretty mind blowing for me! Mountain bike literature has always been incredibly important to me so to even be given the chance to write this nonsense every month for the biggest mountain bike website in Europe has been a very life affirming experience. (See Mum, I told you I was keeping those decades of back issues for a reason) But to then even be nominated for an award for my nonsense was even more astounding! Votes are closed now but the most sincere thank you to anyone that nominated or voted for me, I can’t tell you how much it means to me! Stoke levels were high in my house that night! Tingles of excitement were running through my brain as I went to bed, at least I thought they were tingles of excitement…
I awoke the next day and the tingles had gone, replaced by a dull ache in the left side of my head behind my ear. I felt a bit groggy and bleary eyed but just put it down to tiredness. Then I was struggling to drink my morning coffee without spilling it down my front. My lips felt fat and like they weren’t working right.
Was I having an allergic reaction or something?
I made my way down to the shop and as soon as I walked through the door Jonny noticed my face wasn’t working properly on the left hand side. I then realised I couldn’t blink properly with my left eye. Uh oh…
I much prefer ‘I’m sick because I use my brain too much’ to ‘I’m sick because the cold sore virus made my face stop working’
A quick trip to the doctors around the corner was followed by just about the most worried taxi ride of my life, straight to A&E, as I fell into a state of mild panic that I was having a stroke. Luckily for me it turned out to be much less severe. It’s Bells Palsy, a temporary paralysis of one side of the face caused by either ‘overuse of the brain’ or maybe the herpes simplex virus. No one seems to be quite sure, I’ve had different answers from different doctors and I much prefer ‘I’m sick because I use my brain too much’ to ‘I’m sick because the cold sore virus made my face stop working’.
Either way I’ve been signed off work for a week to relax and get some rest which is going great… (3am is a perfectly normal time for me to be writing this while it feels like a fist is trying to push its way out of the back of my skull. Right?) Anyway what’s this column about? I’m sure I used to write about fixing stuff sometimes, I even said in the last one that I had a good fix saved for this one, and I do! So let’s set the scene.
Say you’ve bought an ebike from a large sports store, maybe one that sells products for a variety of sports, let’s say, eight sports.
So you’ve got your shiny bike from the Octathalon store and you ride it for just over a year. One day on your way back home you notice that the back end of your bike doesn’t feel right and has a whole lot of waggle that it didn’t have before.
You take it back to the shop and they point out that your main pivot bolt has snapped.
“Can you order me a new one?” you ask.
“Sorry no, they’re not in stock and we don’t have a date when they will be”
“Is it covered by warranty?”
“Unfortunately it’s outside of the warranty period sir”
A tale as old as time…
Luckily parts availability matters little to us at Happy Days and luckily that’s where this customer came next!
We have a fabulous engineer’s merchants just up the road from the shop with just about anything, tool, bolt, or washer related, so after extracting the remains of the broken bolt from the swingarm I ran up there and they had just the bolt I needed. Well, they had kind of just the bolt I needed, with a little customisation (not to mention another 50 quid’s worth of tools for young Jack, I did try and warn him he wouldn’t be able to go in there without dropping a load of cash on more tools!).
It turned out that rather than running a shaft all the way through the bearings with a bolt that just screwed against the face of the axle – the same way that any normal bike company would – this one had been designed with a step on the bolt that sat inside the outermost bearing. Meaning that what could have just been a matter of screwing in a replacement bolt turned into 20 minutes of ‘machining’ a shim from an old wheel axle to fill the space on the shop’s ‘lathe’.
And by lathe I mean power drill and by machining I mean running a file over…
It did however fit perfectly and tighten up to a dead stop with zero play! So my methods may be rudimentary but the results speak for themselves!
Also I need to buy a lathe…
I then added a stem top cap turned down on my ‘lathe’ and gave it a nice high polished finish so it didn’t look quite as industrial as it did.
So that’s it for this month hopefully by next month I’ll have fallen back into some kind of normal human sleep pattern and have a face that works again! Fingers crossed eh?!
