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Bicycle Accident – Unusual Prevention Technique

Wouldn’t it be great if you could be paid to keep bicyclists safe? Actually, you can, and it can pay well, is enjoyable work, and fairly easy to start with almost no investment and no experience. So, let’s keep people out of the hospitals and away from the bike accident attorneys.

There are several variations which I’ll explain in the following paragraphs. It will work in big places like New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto and Chicago. It will probably also work great in smaller cities such as Medford, Rochester, Buffalo, Toledo, Des Moines and Newport. My guess is any place with a population of 80,000 or more will support these ideas just fine.

I’m going to propose two options. No doubt you can think of more.

The first is to teach bicycle safety. In 2009, the latest year for which there are statistics, 618 people died in bicycle related accidents. Interestingly, 87% were male, and the average age was 41. I was quite surprised, figuring it would be mostly children who die in bike accidents. 52,000 people were injured, 80% were male, the average age of people injured on bikes was 31.

The venues and ways to get paid for teaching bicycle safety are unlimited. For instance, you can get paid by schools and universities to perform at assemblies. If you can make an amusing show of some sort that teaches some basics of bicycle safety, well, you’d be doing everyone a favor! The show has to be interesting so the audience will pay attention, remember, and maybe even tell their friends some of the important points.

You might like to focus some attention on aspects of bicycle safety that don’t get mentioned often enough. That’s because some safety programs miss the point. They teach kids to use hand signals, when what they really ought to teach to children and adults is what really happens in a bike accident. How bad it can be. If a child breaks an arm at the beginning of summer, that kid will not be able to have nearly as much fun for the rest of the summer. If an adult breaks an arm, he may miss out on a promotion, lose his job, and pay considerable out-of-pocket expenses. Teach what happens to visibility in wet weather. Don’t just tell people they need lights and reflectors. Explain why. Again, you get the idea.

Or, in case you don’t: Kids, and way too many adults, do not think much about their vulnerability. They take risks because they haven’t learned to adequately weigh the possible outcomes. Perhaps you are the one who can teach them bicycle safety in a way that sinks in. They aren’t going to think about hospitals, attorneys, time out of work, lost money. So, you have to give them good reasons not to ride a bike while impaired, or without thinking defensively.

You can be sponsored by local businesses to perform at their company picnics, paid to present in after-school programs, or even street perform. Have you ever seen a juggler or magician doing an entertaining show and then passing the hat? You’d be surprised how much the experienced ones can make. But wouldn’t it be great if they had a message in their show? Maybe something about bike safety? Or, maybe you’re a musician who can write humorous lyrics…

Then, there are ideas such as putting together a free video for YouTube. If it is popular enough, if you can make it go viral, you can make a fine living just from the co-advertising dollars that it will bring in. The same goes for a website. You can make a free website like this one, but better, and focused to the actual riders, and include some advertising on the side, like I have done here.

This next proposal is for people who are somewhat mechanically inclined:

I have been told that seven out ten bicycle accidents don’t involve cars. One out of eight bikes has a serious, often hidden, mechanical problem that could cause injury or even death. If you are mechanically inclined, I’d like to suggest that you could perform safety tune-ups on bikes where you live, and maybe even make a business of it. I’m talking about getting paid to do very meaningful work.

As the former owner of two bike shops, founding author of BikeWebSite, and having repaired more than 15,000 bikes, I have written up some ideas for the safety tune-up business. You are free to take what I have learned, set up your business, and keep perhaps 100 people out of the hospital and away from the attorney this year. I’d like to encourage everyone who reads this to consider the bicycle safety tune-up business.

Here are all the details. Good luck, and enjoy your new, meaningful, profitable business!

I was recently walking through a neighborhood because I was a few minutes early for a meeting, and saw something I really did not want to see. However, it changed my life, and may change your life, causing us both to help prevent something similar from happening to hundreds or maybe even thousands of other children and adults.

I watched in horror as the 11-year-old boy came rushing down a hill on an out-of-control bicycle. He barreled through an intersection at about 30 miles per hour. Fortunately, there were no cars there just then. But, he was not out of danger yet. He hit a curb on the far side of the intersection, and with a bang of escaping air, his front wheel was instantly destroyed. At that point, the boy and the bike became separated. He airborne flight was abruptly halted when he hit a chain-link fence face first. He was taken to a hospital. I believe his injuries were minor, but it certainly could have been worse, and is worse, for many riders.

I came back a while later due to a professional curiosity. The broken bike had been forgotten at the accident scene. I tried the brakes. No go. There was no front brake cable. The back brake cable was so rusted that a grown man could not have squeezed the lever sufficiently to slow that bike.

So, it got me to thinking: As a former bicycle mechanic, what if I could have had a chance to fix that bike before the boy rode it? Of course, the accident wouldn’t have happened. But what if I could fix other bikes? There are several ways I could perform safety tune-ups and get paid. I could probably fix more than 20 bikes a day. Since one out of eight bikes have serious but hidden problems, and since 70% of bicycle accidents requiring hospitalization don’t involve cars, that means in the course of season, I might be able to keep up to 450 people out of the hospital. That number may be exaggerated because not all bicycle safety problems necessarily result in a serious accident. But still, if I could keep some people safe, I’d be happy.

Then, I got to thinking about a larger picture: What if I could leverage my knowledge, and show many people how to do the same thing? I would be quite happy if I could encourage someone in every community to make their living by keeping bikes safe, ultimately preventing hundreds or thousands of injuries.

So, congratulations on your interest in doing something great for bicyclists!

As you know, this is a discussion of the bicycle safety tune-up business.

Be the first in your community to make a profit while performing bicycle safety tune-ups, and keep hundreds of your friends and neighbors, and their children out of the hospital.

You don’t need years of experience. Get a good book on bicycle repair, and practice on some old garage sale or thrift store bikes. Follow the step-by-step procedure described below, and you can literally save lives. However, before you actually start out, you should be well-practiced, and I’d like to recommend you pay a professional bike mechanic to observe you while you tune up a bike, and offer commentary. Obviously, we want to be sure that you working on bikes is safe, since you want to make them safe:)

If you really don’t feel mechanically inclined at all, you might consider a partnership with someone who is a good bike mechanic. You can line up venues, take care of scheduling, payments, and all the business activities. For that matter, if you don’t feel like much of a business person, you can leverage your mechanical skill with a good business partner.

Next, I’ll present the step-by-step procedure. Later, I’ll offer all sorts of business advice that will save/make you thousands more dollars.

The Tune-Up Procedure

You may feel inclined to modify this step-by-step procedure, but if you do, keep in mind that every aspect has been designed after 15,000 bikes experience, to prevent accidents. If you change anything, you really ought to have a good reason, and consider the consequences. Here it is:

1. With the bike on the ground, hold the front wheel between your knees, and turn the handlebar from side to side. It should be firmly attached. If it turns easily, then you’ll need to tighten the stem. If it is the type with a single bolt on the top, try tightening the bolt. If that doesn’t work, you may need to loosen the bolt several turns, tap it with a mallet (soft hammer), which releases a wedge inside the fork steering tube, lift the stem out, lubricate the wedge, reinsert and tighten the stem. While you’re at it, see that the stem is sufficiently inserted. Many people like having their handlebar higher. But if you exceed the limit of stem extension, the stem or fork steering tube could fail. And like many such failures, it will generally let go in a most critical time when bearing a lot of weight. Most stems of the single-bolt-on-top variety have a line molded into the side and a statement stamped into the metal to the effect: “Insert to hide this line.” That line and text must not be visible.

2. Check that the seat clamp and seatpost are tight, and that the seatpost is inserted in the frame at least two inches. Many seatposts have a line stamped in the metal, and sometimes text that says, “Insert beyond this line.”

3. Suspend the bike and check the tire seating, and then air pressures. Tires can be badly seated such that there is a place where the inner tube could bulge out, and suddenly explode. If you find a place where the tire is not seated properly, you can often reduce the air pressure to almost nothing, manually force the tire into position, and then reinflate. Sometimes it is a bit more of a struggle, since the bad seating can be due to a portion of inner tube caught under the bead of the tire, a misplaced or broken rimstrip (layer of material that prevents the top of the spokes from puncturing the innertube), or damaged or poorly manufactured tire.

Except for serious off-road riding, the tires should be inflated to the maximum amount imprinted on the sides of the tires. Low pressures are generally more of a maintenance issue than a safety issue, or are they? When pressures are low, there is greater risk of puncture, or blow-out when hitting a curb or pothole, and therefore losing control. Furthermore, with low pressures, rims can become kinked when hitting potholes and so on, which causes caliper (rim-squeezing) brakes to work poorly.

4. Check the bearings: headset, bottom bracket set (crank), pedals, and front and rear hubs. If you find excessive grinding, tightness or wobbliness, you have at least a maintenance issue, and possibly a safety issue. Repair of these problems is more than I can cover here. You might charge additional money to fix bearing problems that you encounter, or simply tell the bike’s owner to take it to a shop for deeper repairs.

When you find a bearing mildly out of adjustment, it’s not a safety issue. If it’s a slow day, or if it’s your policy to do more than a safety tune-up, you can adjust the bearing. That can be a big plus for customer relations.

5. See if the wheels are true (round). Adjust with a spoke wrench if slightly out of true. Recommend or perform bigger repairs as needed. In the case of rim-squeezing brakes (caliper brakes), run your fingers over the rims to see if there are any kinks or outward bends. Bend them back with gentle hammer strokes or squeezing with pliers while protecting the rim with a piece of cloth. If the rims are made from aluminum alloy, only a small degree of bending is possible. Aluminum rims should be checked for fractures. If spokes are loose or broken, additional repairs will be needed. When you have more than one spoke broken at the bend at the hub, fatigue is likely. When spokes fatigue, they all start to break at the hub, and should all be replaced.

6. Now that the wheels have been taken care of, you can adjust the brakes. This is where you should really know what you are doing. If you have little experience with brakes, consult several bike repair manuals, get lots of practice, and maybe even have a professional bike mechanic check your work on several models of brakes. The hand levers should be secure on the handlebar.

For the remainder of this discussion, we’ll assume that you’re working on bikes with cable-operated caliper brakes. For coaster brakes, hydraulic disk brakes and so on, you must know what you are doing, or simply decline tuning up that particular bike. Fortunately, most bikes, especially the ones that are most often unsafe, have standard caliper brakes.

Look in the handlevers just past where the cable attaches. This is where cables most often start to fail. If even one strand is broken, the cable must be replaced. As each strand breaks, the cable becomes weaker, so with even one broken strand, the cable is much weaker than a new one. Keep in mind that when a cable breaks, it would be when it is at maximum tension in a panic stop, not the time you’d want it to break.

Look at the far end of the cable when it attaches at the brake caliper. You may find a broken strand just at the anchor bolt. If so, the cable needs to be replaced. The brake should open easily. If when the handlever is released, it opens lazily or not fully, the handlever pivot, brake pivot, or cable may be sticking. If you detach the cable, you can find out what’s sticky by squeezing the brake caliper and operating the handlever. If neither of those are stiff, then the cable is the culprit.

The brake pads must hit the rim at the proper height. Too high and they’ll grind through the tire. Too low, and they could suddenly slip lower, jam in the spokes, and cause a horrendous accident. Look for fractured aluminum components. Look for improper cable attachments.

The brakes should open wide enough to allow the wheels to spin freely, yet should adequately stop the bike with lots of room left over for cable stretch and brake pad wear. If you can’t achieve both, then it’s better to have the brakes rub the rims a bit, compared to too-loose brakes.

One of the best things you can do for lower-quality (most) bikes, is replace the brake pads with ones better than original equipment. These are available at all bike stores. A common brand is Cool-Stop. Oddly, many bikes, especially ones with chrome-plated steel rims have brake pads that don’t work at all when wet. This must be attended to. Whereas most bicyclists don’t intend to ride in the rain, it can happen. Yet, it is such a rare occasion, the rider may not know that the brakes won’t work when wet.

So many brakes have been designed so poorly over the years that I have always been amazed that the bike manufacturers haven’t been sued over and over again because of this issue.

What do you do when you get a bike on which the brakes can’t be tuned adequately? You must not pass that bike. You must tell the user there’s a problem that’s beyond your ability to repair. Remember, it’s not your fault if you can’t fix it. You didn’t make the bike! (If you did, the brakes would have been in fine working condition.) You may not be able to charge the full price for the tune up when you reject a bike as unsafe, but you must reject it. That’s your job. You’re a safety inspector first and foremost, and a repair technician after that.

7. Take a look at the chain. It’s not your responsibility to clean it. But you need to see it. You’re looking for cracked, warped, or otherwise defective links. Most of the time you can see them by looking at the chain from above while slowly pedaling backward. Just watch the chain go by from one spot. A link that’s on the verge of failure will often look swollen compared to the others, as one side plate is starting to come detached. Or, you may see that a pin is starting to drift sideways. With practice, you can easily spot a pin that’s out of position compared to the others. You should also look to one side and the other for one revolution of the chain for each side, looking for cracks in the side plates, or missing portions of a side plate. These conditions are less common, but a huge safety issue. Also consider stiff links. While not a safety issue, they can usually be easily fixed with a bit of oil, and moderate side-to-side (lateral) flexing.

8. You can now turn your attention to the gearing system. If you’re working on a typical derailleur-equipped bike, your foremost concern is the condition known as overshift. That’s when a derailleur guides a chain beyond the largest or smallest sprocket. The chain then falls off, and can quite seriously confound the rider. The general ideas is while ignoring the index shifting (clicking from one distinct position to another), you can tighten the limit screws (two on each derailleur) until the chain quits shifting smoothly into the largest or smallest sprockets, then back the limit screw off. This doesn’t tell the whole story however. Many conditions such as worn chain and sprockets, badly positioned front derailleur, weak or broken derailleur springs, and bent sprockets can cause the chain to fall off even when adjusted to the best of your ability. You can study and practice such repairs, or simply declare the problem to the bike’s owner and refer to a fully-equipped bike shop.

Time permitting, you can adjust the index shifting so the bike works as elegantly as possible. This is not officially a part of a safety tune-up, but will score you big points in terms of reputation and can sometimes be accomplished in less than a minute.

9. One of the major parts of the safety tune-up is to check all the nuts and bolts for tightness. Start at the handlebar, checking handlevers, shifters, any accessories that may be attached, and then the handlebar stem. Cruiser style and highrise handlebars should be checked to be sure they won’t shift position. Check the seat clamp and seat post bolts.

Check that the front wheel is properly attached. Check the rear wheel the same way. Check the cranks (which often come loose and while not a safety issue, are can cause an expensive mechanical failure), pedals, and chainwheel bolts. Check the brakes – every single nut and bolt should be checked on the braking system. Check all fasteners associated with the shifting system. Check all accessories.

See if the bike is properly equipped with reflectors. If not, an artistic application of reflective tape is a good idea, and fairly inexpensive, lightweight, durable, and effective. Suggest proper lighting equipment to the bike’s owner.

10. Test ride the bike. You’re looking for squeaky brakes, improper shifting, and anything idiosyncratic in the ride/steering/handling characteristics. It is common for bike mechanics to baby the bike on the tune-up, in case something goes wrong. That’s not what you want to do. You want to make a fool of yourself if necessary. It is better to look like a ‘bad’ mechanic than to let a safety problem go unresolved. Squeeze those brake levers hard, shift all the way from low to high in one swoop. If something does indeed go wrong, it’s better to happen now, when you can do something about it! Compared to your client’s safety, your own pride is not important!

11. Finally, check that the rider fits the bike properly, is using a helmet, wearing fluorescent or bright clothing, not riding at night unless properly equipped and experienced, knows defensive riding techniques, and ask whether the rider would be willing to talk with others about bike safety.

The Business of This Business

Now, let’s look at some ways to make money with bicycle safety tune-ups.

Probably the first and easiest way is to charge a fixed amount for housecalls. This requires the least expense to set up, since all you need are some basic tools and transportation – a car or bike.

Using the standard methods of putting advertising flyers on local bulletin boards, newspaper classified ads, and business cards, you can establish a business in which people call to set up appointments. Once you start getting enough appointments, you can arrange your days for a minimum of time spent on the road. For instance, you can schedule everyone on the east side of town on Wednesdays, the west side on Thursdays, South County on Fridays, and so on. You really want to encourage people to bring all their family’s and friends’ bikes. Once you’re at a location and set-up, you can knock out safety tune-ups every few minutes. When you establish the appointment, you’ll want to know the approximate number of bikes you’ll be expected to tune.

One way to set it up is to work on a donation basis. All safety tune-ups are free. However, you can accept cash donations to continue your work, you can accept old unwanted bikes that you can fix up and sell (or sell the parts on eBay), books that you can sell on Amazon, and so on. This would be somewhat like an old-time country doctor, who would fix people up, and accept chickens, baskets of corn, and such as payment. By going with the all-donation paradigm, you are able to bring equal safety to all, not just those who can afford to be safe. Interestingly, you may get more in donations than you would have charged. For instance, you may have decided $38 is the right price for a safety tune-up. However, many people may give you $40, $50 or even more.

You can also offer additional services. For instance, to fix a flat tire would be $10 extra. You can offer full tune-ups, including derailleur adjustment, more advanced wheel alignment, and bearing adjustment for an additional charge.

You can set up in a local park if you are working on a donation basis only. This is good advertising, because many people will see you and talk about you. Much better than advertising in local newspapers, for instance. If you set up in a park, and want to charge money, it is best to check with the local police first since there is often a local ordinance against doing something in which money changes hands in public areas. More than likely, when you tell them what you are doing, the police will go all out to support your work.

Taking the donation idea a big step further, you may want to look for a benefactor, sponsor, or a government grant, so you can devote 100% of your time to tune-ups, and not have to pursue money.

Another version of the park idea would be to set up in a cafe or similar venue. Imagine: The cafe benefits because you’ve created a brand new stream of patrons, many of whom may not have visited the cafe before, but they may like it and develop a habit of visiting again frequently. Plus, during the ten minutes you’re tuning a bike, the customer will most likely purchase some food. Book-cafes may work in just the same way, with the added benefit that people will browse and buy books while waiting. The cafe venue is good for you also. It’s a place to work out of the sun and rain, in which you don’t have to pay any rent.

Flea markets and farmer’s markets can be gold mines, especially if you have a lot of local people walking their bikes through the market.

You can go a step further and rent your own commercial space. If you have 1,000 square feet or so, you’d have room to accept donated bikes (or buy used bikes), fix them up, display, and sell them. You could evolve into a full-service bike shop, selling parts, accessories and new bikes.

Or, maybe you already have a bike shop. What would happen in your community if you offered free safety tune-ups during the off-season?

If you are planning to sell used (or new) bikes, and Craigslist operates in your community, you’ll find advertising on Craigs works very well! Here are some tips for working with Craigslist:

1. Due to a recent change, you can post an ad only once every couple of days. But, you can post as many different ads as you want. You’d be primarily interested in the bicycling section. Initially, once every other day, you renew your basic ad for bicycle safety tune-ups. If you’re doing this as a free (or donation) service, you can post another ad selling the same free service in the ‘free’ section of Craigslist, as long as you change all the wording. You can also create up to seven different versions of your ad for each section (bicycling and free), so you can renew one everyday, and stay near the top of the listings. Saturating craigslist to this degree may be technically possible, but it is not a neighborly thing to do. You’ll start getting complaints or getting flagged (ad removed) from people who have seen too much of your advertising.

You can also consider shifting into different categories on Craigs from time to time. You might spend a week in “services” and you could post something relevant in “items wanted” from time to time (like, “donate you unwanted bikes to provide free safety tune-ups”). Of course posting in off-topic areas is best leveraged by making sure your posting also states your primary function: bicycle safety tune-ups and how the readers can find out more.

2. If you sell used bikes out of your garage or backyard, this is a big opportunity on craigslist, because you can post a separate ad for each bike (within reason).

Don’t forget to delete your ads as soon as the specific bikes sell.

3. If you have more than a half-dozen bikes available most of the time, you’ll probably want to make your own website. You can register an easy-to-remember, and easy-to-type domain name at Godaddy for as little as $3/year. Most ISPs (your Internet service provider) give you free space to build websites. For instance, Comcast gives you 10 megabytes of contiguous space. This is plenty for a website that sells used bikes. Or, you can do it blogger-style for free.

I’d recommend a home page with basic information at the top, such as your name or your business name, phone number and email address. Then a sentence that explains what you do, maybe something like this: “Call or write to schedule your free bicycle safety tune-up. We accept donated used bikes, fix them up, and sell them here to support our program.” Also, invite people to bookmark your website, and tell everyone they know about it. Oddly enough, this invitation brings quite a bit more business.

Then start right in with a table of available bikes. Each can have a thumbnail image, small description and price. The thumbnails can be clicked on to see larger pictures. You’ll probably want to limit your larger pictures to 800 x 600 pixels so people using grainier screen resolutions can see the whole bike at once, and so the download times on slow connections will be reasonable. Thumbnails work well when they are around 160 x 120 pixels.

Now, all you need to do is get people to see your website. Each bike you advertise on Craigslist should have a link to your website. That way, if the bike they see on Craigs isn’t quite right, they’ll find one that is.

If you don’t have craigslist in your community, you can do the usual thing: yellow pages ad (expensive, and not required), small newspaper ads (classifieds almost always work better than bigger, more expensive display ads), business cards, and flyers on local bulletin boards. After a while, word-of-mouth will do the job work for you.

If you can manage to do something content-rich or eccentric in a positive way on your website, it will soon advertise itself. Everyone will tell everyone else what you have, and they’ll all click on over and take a look. It can have a cascading effect that could literally result in millions of hits. Imagine: Let’s say ten people come to your site, and they’re all fascinated. They each tell 5 others who come take a look. So now you have had 60 viitors. They all tell 5 others, and so then you have 360 visitors – and it just keeps growing. It generally takes considerable thinking and experimentation to build this effect, but it’s well worth the effort. I have often explained this to website owners, and they just don’t get it. Eccentric doesn’t mean paint a bike purple and take its picture. Who’s going to care about that? It doesn’t mean filling a car with sand and inviting the local disk jockeys to a press conference. It means something truly eccentric. Something that strikes a chord in the visitors – enough so that they’d want to take a minute to email their friends about your website. For instance, I once posted some shocking news: I declared a certain road that was a favorite weekend ride as unsafe, and went on to explain why (because it was heavily driven, curvy and narrow without places to safely drive around bikes). That got a lot of attention. No doubt you can come up with something better than that, however.

What if you don’t have any experience or interest in building a website, doing publicity, arranging advertising, or that sort of stuff? This is where a partner can be invaluable. You can offer a portion of your profits to someone who is willing to do the things you don’t want to do. However, when you set up a partnership, make sure there is an easy and amicable way to break it up later on, should the need arise. You’d be amazed how often partnerships end for one reason or another. You want to insure right up front, with honest communication (and written communication) that you can save your brilliant business if you can no longer function well with your partner.

To advertise without a website, the most cost-effective ways are to put up flyers on local bulletin boards (the natural food store in your neighborhood is probably the very best place), and hand out lots of business cards. You should also makes a sign you can place on the ground if you’re working out of a park or flea market-like setting, and signs on your bike trailer, car, or truck. Don’t be surprised if during a housecall, you get one or more neighbors who’d like to work on their bikes, too, if you have such signs.

I’d like to recommend considering complete tune-ups as well as, or instead of just safety tune-ups, especially if you are doing housecalls. It seems to me that the perceived value of a safety tune-up is between $15-$25, while a full tune-up is valued as high as $80 (more typically $45 – $60). So, in your advertising, you could say something like, “While I’m there to do a safety tune-up, I might as well give you a full tune up, including wheel alignment, bearing adjustment, and adjustment of the derailleurs,” and of course you can then charge more money for a more complete job. But, the few minutes extra the extra work requires is well more than made up for by the fact you can charge twice as much money.

Tool List

What tools to carry? This would be a minimum set:

Portable repair stand (also known as ‘workstand’) Park makes several good models for reasonable prices.

#2 Philips, medium large (5/16″ x 12″) flat-blade, small (3/16 x 6″) flat blade screwdriver.

Combination wrench set from 8 to 17 millimeter (make sure it has a 15mm included).

Pedal wrench.

Crank bolt wrench or 3/8″ socket set with thin-wall 14 & 15mm sockets.

Well, you should have a 3/8″ socket set anyway. It should also have 1/2-inch and 9/16-inch sockets.

Fairly hefty wire cutting pliers (12″ “Kleins” or ‘diagonal cutters’) or cable cutter.

Spoke wrench(es) for 14 & 15 ga spoke nipples.

Tire pump with built-in gauge.

Long-nose pliers.

Large tongue & groove (“Channellock”) pliers.

2-8mm allen (hex) wrenches.

6″ adjustable wrench (for a quick bolt check, this is much faster than individual wrenches)

Tire levers (no doubt you’ll be asked to fix flat tires from time to time, and of course you can charge extra for that service).

Sprocket chain wrench.

A small folding table.

Swiss Army knife.

Medium ball-pien hammer.

Pin punch, drift punch.

Small & large rubber mallet.

An Initial Inventory

Patch kit and spare inner tubes. (27 x 1-1/4 Schraeder valve, 27 x 1 Schraeder valve, 27 x 1 Presta Valve, and/or 700 x 20c through 700 x 35c Presta valve, 26 x 1.75 Schraeder valve, 24 x 1.75 Schraeder valve, 20 x 1.75 Schraeder valve, 16 x 1.75 Schraeder valve)

Tires: 27 x 1-1/4, 700 x 25c, 700 x 32c, 27 x 1-1/8, 26 x 2.125, 26 x 1.50/1.75, 24 x 1.75, 20 x 1.75, 16 x 1.75.

Brake pads.

Chain & general purpose oil.

Grease.

Rubber gloves.

Cleaning supplies.

Handlebar grips.

Universal brake and derailleur cable wires, and cable housing.

5mm x 0.8mm x 1cm screws (water bottle & carrier screws).

A few assorted brake cable anchor bolts.

Cable tie wraps.

Of course, you can expand on this inventory list. You may find it quite beneficial to have some attractive accessories for sale.

Have fun, prosper, and keep cyclists safe! – Jeff

 

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