I took my bike in for service. I specified two problems. I could tell the guy was not paying attention to one of them, so I explained it again. I emphasized that it was a noise from the crank, and would only be apparent in a hard ride (e.g., uphill). He assured me that they always gave bikes a good test ride to identify problems.
He said the bike would be done Tuesday. It wasn't.
When it was done, I went in. He had no clue about the crank problem. He said he wasn't there when they did the repairs -- which apparently means he did not write down what I told him twice. But they would have detected it anyway, if they had taken the bike for a good test ride as promised. So apparently that didn't happen either.
What they did try to fix was a problem with the rear shifter. He had said something about it when I took the bike in. I had told him that this was not one of the two problems that I had in mind. But they fixed it anyway. Apparently they replaced the shifter or the cable. That cost me $38. I might have been able to fix it with WD-40. The bike is eight years old, and not worth much on the market. I don't want to pay to replace everything that could be replaced on it.
They must have done something to the front shifter too, but it seems they did not take the bike for a good test ride after doing their repairs. When I took it out, on the first ride, the front derailleur was sometimes failing to get the chain onto the large front sprocket.
When he explained the repairs at the time of pickup, he said they had bent an aluminum part back into place. It's normally not a good idea to bend aluminum back and forth: it breaks easily. I hadn't noticed anything that needed bending.
What I had actually said, when I took the bike in, was that it had two problems. One was the crank problem (above). The other was that the chain was skipping sometimes under load. The guy assumed this was due to a problem with the shifter. But I told him clearly that it was not: the bike was in gear X before the skip; the chain skipped; and the bike was still in gear X after the skip. Not a shifting issue!
There was another worker standing nearby, when I picked up the bike, but apparently nobody was authorized to take responsive measures in real time. Their authorization (or perhaps their concern) appeared to be limited to telling me that, in effect, I could just write it off as a wasted trip, leave the bike for another week, and hope they would get it right. I think the better strategy would have been for them to use the telephone, a day or two after I dropped the bike off; tell me what a real test ride had revealed; and confirm what they were going to do. This seemed reasonable; it was what would happen if I dropped the car off to have a mechanic figure out why it was making an unfamiliar noise.
The owner responded to this review, and so did another employee. I emailed a reply to the latter. He didn't reply. The owner tried again. Eventually we spoke. He seemed very motivated to get things done right. We talked for 15 minutes. I told him I'd raise this review from one star to three, and maybe at some point I'd take the bike back and they could try again.
Based on what I understood from the owner, it still wasn't entirely clear that the guys in the shop were acknowledging any errors or arrogance -- in which case it seemed I had done the right thing to take the bike home and basically give up on them. I may take it back there at some point, or I may just go elsewhere. But in any case, I did appreciate the owner's effort. read more