Filed under: Anecdotes
While at Wright Bros I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to assemble many new bikes out of the box. We didn’t sell complete bikes per se, I assembled many bikes there, more from the ground up though. The few “new” bikes I did put together at Wright Bros were completely disassembled and reassembled substituting the minimal factory grease with proper amounts, checked bolt tightness all over, greased cables, trued wheels, repacked hubs, etc. Pretty thorough.
Where I’m at now I try to assemble new bikes with a similar thoroughness, checking all elements of the “factory” assembly, but leaving some as is if they pass my inspection. I don’t place any little annoying stickers on components that “pass” however. Part of my inspection is thoroughly removing the stickers the manufacturing factory places all over the bike. Recently some of our Jamis bikes have arrived with little numbered stickers on the braking surface of the rims. Not a big deal to remove, just annoying. As are the ones on the wheel’s reflectors. Seems excessive, albeit contradictory when the handlebar reflector is dangling looses with a missing binder bolt. Where was Wang on that one?
This pedal can somehow "pass" inspection.
Assembling these bikes sometimes brings up questiona as to the manufacturing process. I’d love to visit one of these factories one day. Our Chinese or Taiwanese friends in the factory are thorough in sticker placement, but are oftentimes over-casual when it comes to actual working cable tension on the derailleurs. Or how about the time I assembled a Marin and noticed an oddly placed inspection sticker on the backside of the fork, below the headset. The dust seal was mangled and crimped, hanging half outside of the bearing. I guess the sticker was just to alert me to this mistake. Procuring a new dust seal and rebuilding the headset kept that bike off the showroom floor for a few days. With or without that sticker, I’m sure I would have noticed the crunchiness in the headset bearings. While not always this bad, nearly every manufacturer I’ve assembled have had some odd incongruities that needed correcting.
At Wright Bros, we would joke about the factory workers where the manufacturing is done. Blaming Wang with some Asian manufactured component, or Giuseppe with some Campagnolo hub (yeah, that never happened), or perhaps when we’d see a defect in a Velocity rim (once what looked like a small curly hair in the powdercoat): “Angus had one too many Foster’s on his lunch break, eh!” All in good fun of course.
It is up to us, the shop mechanics to vet these components and bikes. Making sure the end user is satisfied and safe with their purchase. This is why the bike boxes asserts that only a trained mechanic should assemble the bike. Yeah, and depending on the manufacturer, the box also says the tools required are merely two screwdrivers, and a crescent wrench. Believe me, I use more than three tools to dial these bikes in, and beyond tightening the reflectors, I don’t use any of those three.
That's it, two cable crimps, nothing else.
Yeah, bike assembly is an odd task sometimes. The things you find, the questionable “efficiency” in the factory process: two cable crimps in a taped bag all to themselves. A pedal without threads? Definitely dubious.
Two screwdrivers and an adjustable wrench
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