Essential Road Bike Maintenance Handbook
By Todd Downs with Brian Fiske (Rodale paperback, February), 166 pages, $14.99
This little book — 5 by 7 inches and only about 5/ 16 of an inch thick — likely will slip into a backpack or saddlebag. Does that mean the type’s tiny? Do they expect baby boomers to carry reading glasses when they go for a bike ride?
Sure, but that’s a common-sense practice even if one doesn’t plan on reading a small book. Have you looked at the dials on frame pumps? Those readouts are not designed with presbyopia in mind. The good news is this book’s design includes enough white space, double spacing, color coding and boldfaced section dividers that it’s not hard to find the topic you want to study.
Chapter topics progress from the front of the bike to the back, so if you aren’t patient enough to use a table of contents, it’s not hard to guess where in the book a topic might be found.
Yes, but look at the opening pages: small words in the sea of white space. Don’t tell me the designer couldn’t have bumped up the point size without adding pages.
Let it go.
So how useful will this book be?
The little book is mostly about maintenance. Maintenance isn’t usually done by the side of road. But you could carry the book for emergencies, though, because having some background about the broken parts you’re looking at can be helpful.
The illustrations are instructive and the text includes URLs for how-to videos.
And it’s lovely to imagine a bicycle tourist relaxing in his camping hammock before the sun goes down by reading about how to use a chainwhip tool. Of course, any repair requiring the use of a chainwhip tool would most likely have to wait until you got the bicycle home.
But can’t folks pull out their cellphones to look up repair information on the Internet?
Sure, but the planet still includes areas without Internet access.
Is the book well-enough organized to be useful in a hurry?
Each chapter includes a “troubleshooting” section. Let’s say you’re riding with buddies and everyone stops to eat a snack. After dismounting, you let your bike drop to the ground a little too carelessly. When you set out again, one of your pedals wobbles.
You can pull out this book, look up “Troubleshooting Pedals” and read that you’ve probably bent the pedal shaft, which can lead to ankle problems, and that you will need a new spindle part or a new pedal or a new pedal set.
Is that something you can fix by the side of the road?
That depends upon who “you” are. If you’re the driver of the sag wagon, maybe so. But then he would have his own, normal size book