I am a real newbie when it comes to bike repair. I am just getting to grips with adjusting the gears by myself, which is of course actually really straightforward. I would like to learn a few more key repairs so I am not reliant on the bike shop so much. It could be a life-saver out on the road, too.

Like all new areas of learning, it all seems so overwhelming and mysterious. However I have no doubt that given a bit of time and practice (on my old bike :)), most repairs to a bike , even major ones can be done at home. The bike is a pretty simple machine, after all.

I would like to build up some “bike repair for idiots” resources on these pages (from my own wealth of experience!) in the future. In the meantime, I have collected together a few pages that I have found very useful, containing some great resources on bike repair and maintenance. Some of them are bike shops too, which is fine - they are adding a useful resource and getting extra traffic that way. I don’t have any affiliation to any of them though!

Park Tool USA - use the selector to find the area of the bike you need info on. Nice simple explanations, which do not assume you know what you are doing! This site finally helped me crack the whole concept of adjusting gears. Here was the key for me: indexing is a seperate adjustment from the limit screws - you can and maybe should make the latter adjustment just by manually tensioning the cables. Now why didn’t someone just explain that before?!
Utah Mountain Biking - a much less polished site, but with a lot of resources which you can choose from the left-hand menu.

Sheldon Brown - the one and only, and original. Rather chaotic site, but judging by its Pagerank, very well linked-to. A lot of off-beat stuff on here, like how to make a single-speed bike etc. But some useful repair tips too.

Happy fixing (and remember, there is always the bike shop at the end of the day )

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