She took it home and asked me if I could fix it.
I like to imagine that I am pretty handy so I said, “Of course!”
The rear wheel had a flat tire. I remembered changing a tire back when I was 16 so I was pretty certain I could do that.
I started by taking the rear wheel off. That took a little bit of finicky work, but I got it.
As I was doing that I noticed that the chain was pretty rusted. I did some work on chains last summer so I figured I could replace that pretty easily. I also noticed that the gears on the rear wheel were pretty badly rusted. If I was replacing the chain why not replace the gears? It couldn’t be that hard could it?
So I went shopping for spare parts. The bike shop in town wasn’t open on a Saturday (?) so I ended up driving to the next town over. I got a new chain, a new set of gears, a new inner tube, and a couple of tools.
I proceeded to try to take things apart. Youtube helped, but mostly I discovered that trying to make do with the tools I had wouldn’t work. I needed to go buy some specialized tools. It was late in the day, so I stopped. I also broke my chain tool.
During the next week I went shopping again, found out I had purchased the wrong set of gears, got the correct tools and the correct parts.
Next Saturday I started in on the bike again. After an hour of fighting with the old wheel, I gave up. Drove back to the store for the third time and bought a new wheel. They guy in the store asked me if I wanted him to put the wheel, tube, tire, and gears together. I said, “Sure!” I watched him assemble, in fifteen minutes, what I had been struggling with for two weeks. Then I took the wheel home, mounted it on the bike, put the new chain on, and got the bike working.
My son was riding the bike on Sunday and it worked.
His “free” bike only cost:
- 3 trips to the store
- 6 hours of work (I think!)
- A new wheel, inner tube, freewheel gear sprocket, and chain
- A busted old tool
- 4 new tools, one of which was stripped while working on it.
What’s more, the front wheel is really rusty and I’m afraid it may have a leak, the gear shifters don’t really work all that well, in fact he only has access to about 6 of the 21 gears, the rear brakes don’t work great, and the seat probably should be replaced too.
Quite frankly, I think that if I had put the same effort into Kijiji I bet I could have bought a decent used bike for the same amount of money I spent fixing up this free one and done it in less time.
Now, this blog isn’t about fixing bikes, it’s about Christian education.
I think this applies in quite a few places in our schools, but there’s one place in particular that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about.
Curriculum.
There are so many free tools and options out there that it’s really easy to turn to teachers and tell them to go a build something themselves using whatever they can find. It can be done, I know, I’ve been doing it for years. So have lots of other teachers.
But I think we can do better. In fact, we have, in the past. I think it’s time we do it again.