Hello and welcome back to the Pink Bike Podcast. I'm Mike Casmer. I'm joined by Matt Beer, Stefan Pelletier, and we've got a special edition for you where we actually have Calvin Jones from Park Tool, me chatting with him, interviewing him, because if you haven't heard the news, he's retiring after, I think it's 28 years, well over 20 years with Park Tool. A lot of you have probably Googled how to fix something on my bike,

and Mr. Jones showed up and told you how to do it on YouTube. So we're going to chat with him

about modern bike mechanics and his time at Park. And yeah, so sit back, enjoy this conversation,

and we'll come back to you in a little bit with some reader questions. Today we have a very special

guest. We have Calvin Jones. He's a director of education at Park Tool, and he recently announced his retirement after

28 years with Park. Now many of you out there have probably seen Calvin, maybe heard his voice,

if you ever Googled how to fix something on your bike. He's the man in all Park Tools videos

for the last many, many years and educated millions of people on how to fix their bikes the right way.

So I thought it would be a good chance to get Calvin on, talk about some of his backstory, his plans for the future,

and kind of what he's learned over all these years as being a high-level professional mechanic.

So welcome, welcome to the podcast, Calvin. Well, it's good to be here on the pink. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, it's good to see you. I feel like every year, I usually see you at Seattle every year. That's a, you're manning the park booth. Usually have a little headset in, just doing educational demos. There's always a crowd. Right, right. And meeting one-on-one with people is good education and that,

we're going to talk about this aspect later, but education in a profession,

and every person that comes to you can be your educator.

It's the screaming 12-year-old that has a race in five minutes or the,

you know, the old-timer whose crank fell off or anything. You know, it's a good education

being on the other side. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you can definitely, you can learn from the people that bring you a, the puzzlers, the stumpers, you know, you've never seen. How did you manage to do that? You'll learn from the ways that people do things the wrong way. Yeah. Before we get too deep into it, we should just do a little quick back story. I know you've been on a few podcasts recently, so this might be old hat, but I just kind of want to let people know where you came from, how you got to be where you

are. So let's start at the very beginning. What was, how did you even get into biking? Yeah, the long cabin

was in Colorado. So Gubwood Springs up in the mountains, eventually in the Littleton going to school

there, Rappalo High School, got into bikes through a buddy who just said,

you got, you got to get a bike.

He raced, he eventually raced bikes.

And that was just road stuff then.

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