The Modern State of Bike Repair According to Calvin Jones
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2023
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Calvin Jones is the Director of Education at Park Tool company, a position he’s held for more than 15 years. He’s the author of the Big Blue Book Bicycle Repair and his repair videos on YouTube have been viewed by millions.
We ask Calvin:
- How did you learn how to work on bikes?
- What type of riding do you like to do?
- Do mountain bikes require more or less repair and maintenance than other types of bikes?
- Are today’s bikes easier to work on than the bikes 10 or 20 years ago?
- Do bike manufacturers do a good job considering maintenance and repair when they design new products?
- Are Torx bolts taking over hex bolts?
- Which repairs are your least favorite?
- Will future bike mechanics need electrical skills, or is diagnosing and repairing electronic components something manufacturers will want to control?
- What’s the effect of YouTube videos like yours that help folks make repairs themselves at home?
Check out the Park Tool YouTube channel and parktool.com.
Programming note: For 2023 the Singletracks podcast will be published on Tuesdays each week instead of Monday.
✏️ A written transcript of this conversation will be available at singletracks.com.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Something unexpected has arrived in Happy Meal. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Hello Kitty and friends are teaming up for the ultimate collab. |
| 0:08.0 | Joining your little ones on a fun-fueled adventure. Some fun, some food, it's all inside this Happy Meal. |
| 0:16.0 | Until the 2nd of February from 11am includes one pre-selected book or toy whilst it's last. |
| 0:20.0 | Hey everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. |
| 0:23.5 | My name is Jeff, and today my guest is Calvin Jones. |
| 0:27.6 | Calvin is the Director of Education at Park Tool Company, a position he's held for more than 15 years. |
| 0:34.4 | He's the author of The Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair, and his repair videos on YouTube |
| 0:40.2 | have been viewed by millions. Thanks for joining us, Calvin. Well, thanks for having us here. |
| 0:46.5 | Yeah. Tell us a bit about your background. How'd you learn to work on bikes? |
| 0:51.4 | Oh, how do someone learn anything? |
| 0:56.5 | Jumping in and doing stuff right away is important. |
| 1:00.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:01.6 | Yeah, bike repair and bike stuff, you go through life and the stream cuts many channels, and you know, you look back on it. |
| 1:12.8 | It seems, oh, it's obvious I was going to end up here. |
| 1:15.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:16.6 | At a young age, my dad was a snap on tool dealer. |
| 1:22.3 | Okay. |
| 1:23.4 | Which was fun, which is to me and my brother was basically a big point truck to us because all |
| 1:28.8 | these shiny steel, you know, ding, ting, ting, and sharp stuff. And then, you know, hey, you |
| 1:35.0 | kids, get out of get out of there. What are you kids going? It was fun. So he was a car mechanic |
| 1:42.0 | and a tool salesman. So in the garage, of course, his own tools, we got to play with and nuts and bolts. |
| 1:48.2 | So that was actually a big, I didn't know it until later, but a big, big start as a young kid, just playing with stuff, just, you know, not fixing anything, but just taking stuff apart. |
... |
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