clean bikes, clean shop

Imagine eating at a restaurant where the food is served on soiled plates, the silverware has caked-on bits of food from previous diners’ meals, and the dish room is visible from your table as you eat food that was cooked using pots and pans that never get cleaned. Of course, you would run from a place like this and any modern country’s health department would shut down such an establishment before someone gets sick.

With a bicycle shop, no one need worry that a dirty shop is going to make them ill, but a clean, organized, well-lit bicycle shop fills them with confidence. Everything from floor to the work tables to the tools to the mechanics themselves should be kept relatively tidy. bicycle mechanics should look and work like technicians, not greasy shop rats. Think of your service area as an operating room: stuff comes in dirty and in need of repair and comes out as good as new.

Tools should be easily accessible, either on a peg board system or a chest of drawers. Each tool should be in it’s right place, clean, and in good working order. Ask yourself the following:

1. When were your torque wrenches last calibrated? A precision tool such as this is of no use if it’s been used hundreds of times, dropped a few times, and left wound-up for days or longer and you are not certain it is going to give you an accurate, consistent amount of torque.
2. Do any of your hand tools have blunt edges when they should be sharp, or un-precise flats on your spanners that will slip on precision flat edges? Worn-out bottom bracket cup tools will tear up a BB in seconds. Blunt philips heads and allen keys slip inside bolts and strip the heads. Blown-out cone wrenches make precision adjustments on cup-and-cone hubs impossible.
3. Do battery powered tools have fresh batteries, backups, and a reliable way to recharge them? Cordless drills for removing seized bolts and spinning hones are great, but if you have to wait for a battery to charge, you are wasting time and money.
4. How many workstations do you have? What tools should every mechanic have readily available and what can be shared? Do other people borrow a mechanic’s tools, and how likely is each mechanic to gouge out the eyeballs of anyone who removes something from that work area?

I will be the first to admit that I am horrible about cluttering my work area with tools as I work, so do as I say and not as I do. Every work area should have a sign that reads, “use a tool, put it back.” Do not let anyone to allow tools and parts to pile up on a work table, on the floor, in apron pockets, in trays, etc. The work area quickly goes from being an operating room to a battlefield triage tent, complete with blood and screaming, when tools aggregate in inappropriate places a work area rather than in their designated places. If you see tools piling up, say something. If they are your tools, stop at convenient moments in your work to put all of your tools in their right places. If you are the boss, make your employees do push-ups every time they are caught with more than three tools on their table. Find creative ways to keep everyone accountable for cleanliness.

When walking into a bike shop, no one wants to see other peoples’ used, dirty bicycles on the sales floor. Think of these as your dirty dishes. No one wants to see, hear, or smell the dish room while they peruse the menu. Customers who have dropped off their bikes with you also don’t want other people pawing at their bikes while they are in your care, so put them away somewhere safe and forgotten until they are ready for pick-up.

Don’t lean a bike against a wall, counter, or any other solid object. It’s likely to fall over and, just your luck, clip something on it’s way down and scuff the paint, nick a saddle, or trip someone. When you are not working on a bike it should be hung from a hook, wedged into a bike storage apparatus, or suspended in a work stand. Don’t give the shop graemlins a chance to knock your customers’ bikes over.

Likewise, clutter and misplaced products make a shop look like grandpa’s tool shed rather than a professional place where highly-trained technicians work on bicycles. If you have products for sale in the shop area, merchandise them as such. Tubes, cables, brake pads, ferrules, brake fluid, bearings, spokes… hide those in a cabinet or around a corner where the only people who see them are those who are using them. For all the general public needs to know, mechanics make those things appear from a Star Fleet Replicator.

Finally, when a customer picks up a bike that has been worked on, the first thing they will notice is what the bike looks like. When it rolls back to their loving arms, they won’t be able to tell if it shifts, suspends, and stops better than when they dropped it off, but they will likely notice a lack of grime on the rims, shiny fork stanchions, a clean chain, or a candy-coated appearance of a clean, polished frame. You can’t get every bike looking like a beauty contestant, but you can make it look better than it came in. Include a quick wipe-down of the frame and fork with even the most basic service. If cleaning is part of a tune-up service, get the bike spotless! They will take notice and perhaps take better care of their bikes in the future, or just bring it back to you more often for that new-bike look they miss.