The maintenance evening happened on the last Tuesday before the clocks went back, in the bike shed with the doors propped open and one work lamp doing most of the labour. Around twenty bicycles came through, and the same four faults appeared on nearly all of them.
Half the bicycles that arrived had a rear light that worked when shaken and a front light aimed at the treetops. Both are legal problems and practical ones, and both take two minutes. The advice given all evening was to move to a hub dynamo if the bicycle is your daily transport, because the failure mode of a battery light is that it fails in November on a cycle bridge in the rain, at the exact moment you would rather it did not.
For everyone staying with batteries, the fix is duplication rather than brightness. A second small rear light on the bag or the seatpost costs almost nothing and means one dead battery is an annoyance rather than a walk home. Aim the front light at the road roughly ten metres ahead. Pointing it higher does not help you and blinds the person coming the other way on a two-directional path. Keep the spare light in a jacket pocket rather than a pannier, because a cold battery often recovers once it has been somewhere warm.
The city salts the cycle paths generously, and salt does to a bicycle roughly what you would expect. Cables corrode inside their housings, rim brake pads collect grit and start sanding the rim, and the chain turns a shade of orange by February. By March the cables are usually the first thing any workshop suggests replacing. Every second bicycle on the evening had brake cables stiff enough that the lever returned slowly, which the owner had adjusted to without noticing.
The whole winter routine is one bucket of lukewarm water, a brush, a rinse and a dry chain lubricant afterwards, once a fortnight. Wet lubricant holds grit and makes things worse. On rim brakes, look at the pads under the work lamp and dig out the embedded fragments with a thin screwdriver, because those fragments are what turn a rim into a wear item before spring. Ten minutes a fortnight is straightforwardly cheaper than a new chain in April.
Slightly lower pressure than summer gives a more forgiving contact patch on wet cobbles and painted road markings, which are the genuinely slippery surfaces here rather than ice. Nobody recommended studded tyres for a normal commute; the paths are cleared quickly and the few bad mornings are better handled by taking the bus than by riding a bicycle that has been heavy for four months. Painted road markings and polished cobbles after rain account for nearly every fall anybody described that evening.
Full mudguards were the evening's least glamorous advice and its most repeated. A proper rear flap keeps the person behind you dry and keeps road salt off your own drivetrain. Crossing the bridges with the wind off the water, the difference between a bicycle with mudguards and one without is the difference between arriving at work and arriving at work needing to change. Somebody also pointed out that a rear flap is the cheapest available method of not being resented on a busy path.
Three bicycles were turned away, gently. Two had bottom brackets that needed a workshop and a press, and one had a cracked frame near the seat tube that its owner had been watching for a year and hoping about. The volunteers were clear that the evening exists for cables, lights, brakes and chains, not for structural optimism about aluminium. All three owners left with the name of a workshop and, in one case, a fairly firm opinion about continuing to ride it in the meantime.
The shed keeps a small stock of cables, brake pads and inner tubes bought collectively, and the tin on the bench paid for most of the replacements again. Next evening is planned for the same week in autumn. Bring the bicycle dirty; it is easier to see what is worn when nobody has polished it in the hallway first. Anybody who wants to help should say so during the autumn rather than on the evening itself.
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