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Title: Bicycling Magazine's Complete Guide to Bicycle Maintenance and Repair for Road and Mountain Bikes by Jim Langley ISBN: 1579540090 Publisher: Rodale Press Pub. Date: May, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.33
Rating: 4
Summary: Good beginner guide to fixing your bike
Comment: Its a good book for beginners like myself, but I wish it showed more detail photos!
Rating: 3
Summary: A little job done with a lot of pain
Comment: After using this book to fix both the derailleurs, and the brakes on my bike, I can say that it does the job I bought it for. It explained me how to do it. But it's done in a very awkward way. What this 350 page book does can be accomplished in 50 pages of illustrations and clear instructions.
1) The book is repetitive, contains too many words, and too little detail. It's filled with ``common sense'' which nobody, especially somebody about to fix his/her bike needs! It seems the author did not realize he was writing a technical book! In each chapter, the book goes on to tell you how do to certain things, without any matching pictures! You can realize the pain, and obviously, it gets very wordy, and puts much more stress on imagination than one needs while fixing a bike. Then, it provides you with several pages describing basically the same thing, this time with pictures. Very repetitive -- this shouldn't be a problem, one might think, but some information is only present in one part, while other information is only present in the other. Given what I said earlier about the prodigious common sense of the author, the book makes one read A LOT OF ... stuff, which nobody needs.
2) The pictures. It seems, that the publisher has brought together a lot of technical info, and then assigned a non-technical team to write the book. WRONG MOVE. The pictures are mostly photographs, without any pointers, numbers, or other precise indication of what is what. Good drawings are very rare, good drawings with numbers on them are even more rare, and the numbers on those drawing are almost never referenced in text? Was this book written by a journalist? To make it even worse, all the pictures are black-and-white, most taken at awfull angles, with awfull lights -- a pain to distinguish what's in there.
For example there is a large BW picture of instruments at the beginning of the book, with a lot of instrumets. Very interesting, but the book does not say which is which, the toolsin the picture are not numbered, and when the books goes on to describe the tools you need, there is no connection with the previous page.
And the way-too-often comments, about visiting a local bicycle shop are irritating. It's enough to say this once, yet this happens to be repeated once in every paragraph.
I only gave this book a *** because after a lot of headache, and figuring it out, you can actually get a simple job done.
Rating: 5
Summary: All types of bikes covered in one source with great pix!
Comment: This is an excellent book on the maintenance and repair of all bicycles.
Each of the 17 chapters discusses one component of the bike, such as rear derailleurs, front derailleurs, brakes, wheels, suspension, frame and others. Each chapter begins with a drawn illustration of the system, which is followed by a text description of the system and maintenane and repair of the system. This is followed by a troubleshooting section listing common problems and their solutions. But the best part of each chapter are the step-by-step procedures with excellent black-and-white photographs of each step.
In addition to discussing bike systems, there are chapters on creating a home workshop and even how to box a bike. (Exactly how my bike came from its manufacturer!)
There's really not a lot more to ask for from this book. The main complaint is that some of it seems a little out-of-date despite its 1999 copyright date, and I regret now that I did not list examples as they struck me, but a minor one, for example, was ignorance of 10-speed cassettes. However, some bicycle components are changing rapidly, and it's difficult for authors to keep up. Note that this is the 4th "expanded and revised" edition, so it does appear that the editors of Bicycling have made a commitment to update the book regularly.
I also got bogged down some times in the text description of procedures without pictures, but everything is clear when you get back into the step-by-step procedure section with the photographs. So it also seems that information is unnecessarily repeated.
Bicycling magazine has run articles on how to get home from different types of roadside breakdowns. It would be nice if they include this as one separate chapter that can be read before a trip. The rest of the book lends itself to a "only read the chapter I need at the moment" type of use. You don't need to read through the whole book to understand chapter 15 on saddles, for example.
I have also read and reviewed Complete Idiot's Guide to Bike Maintenance and Repair, and despite its knowledgable author and fun style, did not have step-by-step illustrations which are required for such a book. Others have also recommended the books by Zinn and Van Der Plas, and I have seen them and they look good, but separate books are written by each author for road bikes and mountain bikes, while this book is one reference for all bikes.
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