Originally Posted by
02Giant
No one has suggested "never" checking maintenance items.
It is completely unnecessary to go through a thorough maintenance list before every ride, unless you ride junk.
I specified in my post what I check and when. As you can see, every ride I only check the bare minimums: tires, brakes, drivetrain (and fork on the mountain bike).
I think that's more than reasonable. And, as I specified in my post, I also think that it's reasonable to do more through checks periodically, depending on how much you ride.
Some of the people I ride with are professional maintenance avoiders. And I've seen everything from them: brake pads that finally wear out the first day of a multi-day adventure (and they didn't carry spares, of course), cables snapping in the middle of nowhere, forks found with little or no pressure just before a ride... and I could go on and on.
I may be a bit paranoid if you want, but in the last 13 years I can only remember one time when I had to abort a ride and call someone to pick me up, and the cause was that I got sick and started to throw up. The bike was perfect, as usual.