beng1

A number of years ago someone in a local classified advertised a Mangoose bicycle for sale. Of course it was a Mongoose, but they spelled it wrong or had a typo they did not care to correct. But ever since then a buddy and myself have had fun calling various bicycle brands by the wrong spellings they are advertised as in local classifieds instead of their real names, and there is always plenty of them.

Anyway a few days ago I pulled this Mangoose out of a trash pile someone had put out to the curb. I thought I could fix it up and give it to some neighborhood kid that needed a bike and have fun in the process. It looked like its only problem was brakes that did not work, the front brake having a broken lever. The original lever had a plastic clamp/pivot and had snapped in half. So the search for a replacement began.

I saw another cheap 20" bike of similar quality in a dumpster by a local scrapyard while on a ride, but there was a sign saying they had video surveillance and they were closed, and I did not have the tools with me so that did not work out.

I drove to Target, WalMart and Bert's Bikes and the big-box stores had nothing and Bert's wanted $15 for a single brake lever assembly.

The dumpster at a local cycle shop had a pair of 7-speed Shimano rapid-fire shift/bake combos sitting in it. After a while I got the idea of cutting the shifter mechanism off one of these so that only the brake lever part was left, I looked at it and it seemed like it would work so got the band-saw and a hand-file and sharpie marker out and the result was pretty good. It fit on the Mangoose well and looked fine, and now it has a front brake.

So I figure if I count my time driving and riding around looking for a brake lever, then the time cutting down the Shimano item and fiddling with it, I only have about $300 invested in the Mangoose so far. Another few hundred dollars worth of time and it will be ready for some youngster to enjoy for the summer before throwing out on their curb on trash night once again. !!!

Koyote

tl;dr

shelbyfv

beng1

Yesterday I cut the other rapid-fire up and made a matching brake lever for the right side. Next will go dumpster-diving again and try to find a cable long enough to work the rear brakes, I am doing away with the freestyle brake mechanism that let's you rotate the bars 360 degrees because it is not quality and does not work well enough to let the rear brake be effective. Since I had one lever under my belt, cutting up the other rapid-fire assembly went more quickly, so maybe only another hundred bucks labor dumped in.

tomato coupe

You’ve got 40 hours of labor in this project already?

beng1

Today I gave the bike to a group of kids playing basketball in the city park on my block. Got it out of my hair and the kids were having fun with it. Now I can move to the 5843th project on my list.

soyabean

Fixing up dumpster finds can only be done after one collects about a dozen of them first, so on the 13th one, it's a sure bet you'll find whatever it needs off the first 12.

I admit there is a thrill in restoring/repairing a bike that has been rescued from its ashes, I make sure I achieve the same with only resellable bikes that I can flip fast so I get paid and paid well for it. I won't go into details of my business, but it starts with avoiding anything that sucks my time and makes me spend money.

mstateglfr 

This is...insane.
How do you have $300 invested in the bike? You garbage picked the bike, you garbage picked the brake. What money has been invested? It looks like youve spent $0.
If you are claiming your time is worth money, it isnt. It simply isnt.
And how can another few hundred dollars worth of time be needed before the bike is ready for some kid? Thats $600 of 'worth' for the bike. Come on now, thats absurd.

Dont look now, but that bike retails for $88 and can be purchased new for $50.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mongoose-...lver/324996846
https://mongoosebike.cc/mongoose-mal...ike-p-190.html

beng1

Pssssssssssst. If you take any object in your possession to a skilled mechanic, craftsman, repair-person or fabricator and have them work on it they are going to charge you fifty to a hundred dollars an hour. Maybe you can look some of these people up and give them your brain to work on, it would be a great investment for you.

livedarklions

So you're valuing your labor at the rate we'd pay a mechanic to do brain surgery? Sounds about right.

indyfabz

Just like his time here isn’t worth anything.

Ironfish653

So, what exactly makes a Master Millwright so uniquely qualified as a bike mechanic, anyway?

If you're going to value your time at $75-100/hr for bike work, I'm going to expect more than chopped -up dumpster parts. Do better.

mstateglfr 

I continue to initially think you are trolling, then I remember your views on fit, bikes, etc and remember you are serious with this stuff.
Oh my gosh.

- You arent a skilled mechanic. You definitely arent a skilled fabricator.
- Just buy the parts for $15 and you dont then have to count your 'labor' as a higher cost. Why are you 'spending' $150 for 2 hours of work when you can spend $15 on the component and have it installed in 2 minutes?
- You dont have $300 invested in that Mongoose because that assumes you would be earning actual money if you werent 'improving' the Mongoose. That is a poor assumption since you would likely otherwise be tinkering with something else, riding your bike, watching TV, or engaging in other leisure activities.
---- This is important to understand- your time is not inherently worth money. It just isnt. No matter what you want to be true, no matter what someone else may claim, your time is not always worth money. If it were, then you would be able to sell that Mongoose for $300 right now. Good luck with that.
- Why are you trying to count riding around as money(time) spent working on the Mongoose?



To respond to your absurd equation of your time spent rebuilding a cheap kids bike to a skilled mechanic or fabricator- if an auto mechanic had a car that didnt work and they wanted to sell it, would they spend countless hours working on it if in the end they wouldnt be able to sell the car for anything close to what they put into the car? Of course they wouldnt do that because that would be dumb. It would be bad business.

You are not a skilled mechanic.
You do not have $300 invested in that dumpster dive bike.
You will not have $600 invested in that dumpster dive bike if you continue to work on it.

livedarklions

It's really worse than that. The time he's "billing" here includes mostly time spent searching for and diving various dumpsters and adapting the dumpster-found part for replacement use. What's the market hourly rate for that kind of labor? I pay a mechanic for shop time working on the bike, not for scrounging around town for hours looking for a part that would be $15 new and adapting it to fit. He's set the value on that search and adaptation time--it's $15, the price he would've paid to purchase a suitable new part that would not have to be adapted.

Honestly, if the OP actually had a sense of humor, this could have been an amusing story of how he had fun putting together a beater bike for some kids to totally destroy yet again. Instead, it's now going to be a debate about the under-valuing of dumpster-diving labor.

smd4

Pssssssssssst. I've seen your "work." I wouldn't pay you for it.

shelbyfv

Surely you'd pay for a bong1 bike fit....

smd4

Might be worth it to see how a Dura Ace aero seatpost looks backwards. I couldn’t bear to do it myself.

beng1

I am a union inside lineman. I could go to work any day for union wages anywhere in the USA. The total package of wages and benefits of a union outside lineman is $60 to over $100 depending on which union hall you work out of.
I went to school for tool&die and worked for The Warren Company, steel fabricating shop in the 1980s before going BACK into the electrical trade. Went to school for welding, jewelry-making and worked with a charter member of the American Horological Association, Edmund Lada, repairing mechanical wrist-watches. Took four years of art classes from the famous water-color painter Jean Stull learning lost-wax casting and silver soldering etc.. And built this little 17-foot tall barn from scratch with hand-tools, not power tools, in summer of 2019 with wood from local Amish sawmills. Rebuilt my first automobile engine when I was 18, father was a British motorcycle dealer and have rebuilt British motorcycle engines etc.. Just put a new clutch in my Toyota in my driveway, also a timing belt, water pump etc.. I have forgotten how to do more with my hands than anyone else on this forum will ever learn to do.

Also, if you call a plumber, they will charge you eighty bucks or more just to drive to your house, all transportation and other overhead is always part of the cost of doing business.

Nothing though is more valuable than doing what you want to , when you want to. To me, or any really sane or educated person, that is priceless, and that is what I have been lucky enough to do most of my life. That and a few other things you do not have the capacity to understand makes me the wealthiest man on earth, and I would not trade what I have for any amount of cash.

smd4

Perhaps. It’s unfortunate those skills don’t seem to be applied to the bikes you own.

tomato coupe

That's like taking ski lessons from a famous rugby player.

shelbyfv

And yet there is quite a disparity between your alleged talents and the mechanical kludge/aesthetic abominations you are fond of posting.

mstateglfr 

livedarklions

So you choose to spend hours looking for a $15 part for a crap bike that no one is looking for, and make that the basis for lecturing us on your obviously superior way of life?

I sense that this may be an argument you're having with your spouse.
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wheelreason

Maybe it's a Mangoose NFT...

Koyote

There is always an opportunity cost (=value of next-best opportunity that would have been pursued) for any use of time. In that sense, if beng1 would have been working for wages instead of fixing the bike, then yes, the bike cost him the sum of money that was foregone. That is true ONLY if he actually did take time away from paid labor to fix up the bike. But that has little to do with the bike's value, which is determined by myriad other factors.

Example: If I were still working, I could (conservatively) bill at $200/hr for consulting work. If I actually skip such an opportunity in order to do housework, then yeah, my housework costs me $200/hr. But the housework is probably only worth $25/hr or so, which is what those services sell for in my area.