Originally Posted by
Kimmo
Paradoxically enough, the real skill and experience is required when it comes to the cheap and nasty junk. You need to know a whole bunch of stuff that's difficult to readily impart via text, and little if any text exists on the subject anyway. And you need to know when something is going to be either a lost cause or a stupid timesink. Cheap junk can get expensive if you have to pay somebody to make it work.
Amen on this.. At the Co-op the repair jobs that require the most extreme combination of experience and expertise are the department-store bikes, especially ones that have been taken apart and put back together by the homeless. The intersection of easy-to-damage hardware with poor tolerances and materials, a potpourri of parts mixed together from multiple bikes, and clients with very little money produce the highest test for a mechanic.