Good stories all but I doubt that shop mechanics see a 10th of the horror stories that we see at co-ops…especially ones with “Fix-Your-Bike” hours. We get the bikes that shop refuse. We get things like a bike that someone had been riding for hundreds of miles without bearings on one side of the front wheel
and with the cone turned around backwards. The axle didn’t turn in the hub shell. The axle was turning in the fork tips (quick release hub) and had eroded a significant amount of the threads on the axle
and the fork tips. The guy was amazed at how fast the bike would go with bearings.
Or the coaster brake bike that someone’s mother’s boyfriend had tried to convert to a freewheel bike by removing the brake lever and about 3/4 of the bearings. And his mother told him that he had to leave it that way. The kid kept coming in for most of the summer with similar problems that, again, his mother insisted that I fix without changing anything. I started to hide in the bathroom if I saw him coming.
Or the guy who came in with a high end Specialized dual suspension mountain bike (probably stolen) who had the great idea of removing the chain by…wait for it…hacksawing through the seatstay. He was totally confused (and angry) when I told him that I couldn’t do anything for him and that he had ruined his bike.
Or the Dad that didn’t have the right size handlebar so he shimmed it to the right size. Since he had a welder, he did it poorly
Completely ground out the inside of the stem.
Or the bikes…yes multiples…that had been left under some tree so long that they looked like this
We counted 15 rings in 2020 meaning the bike had been sitting since 2005 at the earliest.