Pro Bike Mechanic Q&A – From Bromptons to Wheel Building and Lots More – YOUR QUESTIONS!

Q&A with Professional Bike Mechanic Paul. We asked for your cycling questions and here are Pauls answers!
From Bromptons to Wheel Building, Favourite Tools to Bike Touring check it out 🙂

WATCH NEXT:

CHAPTERS:
00:00 Q&A
00:23 Why Do you Like Working as a Bike Mechanic?
01:32 Favourite Bike Tool?
02:12 How Often Should I Service My Brompton?
03:34 Where Would be the Best Place to go for a Beginner Bike Tourer?
04:42 Favourite Pro-Cyclist?
05:30 650b or 700c. Yay or Nay?
06:56 Where is the Best Place to go Cycling for a Weekend in the UK?
08:55 How Did You Get Sooooo Good at Building Wheels?
09:49 Correct Tyre Pressure for Heavy Riders?
11:39 How did you Become a Bike Mechanic and How Would Someone Become One?
13:30 What’s Next for Your YouTube in 2024?

We are Sarah and Paul of Velo Works and we love everything cycling from bike touring to Bromptons, Mountain biking, Vintage bikes and much more.

You can find out more about us here: https://www.veloworkshop.co.uk/

Hi I’m Paul from Van Works and I’ve been a professional bike mechanic for 16 years and a professional wheel builder for five stroke six maybe seven years we asked you all for questions via YouTube Facebook and Instagram and we have some great ones so from Brompton to wheel

Building and everything in between come and join me and I’ll answer your questions so first question why do you like working as a bike mechanic you have to love being a bike mechanic especially if you want to do it long term there’s a great saying what’s the difference between a bike mechanic

And a park bench a park bench can support a family of four so basically I love it I love the industry I love cycling I love people in the industry everyone I meet is just yeah so warm and friendly we’re all kind of in it together I love bikes I love working

On really good quality components and vintage bikes and for me it’s just been like I guess a lifelong Obsession I used to be a youth worker I really enjoyed that up until kind of like 35 but I done bike had bike businesses in between as

Well and I just love it I love working on tools I love the fact that I can take a bike and within two hours I can make it better than you bit longer if it’s a restoration but that’s like a full service I love building Wheels I love

The Precision and I love the fact that I build products especially the wheels that go out and they’ll go and do massive Adventures go off around the world and yeah yeah I love it find it very inspiring so next question favorite Bike Tour and why so my favorite Bike Tool is

The DT Swiss Prine nipple holder all about nipples I absolutely love it when you’re will building if you don’t have it basically you just drop the nipple inside the rim and no one wants nipples inside rims it’s not good absolutely love it I’ve got two of them I’ve got

Lots of other tools but I think that for me is my favorite tool I use them so much I have to kind of lubricate them and really look after them I love Park Tool I love DT Swiss tools and I love do like CYO tools as well but that is my

Favorite so how often should I service my Brompton is question three I would say if you have a Brompton the with regular use you want to get it serviced once a year there’s even though they will look after themselves and if you just use it a few times a year you

Probably won’t need to do much than pump the tire but they do benefit from being stripped down and given a bit of love the rear pivots um where where the back of the bike is and it folds the pivot that does that um wears quite a lot I’m coming up

To a second in my lifetime of mine I think it’s really important yeah to keep it clean service it once a year I’ve done that for mine for nine years and it’s like a new bike it’s yeah it’s brilliant um so that’s what I’d recommend for that if you don’t use it

So much then maybe like a tuneup you know get it checked lubricated but definitely service once a year if it’s in regular use question four where would be a good place to go for a beginners cycle tour so one place I can’t recommend enough is going to the aisle

Of Lismore it’s on the west coast of Scotland near Oben there’s a few different routes you can do so it’s worth looking up on the sust strand’s website but basically you can cycle up the coast from either oburn or a place called bendock if you want to miss out

Some hills you can go up the coast then you can get a little fairy at Port appen over to Lismore and Lismore is a wonderful Island it’s real concentrated bit of limestone in Scotland so it’s really nice we really like it because we’re from the southwest it’s full of

Limestone it kind of reminds us of the Southwest and you can do a circular so you can go along the island and then get another Ferry which is more of a main Ferry car ferry down to Oben so there’s a circular you can do or I’ve done it

And me and Sarah have done it where it’s a there and Back Again ride but it’s really nice mostly cycle path on the mainland super quiet roads and I would say it’s a really good place to cycle tour because you get such good views you get everything from a cycle tour but

Actually it’s it’s very much at a beginner level if you want to do it more advanced you can actually do it all in a day um away from that one of the best things to do if you want to plan a cycle tour is to go on San’s website and look

Up go on their map on their website and look look up all of the routes around the UK and you can link them together or there’s longdistance routs you can cycle so I cycle from here to Coral so there’s lots that’s a good resource if

You want to p a cycle talk so question five favorite pro cyclist of all time so I have to focus on road cycling because I love the characters in Road cycling but for me it’s garant Thomas is the best pro cyclist I think he is just so he handles everything well he handles

His peers well he handles the media well and I think he’s just a real inspiration in recent years with the manness of like um Teddy pagara and yis vinnard being all manic he’s just there nicely coming up showing his maturity and just taking it at his pace and yeah he’s just I

Think he’s just such an inspiration and I can’t wait to see what he does after cycling because I think it’ll be really interesting 700 C or 650b yay or nay so for those of you that don’t know 700 C 650b are two different wheel sizes 700 C is slightly bigger than

650b so a lot of gravel bikes these days will allow you to have both wheel sizes in the bike especially with disc brakes um because you’re not relying on the brakes on the rim so um that allows it bikes to be more versatile I definitely think 700c for road bikes I think that

And touring bikes I think that is the way forward I think when it comes to gravel bikes I think 650b is a really good option the reason is is they’re stiffer and and kind of when I say tougher Wheels they’re stiffer they’re much nicer to build you can they hard

Have hardly any Flex in them and what you can do is you can put a bigger volume Tire on it so actually you end up with the wheel being a 700 C size because on a 700 C Tire wheel you have to have a smaller tire so I would kind

Of recommend for gravel bikes a 650 or definitely having 650b or definitely having the two to swap in if you can and then you’ve got the best of both worlds but definitely 700 C for road bikes I would lean more towards 650b for gravel bikes just depends if they’re in fashion

Or not because they have kind of come in and out of fashion over the last 10 years next question where is the best place to go cycling for a weekend in the UK I’m really sorry but it’s going to be Scotland based again and it would have to be the Isle of

Isa so it’s the southernmost herdan in a hean island and it is beautiful I went there for my 40th and it’s just a dream the people on the island are really friendly and welcome cyclists in and we were we went there in March and we were

Like the first people to arrive I think cycle touring after the winter and everyone’s waving at us it was like we were celebrities there’s challenges weather it was really windy that weekend so that was a bit of a challenge but glorious weather but it’s well worth it there’s loads of whiskey distilleries if

That’s your thing you can go in like tast and whiskey then maybe not ride your bike because you’re not allowed but that’s your choice U but that is a really nice uh ride for a weekend you come across these little towns there’s RSP rsbb reserves and it’s just a

Wonderful place to go there’s great places across the Southwest but I think if you want a real Adventure there’s nothing better than getting on a cowak ferry going to a Scottish Island so leave the car on the mainland and go to a Scottish Island and there’s just a

Real sense of feeling free and I’d recommend it to anyone it’s a great way to see the country another one which I’d like to mention is Devon coast to coast is a really good cycle for a weekend you could do it in a weekend maybe a long

Weekend so you go from ilum to or Plymouth to ilum and it’s really nice you get to see a real breadth of the country loads of cycle Lanes you go over dartmore but on an Old Railway line so it’s not too intense and there’s lots of lovely accommodation or you can camp so

That’s a really good one to look at for a long weekend if you’ve got any favorites of yours because I haven’t cycled all over the UK so it’d be great to hear and please leave in the comment section on our Channel next question how did you get so good at building Wheels

Well when I I done a wheel building course years ago probably I don’t know 13 years ago maybe when I started vales in Glasgow I realized that there was a real need for handbuilt Wheels properly professional lovely wheels that you know don’t falter when you use them so from

Then I’ve grown our selection of Wheels I’m thankful that I build hundreds upon hundreds of Wheels a year and as I’ve mentioned in my other videos I don’t believe it’s a dark C you can overanalyze it if you want and talk about this and that and tolerances but

Generally the art of building a wheel is a process and the more you do the process the better off you get it the more you use the same products the more you know what to expect from a wheel when you’re building it and yeah and just practice makes

Permanent how do you work out the correct tire pressure for heavy Riders it’s either soft and bouncy or Rock Solid so this is a person that’s asked the question we got a Tre checkpoint al5 which is a Tre gravel bike so I don’t know if this question goes to the wrong mechanic

Because I’m a bit old school where I pump my tires up to higher pressures so the higher in the range of what the manufacturers um recommend so my road bikes with me I have that at 100 PSI because I ride steel bikes the frame is more forgiving so there’s not so much

Of an emphasis on the tires to give the Comfort I do do ride latex inner tubes which do give a nice feel so I could recommend that as putting some latex inner tubes in you do have to pump them up more often than standard tubes but

Basically I think the industry is at the moment especially is putting so much focus on Tires Tires Tires to give the comfort and actually it’s because they made all the frames super stiff whereas if you go back and you have steel frames they’re more comfortable because basically if you

Have the tube size of a bike if you double it you make the bike eight times as stiff so things like carbon and aluminium have to be made bigger and especially because carbon could be formed into aerodynamic shapes you generally find you have big bits of

Carbon so it makes the bike much more stiffer so whilst the track checkpoint is a really nice bike I think there could be other elements that you could make the bike more comfy for yourself whether that’s a suspension seat post or something to do with the handle bars you

Know grips or something like that so there’s less emphasis on the tires so if you put it all on the tires may not work out how you want it but what I’d recommend is you could try tubless um and like I said latex in tubes is a good

Option so I hope that helps how would someone become a bike mechanic and how did you become one so I’ll start by how I became a bike mechanic so traditionally I was a youth worker and I worked in Bristol on loads of different projects across the city but that always

Led me to do bikes and bike maintenance with young people because it was a huge interest for them and I’ve ridden all my life so I slowly got my skills together doing that and then I went on my scitec course so that’s super important scitec uh they do wheel building one two and

Three two is the industry standard three is the kind of advanced one if you’ve been working in the industry for a while and then it’s practice really I had I’ve had this is V this is my second business it’s my first business was the cycle Hub

In Bristol so I got loads of experience uh with bikes then and working at other bike projects so there’s things that you need to do you need a qualification so scitec is the best one in my mind but you also need to have the experience it’s the experience because someone can

Go and do a scitec course and you just don’t have the breadth of problem solving which comes so the best thing is if you’ve got a set of Gears that doesn’t work what is it in that system that’s not working is it the shifter is

It the deria is it the cogs what is it that’s not working and it’s or cables it’s about getting over those hurdles quicker obviously so bike shops can be profitable and that’s what people look for so it’s definitely worth going and getting a job some people even start for

Themselves that’s how I started they’ll fix friends bikes and that it’s worth knowing product knowledge that’s all available online from the brands but definitely first place I would start is going to get your scite Tech and then looking to do some volunteering or getting a job okay final question what

Can be what can we expect from the YouTube channel in 2024 love it by the way um well we’ve just run a competition for handbuilt set of wheels so hope I’m hoping we’ll do a couple more throughout the season and towards the winter because we really enjoyed doing that

Lots about riding basically lots of unpretentious cycle chat so I is and just an enjoyment of cycling really we love cycling we’re not too bogged down by kind of being Pros or anything like that we just love it and I guess that’s hopefully what we get across in our

YouTube channel I’m hoping to do some lightweight cycle touring and some cycle touring this year hoping to do silly stuff on the Brompton Sarah’s hoping to do lots of rides as well kind of have left the summer blank just to to do lots of riding so yeah bit of axing and just

General love for cycling if there’s anything you want to see from the YouTube channel let us know in the comments so thanks so much for watching and letting me have a chat about things that I’m interested in thank you for your great questions if you have any

More questions please leave them in the comment section because we can do another Q&A video also if you have any advice or anything for anyone please leave it in the comment section we aim to get back to everyone so no comment is unwanted well that’s not fully true but

Please do leave comments um and yeah thanks for watching please subscribe