Marty Esquibel recently got a nice windfall: a mountain bike from a friend who felt guilty about letting it gather dust in the garage.
But it needed work, along with some serious cobweb mitigation, so he decided to take it for a tune-up at , his neighborhood bike shop.
There he could work on the bike himself with The Bike Depot’s stand and tools, replacing the chain and other aged bits by going through the bins of used parts.
The Bike Depot is among a handful of Colorado bicycle shops that . Here, and at Boulder’s and the , are variations on the burgeoning designed to teach craftsmanship.
The specific goal, says Ryan Schutz, executive director of the Bike Depot, is to encourage people to .
That goal is a work in progress, says , an elite bicycle mechanic who volunteers for the Bike Depot’s and programs.
“The culture here is very different,” Cortes says. A lean, enthusiastic man with short-cropped hair, he grew up in Spain, where people than those in America’s car-centric culture. (That’s partly because fuel typically is in other countries as it is in the U.S.)
“Here, when people learn I am a bicycle mechanic, they get very excited. They don’t know how to fix their bikes. They get so excited when they come to this shop and learn how to put old parts on a good frame!”
Like the other bike stores that open their shops to customers, the Bike Depot has an ample stock of inexpensive used parts, from tubes that may or may not need to be patched, to stems, handlebars, derailleurs and other components.
Everything is kept in bins that are labeled and color-coded to correspond with the parts on a display bicycle hanging over the workshop. Newbies who don’t know what a is can look at the painted bike to identify the part they need.
And if they don’t know where to look, they can ask one of more than a dozen volunteer mechanics, like Amelia Jaffe, working alongside them.
Jaffe, an emergency department nurse at Littleton Adventist, spends some of her spare time building bicycles that will be given away to people who can’t afford to buy their own bike.
“I like to come and work on bikes here because bikes don’t talk back,” Jaffe said.
“There are some things that this place has in common with the ER. It’s trial and error, figuring out what’s wrong.”
Other volunteers, like military veteran Dave Babb, help novice mechanics learn the trade.
“This here’s shrapnel,” Babb said, going over a tissue-thin tire that was responsible for a demoralizing four flats in less than 20 minutes. He held up tweezers pinching a tiny metal shard, one of at least four he found, along with the tips of the responsible for countless flat tires.
Another regular, William Patton, is a professional bicycle messenger who structures his work and home life around cycling. For hardcore riders like Patton and Jaffe, who each own multiple bicycles but have limited space at home for a workshop, The Bike Depot is a godsend.
For Corey White, an affable man who began his stint as a volunteer building bicycles for The Bike Depot’s giveaway programs, his avocationbecame his calling.
“I started like everyone else here,” White said.
During his salad days in the 1990s, he worked as a bicycle mechanic. Then he transitioned to a lucrative career as a graphic artist, but 15 years later, his job was outsourced.
“So then I was unemployed and I wanted to do some worthwhile stuff while I was looking for a job, so I came here,” White said.
“They figured out I had some experience, and moved me up the ladder pretty quickly. So I worked here, and studied ophthalmology, and got a job. But after a little while, I said, ‘Whoa, this isn’t where I want to be.’ I quit, and I came back here. Working with bikes and people — that’s what I want to do.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin
Diy bicycle mechanics
Instead of paying a mechanic, learn how to fix your bicycle at one of these shops.
