This seatpost came out of the "Groovy Girls" bike pictured in the previous post. It shows what happens when you don't grease a seatpost when you assemble a bike.As I said in "Detailed Assembly," grease everything with threads, too. I spent the day following up on substandard assemblies from our shop and elsewhere in today's repairs. In particular, I had to grease brake post threads in order to complete proper adjustment and threadless headset top cap bolts. I also extracted ungreased crank arm bolts from a Trek.
Without grease on the threads of brake shoe posts, the nuts bind on the threads so the pad will rotate as you try to tighten it fully. Or you can stop where it binds and find out if that pad will suddenly loosen while you are using it. Do you feel lucky?
All this is made more amusing when the two conscientious technicians are told to work faster as we redo work done shoddily by some of our own personnel. The attitude from on high seems to be if you want to do it right it's your own business. It's not our business, of course. We don't own it. But I often feel self-employed as I pursue my standards in the face of such disinterest from the owners. This is the down side of family businesses. The clan closes around its members rather than respond professionally. When we get "help" from certain people we know that job will need to be completely redone. Then we get called "anal" and worse when we take it apart and start over.
I furnished my own lifeboat with all the tools necessary to ply my trade in the event that their style ultimately undoes them. In the meantime it does more good to try to pump at least some good work out of there. They are an organic product of their community, with connections to many good things. Their collapse would be somewhat of a loss. I won't jump in front of a bullet to keep them from bringing it about by themselves. Nor will I pull the trigger. The community could learn to live without them, but it does no good to hasten their demise. My co-mechanic and I just do what we can.
"All this is made more amusing when the two conscientious technicians are told to work faster as we redo work done shoddily by some of our own personnel."
ReplyDeleteOn a busy, late spring, Saturday afternoon while the customer is just waiting for it to get its "final check," but it's going to take you twice as long to take it apart and do right as it would have taken you to do it right in the first place when the bike was assembled months ago when it was hours between customers and if you'd been allowed to do that the customer could have just paid for the bike and ridden it right home?
Nope, don't know what you're talking about.