A Thousand Times No

This evening I took the first class in a four-part series on bicycle maintenance and repair. For the cost of a spring tuneup, I’ll have the chance to go through everything a bike shop would do, but do it using my own two hands — with help from a nice library of borrowed tools (truing stands, cone wrenches, and other specialty goodies) and a capable instructor. I’ve already taken this class once, which helped me get over my fear of changing flats and tinkering with my derailleur, but it’s been a while since I’ve actually opened up everything down to the ball bearings, so it seemed like a refresher was in order.

Tonight we focused on patching and changing the tubes on our wheels. As the instructor pulled a quick-release wheel off the front of one participant’s bike, he drew our attention to the small bumps at the bottom of the fork tips. “If your front wheel comes off, it’s a catastrophe,” he said. “So bike manufacturers started to build these extra things in to make sure that your quick release wheel won’t fly off, even if you haven’t really closed it properly. It just sort of wobbles around until you take the hint that something’s not right.”

The problem with these nubbins is that they make it tricky to separate the wheel from the rest of the bike; the so-called quick release becomes the whistle-while-you-work release. The nickname in the bike world for these annoying little ridges? “Lawyer lips.”

Then our instructor cheerfully shared his preferred solution for those pesky lawyer lips: “I just file them off.”