Oh my goodness! Yes, my Riv made me more of a tinkerer. In reading something-or-the-other Grant wrote, that is part of the intention; well, it is more of a by-product of the intention: Make things simple and fixable. By making them simple (relatively speaking), we have the opportunity to work on and learn from our bikes. Disc brakes were on my right-before-Riv bike and while they were great, but I would have had no clue how to work on them. We have the opportunity to understand what a subtle change in a component translates to in feeling and and performance, I changed handle bars and shifters and brakes levers several times. And, by making it fixable, we have the opportunity to stick with a bike even when something malfunctions because we can replace the component ourselves when it is all too tempting to start over because the cost of an LBS doing the work narrows the cost gap to new. Prior to my Riv, the most I had done was swap seat posts, saddles and handlebars. I stripped and rebuilt my Cheviot several times. "I" am a sixty year old woman with questionable mechanical skills to augment keen mechanical desires. And yet, I did it. Slowly and several times over, but I loved every minute of it.
Evidently, I was bound for this fate anyway. I started tinkering with bikes at 18 months of age. Grant just reminded me;-). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
