Bicycle Workshop Standards

The single thing separating a workshop mechanic from a capable home mechanic is not skill with a spanner. It is that the workshop mechanic checks the same things, in the same order, every time — so nothing gets skipped when they are tired, busy, or certain the bike is fine. That system is the M-check, and it is the backbone of Cytech technical one.

Why the shape

Start at the front hub. Up the forks to the bars and stem. Down the down tube to the bottom bracket and chainset. Up the seat tube to the saddle and post. Down the seat stays to the rear hub. Trace that on a bike and your hands draw an M. There is nothing clever about it — the point is simply that a fixed route has no gaps, and a mechanic following one will find the loose stem bolt they would otherwise have walked past.

What you are actually testing at each point

Wheels are where bicycle mechanics stops being intuitive. A wheel is a pre-tensioned structure: the rim is held in compression by fifty-odd spokes all pulling inward at once, and truing it means adjusting that balance without destroying it.

The two kinds of untrue

Bearings

Hubs, headsets and bottom brackets all come down to the same question: is there play, and is there roughness? Play is detected by rocking the component perpendicular to its axis; roughness by turning it slowly with the load off. Cup-and-cone hubs are adjustable and serviceable — you can strip, regrease and reset the cone tension. Cartridge bearings are pressed units, generally replaced rather than serviced. Knowing which you are looking at, and adjusting a cone to the point where play has just disappeared but the bearing still turns freely, is a Cytech-assessed skill.

Chain wear, and why it is the expensive one

A chain does not stretch — the metal does not lengthen. What wears is the pin and bush at every link, and the accumulated slop makes the chain's effective pitch longer than the sprocket teeth it runs on. A worn chain then grinds each tooth into a matching worn profile. Replace at around 0.75% elongation on a modern narrow drivetrain and the cassette usually survives; leave it past 1% and you are generally buying a cassette too, and possibly chainrings. This is the single most cost-effective measurement in a workshop.

Indexing, in the right order

Bad shifting is usually diagnosed backwards. The order that works: check the hanger alignment first, because a bent derailleur hanger makes every subsequent adjustment wrong; then the limit screws, which define how far the mech can travel at each extreme; then cable tension, which sets where it lands in between; then the B-tension, which sets the gap between the guide pulley and the largest sprocket. Adjusting cable tension to fix what is actually a bent hanger is the classic wasted hour.

Brakes

Working to a figure

Steel and aluminium bend before they break, which is what "tight enough" feels like in the hand. Carbon composite does not: it holds, then the fibres crush, and the damage is often invisible until the part fails under load. That is why carbon components carry a printed torque figure and why a torque wrench stops being optional the moment carbon is involved. The same discipline applies everywhere — most bicycle fasteners want somewhere between 5 and 15 Nm, and a stem bolt at 5 Nm when it wanted 8 is as much a safety issue as one wound up to 20.

The habits that make a workshop

Assembly compounds matter: anti-seize on titanium and between dissimilar metals, threadlock where a fastener is prone to loosening, carbon assembly paste — which is grip paste, not grease — where a carbon interface needs to hold without extra torque. Grease every thread you can. And keep the bike, the bench and your hands clean, because contamination is the enemy of every braking system on the bike.

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