About PedalSpokeCove

PedalSpokeCove is a maintenance schedule for a bicycle or an e-bike that somebody actually rides. Not a bike that lives on a wall, and not a project bike. A bike that goes to work, carries groceries, gets rained on, and gets left in a rack outside a building for six hours.

The organizing idea is time. Most bike maintenance writing is organized around symptoms, which only helps once something is already wrong, or around parts, which assumes you know which part you are looking for. Neither helps the person whose real question is “what should I be doing, and how often?” Every job on this site belongs to an interval, and the answer to that question is the whole site.

Where the boundary sits

Every job here has a section that says, plainly, what you should stop doing and hand to a mechanic. That section is not a disclaimer and it is not there for legal comfort. It is the most useful part of most of these pages. A brake lever that pulls to the bar, a cracked rim, a bent derailleur hanger, a swollen battery: none of those are things to work out from a web page, and a site that pretends otherwise is not being helpful, it is being flattering.

The same principle sets what is not here. There are no instructions for opening, repairing or reviving an e-bike battery, because that is not a home job and there is no responsible version of writing it down. There are no torque figures invented for parts whose manufacturers have not published one. There are no claims that anything is “safe” unless a published standard says so, and where a standard is relevant it is cited and linked.

What the numbers are

Two pages on this site do arithmetic: the service planner and the tire pressure calculator. Both of them print their formulas on the page in full, in plain text, so you can do the same sum on paper and check. Both of them also list what they do not take into account, which is longer than what they do.

Neither of them overrides a manufacturer. The range molded into your tire sidewall beats the pressure calculator. The service schedule in the manual that came with your bike beats the planner. Those documents were written by people who know which specific parts you have.

How it pays for itself

Some links to Amazon on this site are affiliate links, and a purchase made through one earns a commission at no cost to you. Nothing here is paid placement, no manufacturer has any say in what gets written, and the product pages describe only what the listing itself states. Nobody writing this has ridden any of it, and the pages say so rather than implying otherwise. The full arrangement is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.

The voice

The tone here is meant to be the one you get from a good mechanic who is not busy: honest about what is worth doing, honest about what is not, and completely uninterested in making you feel bad about a chain you have not cleaned. Maintenance is not a moral activity. It is a set of small habits, most of which take under ten minutes, and the point of putting them on a schedule is so that you stop having to think about them.