I regularly use my many years old mountain bike to go everywhere in Barcelona. A bike is an extremely cheap, fun and addictive vehicle. At least one friend followed my advice and his bike is nowadays his preferred choice when he has to go somewhere in the city… so give it a try if you can, I’m pretty sure that you’ll not get disappointed :)
After this short (not devilish) advertisement, there’s a curious repairing procedure I wanted to comment on this post: spoke wrenching. I like to ride my bicycle, but I must admit that I’m rather ignorant when it comes to fixing it, and here is precisely where your bike starts to get more expensive if you don’t stick to basic maintenance practices.
Just a couple of days ago I noticed that my rear wheel was not aligned at all: the wheel was touching one of the brake pads once on every cicle (woobling) and was getting worse as I kept biking :-/ The bike technician told me that my rear wheel spokes were not tight enough and that was causing all the wheel structure to bend.
After wrenching all of them, he managed to correct the woobling, but he explained that the hopping could not be fixed without completely removing all the spokes, readdressing the wheel itself and mounting all the spokes back again… which would translate in a “not-good-for-my-budget” amount of money and it wasn’t a critical repair anyway. So afterwards I bought a 6€ spoke whench tool and did the same procedure the bike tech guy did, this time with my front wheel. It was not easy, but eventually got it right and in addition I learnt a new and useful thing which could be also useful (and cost-saving) to you someday… isn’t blogging and biking cool ? :)