Repair & Mods — Billings Cycle Works

I love vintage bikes. Hell, I love old bikes. I love fixing things, tinkering, and making them better. It’s hardly a business model, but I also hate seeing fine machines going to the scrapheap. We collectively really don’t need more stuff cluttering up the world. Many, many wonderful bicycles have been made in human history, and simple frame failures shouldn’t necessarily be death sentences for them. Send me an email and we’ll se what can be done.

That being said, it’s not my primary job, I am here to bring my own new machines into the world- machines built to last and be repaired decades down the line. I feel passionately that things should not be discarded when damaged, and strive to keep my repairs affordable - but one can easily see how that cuts both ways.

Repair books will be on a slow and steady drip for the foreseeable future.

As a general rule, they are more difficult, more stressful, and pay worse per hour than building new things, but I do them both out of conviction, and as a critical service to the cyclists of the Bay Area and beyond.

I only work on steel frames, sorry. No Aluminum. No Carbon. Maybe Ti one day.

Repairs

Almost anything can be fixed, for a price. Sometimes it “makes sense” or is “worth it”. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s downright kooky. Sometimes it just happens anyway. The minimum repair charge as of 7/2021 is $75, and major surgeries can cost upwards of $400. Here’s some of many repair services that are available:

Replacement of main tubes: top top, down tube, seat tube, front triangle
Repair or replacement of chainstays, seatstays, and bridges
Repair, or replacement of cracked dropouts, broken dropouts, missing dropouts
Restoring damaged press interfaces or threads: headset, fork crowns BB threads, derailleur hangers, bosses
Dent and dimple repair
Alignments of fork, frames, dropouts, and derailleur hangers
Frame prep: facing, chasing, reaming including disc interfaces

Modifications

Corollary to fixing damaged and broken frames, is breathing new life into classic bikes from another era. An era of small tires and clamp on everything. When heroic riders only carried one water bottle. When brakes were for speed control, not stopping. Particularly, there are many fantastic steel road bikes that can benefit from modern features, or just stuff that got neglected when the cost of factory brazeons was too high. Or you just want track ends. Or disc brakes on your 90s MTB. The sky’s really the limit. That and your bank account.

Some Common Modifications: