Repairing a Bike Pump
There’s no such thing as built to last. Built to last is built to repair
I’m sure by now you’ve seen something about the Right to Repair movement. Be it Apple or John Deere, Tesla or BMW, mega corporations have been facing resistance to their antics that’s far over due. Right to repair isn’t a great name for the movement. It’s not something people generally care or think about. Besides who repairs their own stuff these days?
What’s missed are two factors. Right to repair is really right to own, and even if you don’t personally plan on repairing your property it includes the right for you to take it to a 3rd party professional of your choice to repair it on your behalf.
I recently had a positive repair experience, and it really stood out to me because I can’t think of the last time that’s happened. It’s reminded me of the world we ought to have.
Before we set off too far, I want to clarify my background. If you have to put me in a box, I’m more or less a Libertarian I just reject a couple ideas of the mainstream group. Generally I avoid these types of political labels because they’re unhelpful, but here I hope that for the more skeptical reader it persuades you to consider what later is a call for regulation.
Repairing a Lezyne Floor Pump
I have a fancy, $70 floor pump for my bike. It’s high pressure and high volume with a solid build quality. Since I’d be hand pumping, I wanted to have a good experience with it. Plus some of my bikes need high pressure, some need high volume. It’d work well for both.
Recently it stopped working. Road bikes have Presta valves, which are different than the ones on your car (Schrader valves). For Presta, you have to spin open the valve before spinning the pump connector onto it. If you forget to, you get a weird sensation where you can’t really pump. This is because there’s nowhere for the air to go, so the pressure builds instantly.
Mine was doing this despite opening the valve correctly. Then I tried my e-bike, which has Schrader valves, and to my astonishment I heard leaking air as the pump handle raised itself slowly. This was confusing, and I went online. Amazingly I got not just a result, but an exact result for my exact pump from the company.
The trouble shooting guide explains that when this happens it means the check valve has failed. The part fails so rarely, it’s not for sale so just email us. I sent an email with the link to that page, a short description, and my address. Within 1 business day I was told a replacement was being sent for free and that arrived within a few days. Nice! Super easy.
The Actual Repair
Getting the pump open was straightforward, just twist off the super heavily threaded base. Then it was time to remove the check valve cover. The cover is a cylindrical piece of metal, screwed flush into another metal piece. It’s flat topped, with two tiny holes in it. You remove it by getting a tool into the two holes and applying lateral force to unscrew it. If I had one criticism of the video, it’s that it makes it sound like the tool is optional. It wasn’t. Maybe mine was seized up in some way that’s atypical, but for whatever reason it absolutely would not budge.
I had two pry tools, on in each hole, and pushed hard enough in both directions they would slip out. At this point, the smart thing to do is just buy the $11 tool. But I, being psychotic, didn’t want to wait. So I used a tried and true trick; warm it up.
In hindsight I should have just used my heat gun, but I ran the base under hot water for two minutes then tried again. It was still mostly seized, but with great force it did finally come loose. I popped in the new part, screwed it all back together, and I had a working pump.
Just like that, <30 minutes of effort from research to solution in total and my pricey purchase was good to go. Money saved, and the rest of the assembly saved from the land fill.
Customer Experience Learnings
What were the key elements that led to a good outcome here? These are necessary conditions, in order:
The product is user serviceable. While there’s no computer chip that can be actively hostile to you, it also is just clearly meant to be serviceable. No pins, plastics hooks, or glue. And no illegal stickers.
Great documentation. The issue was exactly documented with a small page and indexed properly where it showed up while searching the problem generically, not even my specific product (there’s a reason here on how rare this is. I didn’t even consider going to the manufacturer site, they’re generally trash).
It explained the problem and had a short video showing how to do the fix, confirming it’s a reasonable task worth attempting.
A contact form / instructions to request the part
No questions asked policy, I didn’t even need to prove my purchase
Promptly mailed to me
The Problem With Repair Today
Why did this stand out so much? A tiny piece of plastic that’s a wear part fails so instead of throwing out the whole assembly with pounds of machined parts you just replace it. This is obvious. This is the default. While I think the customer service was great, I shouldn’t be impressed it was even possible to fix! We can divide the problem into 4 principal causes.
- Things are built cheap or even disposable
- Some features are so over fixated upon it harms others
- Existing laws aren’t enforced
- Companies in monopoly or duopoly positions are actively hostile
Let’s expand on the less obvious ones. Some features are focused on so much that they harm others disproportionately. Consider your phone. It’s probably glued together. Why? Screws work just fine, but they’re slightly ugly (I guess, I don’t know who stares at the bottom of the phone).
When Apple glues the battery in your laptop, there’s not a good reason. They’re just being dicks. When they add a special computer chip to the screen that requires the phone to give a password to pair that’s not security, it’s thievery. It’s outright hostile. You’ve gone out of your way to engineer additional checks (meaning you’ve spent 10s of 1000s of dollars) that say no, you can’t swap this Apple genuine part for another Apple genuine identical part unless you pay us a toll. It’s nothing but a digital highway man, a mob boss shaking you down.
Market forces won’t save us here, because what are you going to do? Not buy a phone? You can’t go to Google, they’re doing the same thing.
The Solution
First, stop giving money to companies that are designing shit products whenever possible. Don’t search by price lowest first. Find something high quality, it will nicer to own and use plus it may actually be cheaper. That $300 laptop seems cheap until you consider you’ll be buying a new one every 12-18 months.
If you’re tight on money, this still applies. I know people hate hearing it, but if you’re living in a cushy first world country reading blogs on your pocket super computer, you’re not poor. Even if you’re struggling relative to your peers in a first world country, well you’re the last person that can afford to squander money on junk. Aim for fewer, higher quality items.
Finally, demand better of your government. Support repair legislation that requires parts be made available. Pay particular attention to instances where you’re locked out “for your own protection”. This isn’t just a lie, it’s a damn lie. In a society where you can replace the break pads on your car we’re seriously arguing that the screen on your phone is dangerous?
Demand they enforce existing laws. Did you know that those “warranty void if removed” stickers are illegal? Because they are. The government always is looking for more money, how about they go get some of these slam dunk cases.
Wrapping Up
In closing, I hope you consider right to repair the next time you’re at the ballot box and when you make your next purchase. Do you really want the cheapest, junkiest option? Is it even actually cheaper once the life time is taken into consideration? Is the company behaving in a way you support? We don’t have a choice with phones, but we do with other products. Take advantage of that while you still can.
If you find value in the content, or are in the market for a bike pump or repair tools, please consider using the affiliate links below. These are companies that are creating high quality, consumer friendly products + a portion of your purchase will support this content. I have no relationship with any of these companies, just a happy customer.
- Lezyne Floor Pump (high quality, repairable! bike pump)
- I fix it tool kit (this was absolutely the wrong set of tools for the job, but I’ve gotten a ton of value out of my older set over the years. Not just in electronics, but for random stuff too)
- Spanner Bicycle Tool (the actual tool for the job, if you’re not possessed by obstinance)