Nah, I need to do this myself. I need to get good at something. I'm not about to spend $75 an hour for someone to do what I would do better myself. You read that right... better... myself... Why? Because I'm willing to spend hours to carefully do what the pros will slap together in minutes. One of the drawbacks of being able to charge $75 an hour is that customers get pissed if they don't get their stuff ready
QUICK. Yeah, they're a lot better and quicker at it, but they are also not as likely to be
careful. So, you see, there's a tradeoff. The pro job could be better.... or it could be worse.... No promises. The only thing that is promised most of the time is that money will be drawn from your pocket.
Now, if I were going to work on bikes, especially if I was just starting out, I would do it dirt cheap, maybe even free. As I got better, I would charge more, but I bet I could still give the customers a good deal no matter how good I got. I doubt anyone really needs to charge $75 an hour unless he can't deal with the flood of customers. Now, the one who quoted me that price has mechanics who work for him. That causes costs to go up. Right? A one man operation with low overhead shouldn't need to charge more than $50 per hour. In fact, there are quite a few people who are forced to live off minimum wage ($7.25). If a shop charged a mere $20 per hour, it would be piled mile high with customers. Of course, that figure doesn't really represent take home pay.
Besides, I basically have no job. The one I have has me scheduled to work 3 hours this week. Yeah, I said 3
hours in the whole cotton-pickin'
week.
I've already run 2500 miles on an 8 year old tire on a beat up little Savage and wrecked twice. How could installing and balancing my own tire be any worse? How could truing my own wheels be any worse. It's not like I'm riding a precision Beemer or something. There's not much to screw up that wasn't off kilter from the factory. I'd say that, unless I screwed up something significantly, my bike should be significantly safer than it was previously.