Bike Trainers for Dummy Winter Cyclists

Roller of bike trainer against tire

It drives our staffers a little nuts (or nutser, if you prefer) to see self-described professional freelancers picking up cash money by doing nothing more complicated than rewording some random user's manual to "answer" some poor guy's question about how to do, use, or set up a newly-acquired device. The blind leading the blind is, in our book, not helpful. Want an example? how about the crib job eHowian Jack Kaltmann performed on the question, "How to Attach a Bicycle to a Trainer" (originally published at eHow.com partner Livestrong.com, now at SportsRec.com).

Kaltmann's (he's sometimes known as John Kuhlman) solution to a question he clearly didn't know how to answer was to perform a copy-reword-paste job on an instruction manual he found somewhere online. That's regardless of the "references" he claimed he used, neither of which is likely to have included such detailed instructions if any instructions at all.
We base our belief that Kaltmann was ignorant of bicycles in general and bike trainers in specific on the sometimes strange wording of his list of steps:

• "Press the left hub into the fixed axle cup, then turn the axle cup adjustment knob to press the other cup against the right hub." – Hubs? What are these "hubs" of which he speaks? Bike trainers clamp onto the ends of the quick-release skewer, not the hubs, which are inside the dropouts, anyway.
• "A rule of thumb is to have the roller compress the tire approximately 1/2 inch." – We'll let the manual for a Blackburn trainer speak on this one: "Screw in the adjustment knob on the RU [roller unit] until the bike tire is slightly deformed [bolding ours] by the RU roller. NOTE: Putting too much tension on the RU against the tire can cause premature wear of the tire and stress on the RU unit." 

Kaltmann's attempt to transcribe some manual he found resulted in the kind of useless rubbish for which eHow's contributors were and remain justifiably infamous. Part of his work is marred by incorrect terminology, a minor discrepancy exacerbated by serious misinformation: you can't depress a bicycle tire half an inch unless it's only partially inflated, not to mention that with a road bike tire such as a 700 x 23C, half an inch would almost reach the rim!

In other words, our Dumbass of the Day is by no means an "expert" on bicycles. Apparently, neither was Zoe84, who "reviewed" his work. Feh.

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