Schwinn Shifters for Dummy Cyclists

Did Sean really think you should take this apart?

In the era of COVID-19 shutdowns, it seems that darned near every schmuck who ever bought a 200-dollar "mountain" bike at Wal-Mart has pulled it out of the garage and is trying to ride it on the local hike-and-bike trails. Far be it from any of us to argue against exercise, but several of the staff feel that they could get rich off teaching people how to use their gears for a couple of bucks each. Based on what he wrote in "How to Fix a Gear Shifter on a Schwinn" at SportsRec.com, it's a fairly safe bet that Sean Mann would be one of those students, not the teacher.

We say that because Sean launched immediately into telling people to,

"Unfasten the gear shifter and clean the inside of it with Q-tips. Spray WD-40¹ into the gear shifter to lubricate it. The grease inside the gear shifter becomes gummy and restricts motion over time. Reattach the gear shifter."

Wow: we suspect Sean is the type of person who would tell the engineers at Fukushima to "clean the inside of the reactor with Q-tips." However, 1) you don't need to remove a shifter to open up the case, 2) you should never disassemble a shifter if you don't know what you're doing (e.g., you're like Mann), 3) you don't spray WD-40 as a lubricant, you use a teflon-based oil, and 4) there's no "grease" in most shifters.

And finally, if you're going to tell people to take apart their shifters, Sean, you need to mention that there are several different kinds: road bike, mountain bike, twist-grip... Idjit.

Once he got that bushwa out of the way, Mann launched into the time-honored eHow.com solution:

"Loosen the cable attached to the gear shifter if it won't advance to the next gear. "

Ummm, no, Sean, you don't "loosen" the cable; you adjust the tension using barrel adjusters and limit screws. And finally, Mann explains the "fine-tuning process":

"Examine the tightness of the screws on the derailer if the gear shifter keeps knocking the chain off the sprockets."

Our cyclists were rolling on the floor howling with laughter at that whole "knocking the chain off" rubbish. Perhaps our Dumbass of the Day should have stuck to computer networks...

¹ Weird: according to staffers who once wrote there, the content editors at Demand Media (parent of eHow.com) always changed trademarked names to generic descriptions, yet this putz got by with not one but two...  

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