Upgel/Bike maintenance

About Upgel

Last updated

We publish bicycle maintenance guides for the person holding the wrench — with the actual numbers, the torque figures, and the mistakes worth avoiding.

Upgel Bike Maintenance exists because most bike repair information online is either a nine-minute video for a two-minute job, or a thin page of text that stops exactly where the difficulty starts. Neither is much use when you are crouched over a bike with dirty hands and somewhere to be.

So we write the other thing: the specific figure, the order of operations, the step people get wrong, and an honest answer about when a job is beyond home tools. Every guide opens with a direct answer to the question in its title, because sometimes that is genuinely all you needed.

What we cover

The library currently runs to 39 guides across 7 areas of the bike:

  • Tires and wheels — Fix flats, change tires and tubes, patch punctures, repair a tubeless setup and true a buckled wheel — with the pressures and wear limits that matter.
  • Brakes — Adjust rim and disc brakes, replace worn pads, cure rubbing and squealing, and run new cables — with the pad thickness limits and clearances that matter.
  • Chain and drivetrain — Clean, lube, shorten, remove and replace a bike chain, plus cassette cleaning and dropped-chain fixes — including the wear figure that saves your cassette.
  • Gears and derailleurs — Index your gears, set front and rear derailleur limits in the right order, and shift without crunching the drivetrain — starting with what is actually wrong.
  • Pedals and cranks — Remove and fit pedals the right way round, free a seized thread, and pull a crank without damaging it — including which crank puller your bike actually needs.
  • Saddle and fit — Set saddle height properly, swap a saddle without losing your fit, and understand why bike seats hurt — and why a softer one usually makes it worse.
  • Cleaning and tune-ups — Wash your bike without forcing water into the bearings, and work through a full home tune-up checklist that finds problems before they leave you walking.

We would rather publish a small number of genuinely useful guides than a large number of thin ones, so the library grows slowly and gets revised often.

How our guides are written

Every guide follows the same method, and we hold ourselves to it whether or not anyone checks.

Our editorial process

  1. Start from the actual question

    We work from what people genuinely search for, in the words they use, rather than from what is easy to write about.

  2. Research against primary sources

    Manufacturer documentation, published standards, federal regulations, and peer-reviewed research where it exists. Not a survey of other blog posts.

  3. Cite specifically

    Every guide lists its sources, and each source says which particular claim it supports — so you can check the one figure you care about without reading the whole reference.

  4. Give real numbers

    Torque values, wear thresholds, pressures, clearances and service limits, with the caveat that your manufacturer's figures always take precedence over ours.

  5. Say when to stop

    Where a job needs tools or training most people do not have, we say so plainly instead of pretending everything is a home repair.

  6. Revise

    Guides are updated when specifications change or when a reader points out something wrong. The date at the top of every guide is the date it was last reviewed, not the date it was first written.

Who writes this

Upgel Bike Maintenance is published by Upgel. Guides are written and reviewed collectively and are published under the name of The Upgel Bike Maintenance Team rather than individual bylines.

Where we draw the line on safety

Bicycles have components that can hurt you when they fail: brakes, steering, wheels, forks, bars, stems, seatposts and frames. We take that seriously in how we write.

  • Safety-critical procedures carry explicit warnings rather than a buried aside.
  • We give torque figures where they matter and say when a torque wrench is genuinely necessary rather than nice to have.
  • We tell you to test brakes and steering at walking pace before riding normally.
  • We say when a job needs a professional. Our full position is on the Disclaimer page.

How the site itself is built

This is a deliberate choice, and it is unusual enough to be worth explaining. The Site ships no JavaScript at all — every page is plain HTML and CSS.

  • Pages load fast on a bad connection, which is the connection you have in a garage or at the side of a road.
  • Everything works with scripts disabled, on old phones, and in text browsers.
  • There is no client-side tracking, no fingerprinting and no behavioural scripting, because there is no script.
  • Guides print cleanly if you would rather take paper into the workshop than a phone.

How this is paid for

The Site is supported by advertising, which covers hosting and lets every guide stay free with no paywall and no sign-up. Advertising is kept visually separate from our guides, and no advertiser has any influence over what a guide says. If we ever recommend a tool, it is because the job needs it — not because someone paid for the mention. See our Privacy Policy for how advertising data is handled.

There is no paywall, no account to create, and no newsletter you have to join to read a guide.

Corrections

If you find an error we want to hear about it — a wrong torque figure, an outdated specification, a step in the wrong order, or a link that no longer works. Email contact@upgel.online and tell us which guide and what is wrong. We would much rather fix a mistake than leave it in front of the next reader, and we do not treat corrections as criticism.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, or a repair you would like covered? Email contact@upgel.online, or see our contact page for what to include. Every message is read by a person.