Upgel/Bike maintenance

Cal Whitmore

Last updated

Editor of Upgel Bike Maintenance. Every guide on this site is written, researched and revised under this byline.

How this site came about

This site started the way most home-mechanic habits start: with a bike that needed something doing, a search that turned up a nine-minute video for a two-minute job, and the slow realisation that the specific number I needed was in none of the first ten results.

The pattern repeated often enough to become annoying. Plenty of pages explain that you should replace a worn chain. Far fewer tell you the wear percentage to replace it at, that the figure differs between 10-speed and 11-speed, and that leaving it costs you the cassette as well. The useful part was almost always the part that got left out.

So the guides here are written to be the page I wanted: the direct answer first, the actual figures in the middle, and an honest note at the end about when a job needs a tool or a skill that most people at home do not have. Nothing is padded to hit a length, and nothing claims a repair is easy when it is not.

I am not a shop mechanic and this site does not pretend otherwise. What I can offer is careful research against primary sources, guides that are tested against manufacturer documentation rather than against other blog posts, and a standing willingness to be corrected. The method is set out below, because on a subject where brakes are involved, method matters more than a byline.

How a guide gets written

Every guide follows the same process. It is unglamorous, and it is the actual reason to trust anything here.

The process, start to finish

  1. Start from the real question

    Guides begin from what people actually search for, phrased the way they phrase it — not from whatever is easiest to write about.

  2. Research against primary sources

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

  3. Cite the specific claim

    Every source at the foot of an article states which particular claim it supports, so you can check the one figure you care about without reading the whole reference.

  4. Verify the citations mechanically

    Every source URL is checked automatically, and every DOI is validated against the Crossref database — including a check that the paper's real title matches the title printed here. That check exists because it once caught a citation pointing at the wrong paper.

  5. Give real numbers

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

  6. Say where the limit is

    Where a job needs tools or training most people do not have, the guide says so rather than pretending everything is a home repair.

  7. Revise on correction

    The date at the top of every guide is when it was last reviewed, not when it was first written.

What you will not find here

  • No invented credentials. No claimed years in a shop, no certifications, no fabricated qualifications.
  • No affiliate links or paid placements. Where a specific tool is named, it is because the job genuinely needs it.
  • No padded word counts. Guides are as long as the subject requires and stop there.
  • No fabricated sources. Citations are machine-verified against Crossref before publication.
  • No 'anyone can do this' on safety-critical work. Brakes and load-bearing parts get an honest warning instead.

What is covered

There are 39 guides across 7 areas of the bike, all written under this byline:

  • 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.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, I want to know. A wrong torque value or an outdated specification in front of someone working on their own brakes is a genuine problem, not a typo. Email contact@upgel.online with the guide and what is wrong — a source helps but is not required — and it gets checked and fixed. Corrections are not treated as criticism, and the review date on the guide is updated when one lands.

More on how the site is run, funded and maintained is on the about page, and the limits of what these guides can do for you are set out plainly in the disclaimer.