No offense bike shop dudes (and dudettes ;^),
But I am the only one with carte blanche to mess up my bikes through oversight, inattention etc. In Lou's example I would also insist that the shop fix their mistake. I can mess things up just fine by myself. The few times I take my stuff into a shop it is because I thought I might mess things up and they are the professionals. My most recent example was getting a Nuovo Record crown race removed from a Vitus 979 fork. I took to to a "good" local shop and they mutilated the crown race in the process of removing it. They didn't charge me, and I regret not making a bigger deal of it, but I won't ever take anything back there for service and I generally avoid the shop (wasn't a big customer anyway). I understand Grant's point, after all we are all imperfect, but high end shops should be treating expensive/rare frames with kid gloves IMHO.
Just my 2ยข,
Doug Van Cleve Chandler, AZ
On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:21:02 EDT, loudeeter@aol.com <loudeeter@aol.com> wrote:
> The "one scratch" rule notwithstanding, I don't know where the line is drawn
> for bike shops. An extreme was related to me by a local rider here in
> Orlando. He had sent a Gios Professional for paint and had used the local bike shop
> to handle the transaction. The bike arrived back from the painter fine. He
> asked the shop to install the headset. They didn't "face" the headtube first
> (or so he says) and the result was a large 1/4 inch chip in the paint on the
> headtube-headset junction. His argument was that a professional shop should
> have known that they needed to remove the paint from the edges of the headtube by
> faciing prior to installing a headset. He insisted that they return the
> bike to the painter for a COMPLETE repaint. Apparently the shop complied. I've
> often wondered about how a shop can stay in business if all customers are like
> that. Lou Deeter, Orlando FL