On taking delivery of Dutch city bike

FWIW, some less than obvious points arising from my experience of
buying Dutch bikes by e-mail and using them in a country where they
are totally unfamiliar.

1. A bike like the Amsterdam is a low-service utility item. But it is
a complicated bike all the same. Small things can irritate if you do
not know how to adjust them. Example: taking the gearchange cable off
a Nexus 8-speed gearbox is real simple: any old idiot can do it.
Putting it back on is also real simple -- on paper. There's a knack.
With the knack it is a two-minute job from wheel-off to wheel back on
and gearbox fully adjusted. Without the knack it is a frustration that
can run on and on for hours. You want someone to show you, really,
because it isn't easy to describe how you twist the cable to line the
nut up to the slot and push it in with the tiny hex key you will buy
for specifically that purpose. When the Marathon Plus are being
swapped in, insist on watching like a hawk when the mechanic puts the
cable end back into gearchange mechanism. Note that you need a torque
wrench to avoid damaging your rear track ends by overtorqueing the
axle-nuts; if you don't have a torque wrench, you need to buy one at
an engineering shop (the BBB one sold by bike shops doesn't go high
enough) together with a deep socket to fit the axle nuts. To get those
axle nuts off the rear axle on the road, I carry a short Park spanner
which at one end is a pedal spanner (same size as the Nexus wheel
nuts) and at the other end a headset wrench (available in two headset
nut sizes); it bolts up to the frame behind a bottle cage.

2. The same applies on the other side of the rear wheel, and at the
front, with the roller brakes, where there is a knack to taking off
the brake operating mechanisms and putting them back on without having
to adjust the brakes afterwards (magic!). As with removing the gear
cable and putting it back on, you really want to have someone show you
how to squeeze the brake bracket and in which direction to pull, and
to practice removing and refitting it at home.

3. You are presumably already downloadin from the Shimano Europe and
Paul Lange sites the spec and installation sheets of every component
on your bike and making a file in a book of plastic leaves so that you
have an operating manual.

4. Jay, if you want, i can send to your college e-mail a set of
screendump jpegs of my folders for the Gazelle Toulouse, so you can
see the file numbers at Shimano you're looking for. If you don't mind
a lot of files arriving suddenly, I can just send you the actual pdfs
and html pages that together make the service manual for my Gazelle
Toulouse to save you hunting around for them. I don't imagine
Electra's Amsterdam operating instructions will contain any of that
detailed stuff; certainly none of it came with either of my Dutch
bikes (the assumption is clearly that the bike will be adjusted and
serviced only by the dealer).

5. Jute's Law of Universal Perversity: RTFM -- and you'll never need
it. Don't RTFM -- and by sunset you will be sorry you didn't.

Andre Jute
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/B...20CYCLING.html