This is a continuation of yesterday's post.
I received a comment saying: "It may be true that shops inspecting manufacturer wheels is standard practice, but there's no shame in advertising it. If you take the 'it's standard so we don't mention it' approach and write nothing about it on your website, won't people think 'they're not doing it'? In fact, you yourself just wrote an article about fully assembled wheel inspection despite calling it standard practice. Is there something shameful about making your work process public?"
Overlapping with yesterday's post, the reason I specifically write an article about "I inspected a fully assembled wheel" is because boxed wheels are often semi-finished products.
When a wheel's center isn't true, correcting it takes five to ten minutes of work—that's what I want to convey. I'm not thinking 'our shop is amazing because we fix it!' at all. It's standard practice after all.
If I wrote about inspecting wheels with the nuance of "our shop is amazing because we inspect wheels!", it would be like saying "our company drivers don't litter with cigarettes!" — bragging about something that's just standard practice, which I'd find deeply embarrassing.
It's not that making work processes public is embarrassing—it's that saying 'we do this standard thing' feels embarrassing to me.
Thank you for the comment.
Another comment on the same post mentioned receiving a fully assembled wheel "still in the unopened cardboard box."
Taken broadly, this is like selling bicycles as seven-tenths assembled in the box.
※"Seven-tenths assembled" is industry jargon meaning mostly assembled inside the box. We end up disassembling everything anyway, but honestly, when bar tape is already wrapped from the start, it's more trouble than it's worth.
No shop would say "we don't hand bicycles to customers in boxes—we assemble them first!" but with fully assembled wheels, you do see this sometimes.
If I were to write an article saying "I completely disassembled and reassembled a seven-tenths assembled bike," it would be to convey something like "complete bikes sometimes have loose bottom bracket cups"—not with the nuance of "our shop is amazing because we fully disassemble and rebuild!" It's standard practice after all.
I've done this before (→here)
I received a comment saying: "It may be true that shops inspecting manufacturer wheels is standard practice, but there's no shame in advertising it. If you take the 'it's standard so we don't mention it' approach and write nothing about it on your website, won't people think 'they're not doing it'? In fact, you yourself just wrote an article about fully assembled wheel inspection despite calling it standard practice. Is there something shameful about making your work process public?"
Overlapping with yesterday's post, the reason I specifically write an article about "I inspected a fully assembled wheel" is because boxed wheels are often semi-finished products.
When a wheel's center isn't true, correcting it takes five to ten minutes of work—that's what I want to convey. I'm not thinking 'our shop is amazing because we fix it!' at all. It's standard practice after all.
If I wrote about inspecting wheels with the nuance of "our shop is amazing because we inspect wheels!", it would be like saying "our company drivers don't litter with cigarettes!" — bragging about something that's just standard practice, which I'd find deeply embarrassing.
It's not that making work processes public is embarrassing—it's that saying 'we do this standard thing' feels embarrassing to me.
Thank you for the comment.
Another comment on the same post mentioned receiving a fully assembled wheel "still in the unopened cardboard box."
Taken broadly, this is like selling bicycles as seven-tenths assembled in the box.
※"Seven-tenths assembled" is industry jargon meaning mostly assembled inside the box. We end up disassembling everything anyway, but honestly, when bar tape is already wrapped from the start, it's more trouble than it's worth.
No shop would say "we don't hand bicycles to customers in boxes—we assemble them first!" but with fully assembled wheels, you do see this sometimes.
If I were to write an article saying "I completely disassembled and reassembled a seven-tenths assembled bike," it would be to convey something like "complete bikes sometimes have loose bottom bracket cups"—not with the nuance of "our shop is amazing because we fully disassemble and rebuild!" It's standard practice after all.
I've done this before (→here)