5.22.08

Yesterday, I visited the local bike mechanic that is close friends with Emmanuel, named Offayao. I brought with me one of Emmanuel’s old bikes to fix up for my temporary transport. The mechanics shop was a small wooden room not more that 6ft x 8ft. When I arrived, Offayao was offloading his raw materials from the shop onto the small patio space in front, throwing the front ends of the bikes over the lip of the open sewer / bike rack. The old bike I brought was a Specialized Stumpjumper that was totally beat down. I took off the wheels, adjusted the hubs, asked for a cone wrench… All we had to tighten down the locknuts were a 17mm wrench and pair of pliers to grab the spacer or cone. No cone wrenches. I watched the mechanic remove a tire with a 10mm wrench, and also find spare parts - washers, weird Chinese valve pieces, spoke nipples – by sifting through the dirt at his feet. I re-used a mangled rim strip after patching a flat (about the 6th patch on the tube) on the Stumpjumper, and I thought about the trash can labeled “tubes” outside the shop in JP. I asked for a small screw driver to adjust the limit screws on the rear derailleur, and one of the mechanic’s apprentices grabbed an old spoke, mashed it with some pliers, and gave it to me, a small screwdriver, it worked. I replaced the missing barrel adjuster in the brake lever with a washer and spoke nipple to stop the housing. I thought about all of the tools we put in that container, all of the high-quality used parts and bikes – we are going to revolutionize the bike market here.

An interesting concept that Martin introduced to me when I asked him about the danger of taking business away from the other small bike shops was “lateral integration.” We can potentially collaborate with these other shops by selling them some of our finished bikes or raw bikes at a lower cost so that they can sell them on the market for the same price we sell them for. This may prove to better disseminate the bicycles throughout the area, because many people do stick to the shops, and mechanics, they are used to. Offayao is an incredible mechanic, breaking a chain and reconnecting it with a pair of pliers, using rudimentary tools to make bikes work. He would be so much more efficient and profitable if he had better tools, and better quality bikes to work with.

The majority of the mountain bikes that are available in Koforidua are very old and cheap frames equipped with cheap Chinese generic derailleiurs and thumb shifters. The introduction of the mountain bikes from our shipment will offer a whole new level of bicycle transport quality to Koforidua.