Fix your own bike. We'll show you how.

The Campus Bike Shop Co-op is a student-run, volunteer-staffed, non-profit repair shop in the basement of Halvorsen Hall. We're not a bike store. We're a room full of tools, repair stands, spare parts, and people who know how to use them and want to teach you. Bring your bike in, put it on a stand, and fix it yourself with a volunteer looking over your shoulder. If you'd rather we do it, we can do that too, cheap. Either way you leave with a bike that works and, ideally, knowing a little more than you did.

The co-op was started in 1994 by a handful of students who were sick of paying $40 for a flat repair and figured out that a $6 tube and ten minutes of instruction was the better deal. Five years later we have about 400 members, a tool library that would make a real shop jealous, and a wall of donated bikes waiting to be rebuilt. We're funded by the student activities fee, membership dues, and the used-bike sales. Nobody gets paid. That's what "co-op" means.

Find us: go in the side door of Halvorsen (the one by the bike racks, naturally), down the stairs, past the laundry room, follow the smell of chain lube. If the door's open, we're open.

• Tool library. Every tool you need for every job on a bike: wrenches, cone wrenches, chain tools, cassette and freewheel removers, crank pullers, bottom bracket tools, spoke wrenches and a truing stand, headset press, cable cutters, and a floor pump by the door that anybody can use any time, member or not. Tools stay in the shop. We check them out to you on the whiteboard and you bring them back to the board when you're done.
• Six repair stands. First come, first served. If we're full, there's a couch.
• Volunteer mechanics on duty every open hour. They'll show you what to do. They will not do it for you unless you're paying for a service (see the price list), and even then they'll probably explain it.
• Parts and consumables at cost or close to it: tubes, tires, cables, housing, brake pads, chains, and a big bin of used parts that are free to members.
• Used bikes, rebuilt by us, from $40. See the sale below.
• Free air, free advice, free coffee (bring your own mug; we're out of cups).

Anybody with a student, faculty or staff ID can join. Two ways to do it:

• $15 a semester, or $25 for the year, paid at the shop, cash or check; or
• Four volunteer hours a semester. Work a shift, help at a Saturday clinic, strip donated bikes for parts, sweep, sort the bolt bins, whatever needs doing. You don't need to know anything about bikes to start. Most of our mechanics learned here.

Members get free stand and tool use, the member prices above, first crack at the used bikes, the free used-parts bin, a vote at the spring and fall meetings, and the right to complain about the coffee. Membership cards are a laminated index card with your name on it. We're not fancy.

Every Saturday during the semester, the shop is open for drop-in clinics. Bring your bike, no appointment. Volunteers walk you through whatever's wrong with it. Each Saturday also has a short how-to session at 11:00 on one topic, about half an hour, free, for anybody who shows up. This fall's schedule:

Fall Used-Bike Sale: Saturday, October 2, 1999 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., on the lawn outside Halvorsen Hall (rain: inside the shop). About 45 bikes, all donated or abandoned-and-released-by-the-university, all rebuilt by co-op volunteers over the summer, all safety-checked, all with a 30-day "bring it back and we'll fix it" guarantee. Prices from $40 for a basic single-speed or three-speed cruiser, to about $120 for the nicer mountain bikes. Most are $50-80. Cash or check only. Members get in at 9:30 for first pick. Join at the door if you want to. Every bike sold comes with a free serial-number registration with campus police right there at the table, and U-locks will be for sale at cost. Please buy one. A repair stand and volunteers will be set up for free seat and handlebar adjustments on your new bike before you ride off. Proceeds go right back into tools and parts for the shop. Last fall's sale bought the truing stand and the headset press. This year we're saving for a second set of metric wrenches and, if it goes really well, a decent couch.