All, last week was steadily busy but with more minor repairs than B-a-Bs which kept things flowing nicely.

New hire Hank started on Friday. Unfortunately, he’s tall so this shop won’t be friendly to him, height-wise. He’s been enthusiastic and willing to learn-as-you-go, which has been good.

Last week I counted all the bikes in the warehouse. We’ve got approximately 504. Working Bikes is still interested but may be doing a full shipment from down here instead of carting the bikes back to Chicago. That will happen sometime next month, I believe. Details are still being ironed out.

We also had Light The Night 2018! Barry did the counts but we didn’t sell out at Illinois/Lincoln and did at Alma.  

This week I have a TBP meeting tonight and am teaching a Bike Maintenance 101 class tomorrow night from 7 – 8pm. Other than that, business as usual.

Numbers:

Visitors: 80
Sales: $773.20
Memberships: 14 for $420
tire/tubes: 10 for $51

Thanks!

Jake Benjamin
Campus Bike Center Manager

All, this past week calmed down a bit. We were still busy but manageably so instead of overwhelmed. Friday’s heavy and constant rain kept visitor number low for that day. Last week I interviewed and will be hiring a new student worker. I reached out to Working Bikes about them taking a lot of our abandoned bikes as in years past but I haven’t heard back from them yet.

I taught a Bike Maintenance 101 class last Monday. It went well, even if there was  low turnout. I picked up 12 bikes or so from UIPD. They’ve got another 10 – 12 for us and I’ll coordinate with them this week on that. I’ll also be finishing up some bikes so we have a few for sale, stripping some of the junkers that we got from UIPD and working on inventory as we look towards fall.

The numbers:

Sales: $1,586.00

Memberships: 11 for $330
Bikes (refurb): 4 for $695
Bikes (B-a-B): 2 for $104.50

Tires/tubes: 14 for $112

Thanks!

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager

All, busy times have arrived! We’ve mostly sold out of bikes (4 left), and been registering bikes like crazy. With a dearth of for sale bikes, we’ve got an uptick of B-a-Bs, for better or worse. The tail end of last week I officially suspended the First Visit Free option for the Campus Bike Center. Just too busy to accommodate freebies. I’ll reinstate FVF when it calms down, usually in October. I’ll add that info to the website today.

Last week featured a lot of stern talking-tos with members about the concept of not being allowed to work on your bike without a stand. There’s a lot of pushback on it and I’ll attempt this week to emphasis the safety aspect and maybe that’ll help.

Over the weekend were two outreach events: Quad Day and Illini Frenzy. Both were well-attending and well-received! I handed out a lot of registration forms and TBP hours pages.

This week I’ll be interviewing for a potential new hire, building bikes, attending the Bike Project monthly meeting, and stripping the junk bikes we got donated last week to keep the shop as clean as I can during the busy times.

The numbers:

Visitors: 123

Sales: $1,677.00

Bikes (refurb): 6 for $960
Memberships: 8 for $240
Tires/tubes: 19 for $83

Thanks!

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager

All, last week seemed to pick up towards the end of the week. We had to herd people out of the shop at 5:30. Even with the street closure, people are managing to find us. I’ve taken the sandwich board sign off the trike and placed it next to the garage door facing east since most of our traffic is coming from that side nowadays. I’ll reconstruct the trike and start using it again once Pennsylvania is reopened.

This week I’ll be bringing the student staff in during the mornings to help clean and purge since we’ll be getting a pan dumpster and some new furniture. The disruption won’t affect open hours, as most of the cleaning will be in the back end of the shop anyway. We’ve got a dumpster here until Friday, so the staff and I should be able to concentrate all the cleaning to the mornings and have things back to functional order in time for open hours.

I think either this week or next I will be suspending First Visit Free. This past week it was already affecting usage/stand availability for members. I’ll put a bulletin on the Bike Project website alerting people to that fact when I institute it.

The numbers:

Visitors: 79

Sales: $468.00

Memberships: 2 for $60.
Bikes (Refurb): 1 for $170
Bikes (B-a-B): 1 for $56
Tire/tubes: 10 for $50

Thanks!

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager

All, last week was slow, for the most part. Felt like we got a lot of donations. Trained a new staffer, waiting on clearance to train one more. Still building and scrapping bikes on the regular. My checklist sheet for shop builds is working—for the most part. There are still detail things that the staff don’t really notice, a slack chain on a single-speed for example, or cable ends are too long. Overall, I think it’s helping but the details matter and very much can still result in an unsafe bicycle. I’ll look at revising it a bit this w eek.

This will be Dennis’s last week here (I think, will check on this). He has been a great staffer and we’ll miss him!

This week I will begin prep for our big clean out/purge at the beginning of August. I’ll poll the staff for availability and iron out the details for how many days we’ll be closed (best-case scenario: one day). We’ll begin August 6th. We’ll be pulling all the bikes out and moving furniture around to give a solid, deep clean, and toss out the junk that has accumulated. We haven’t ever done a big clean like this during my tenure here and it’s wholly overdue. While we might lose a day or two of open hours, the end result will be a better functioning and cleaner/easier to navigate space.

This week I will also be getting in touch with Lexco about ordering PB Blinky lights for LTN 2018!

Numbers:

Visitors: 75
Sales: $724
Memberships: 7 for $210

Bikes (refurb): 2 for $220
Tire/tubes: 11 for $88

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager

All, pretty relaxed week here. The construction on Pennsylvania is in full swing and will probably adversely affect how many visitors we get but we’ll see. If the main door is completely or even mostly inaccessibly, a lot more people will be using the back garage door that we open for air flow. In that case, I’ll reorganize the shop to accommodate for that. All told, we’ll probably miss some visitor sign-ins because of it. But I’ll play it by ear and see how people navigate i t.  

On Monday morning last week I had three folks come in who are going on a mission trip with their church to Malawi, Africa and hoping to teach some bike skills over there. I showed them some basic repairs and gave them some old parts/tools that they could use and advised against buying expensive and specific tools. Their trip is annual so they’ll check back next year.

I’ve got another interview for a student worker today.

On Friday alone we got like 5 bikes donated. Nice old 3 speeds (like we need more). This morning I arrived to find 3 Walmarters donated in front of the garage. I’ll pull and scrap a few more to even it out.

The numbers:
Sales: $1,173.25
Memberships: 5 for $150
Bikes (refurbished): 4 for $695
Bikes (B-a-B): 1 for $57
Tire/tubes: 10 for $87

Sincerely,

Jake Benjamin
Campus Bike Center Manager

All, last week was hot but we survived. A few storms broke up the extreme heat, thankfully. Other than that, it was business as usual. All-stands-full for a few days last week. We had a nice line on Friday but the crazy storm also penned everyone inside the shop while they waited it out. I’ve hired two more student workers and working on a third. I’ll train them this week. We’ve had a lot of volunteers in lately, and one especially eager volunteer wants to come almost every day all summer. Yikes.

Thanks again to Todd for picking up the scrap pile over the weekend. I’m trying to stay ahead of the donations, as far as how many bikes we’ve got in here. As we sell more, that will help, but we’ve still got more bikes than is probably necessary or safe.

This week I’ll be focusing on setting up some volunteer tasks as we have had multiple volunteers per day in over the last week or so, burning through some of my go-to tasks. I’ll work on minute organization tasks and maybe overhauling hubs/wheels. As mentioned I’ll be training new staff this week as well.

The numbers:

Visitors: 93
Sales:  $849

Memberships: 11 for $330
Bikes (refurb): 1 for $135

Tires/tubes: 18 for $124

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager

All, last week picked up a little. We had a couple days there of pretty steady busyness. Summer weather’ll do that!

I’ve hired two new student workers for the summer, which is a start, but will need to hire a few more in time for the Fall semester once Evan, Dennis, and Lucas move on.

I dropped off a stack of quarter sheet flyers at Champaign Cycle over the weekend, much to their delight, so we’ll have a little more exposure in the wider off-campus community.

This week I’ll continue processing the bikes donated from Champaign Cycle’s Community Bike Sale. I’ll do final safety inspections on the half dozen or so bikes that are almost ready for sale. Additionally, I’ll begin training the new student staffers.

Numbers:

Visitors: 87
Sales: $598.20
Bike (refurb): 1 for $110
Memberships: 3 for $90
Tires/tubes: 9 for $49

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager

All, it’s almost BIKE MONTH! Tomorrow is BTWD! Student staff and I will be running the event, which promises—at this point—to be fantastic weath er.

Last week was slightly abridged since I took Monday off. Hours ran smoothly without me. The remaining days were a healthy amount of busy but skewed towards slow overall. This week looks to be warmer.

I taught a class at ARC on Tuesday night. 10 people showed up, one of whom came to the Bike Center the next day and declared, “Your class inspired me to try to repair my own bike”. Couldn’t have hoped for a better result!

On Friday I interviewed two new student workers that I will be hiring. They’re both freshman, which provides me with ample time to mold them into expert bicycle helpers--and they were willing to stick it out through some tough, frustrating hub repairs I had them do. Elsewhere on the staffing front, Leah will be leaving us for the greener pastures of Cunningham Children’s Home in the next week or two. Shean will follow sometime after graduation, I believe. They’ve both been great employees; they’ll be missed around here.

Numbers:

Sales: $296.50
Memberships: 4 for $120
Tire/tube: 6 for $50

No B-a-B or refurbished sales

Thanks!

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager