My local library which is part of the Washington county Library system (next to Portland). It's where Hillsboro is, which is where Intel's manufacturing is, also called Silicon Forest, has a Library Of Things!
I've checked out a KitchenAid stand mixer, synthesizer, guitar, stud finder, drum machine, ukulele, air quality detector, and many more things.
They also have a sewing machine and a. Vitamix.
It's amazing! I love being able to check out new things from our library!
I think there's an effort towards tool checkout as well in the future! There's a tool library in a couple cities east of us as well that I keep hearing about!
PDX has it going on!!!
Libraries of Things are a thing now. The items that are most useful are those that lend things that you use from once a year to every couple of years.
My local library (PEI Library Service) has a telescope, radon detector, a basic (and I mean basic) toolkit, some gardening tools among other things. The collection has a couple of surprises, but mostly underwhelming.
I did request something more practical, like a bicycle disc brake flushing kit, but this has not happened yet.
I can hardly think of a worse thing than a bleed kit to lend out from a library. They're full of small parts to lose, and they'll never be clean once you use them. And you don't want people mixing up the DOT and mineral oil bleed kits.
I have worked in a bike shop as a mechanic, and we periodically ended up misplacing the various adapters. This is in a place where everybody using the kit is getting paid to do the job and has been trained. The librarians would go nuts just replacing O-rings and adapters that people had lost.
If you need one for your specific bike, you're probably as well off just buying the one you need from e.g. bleedzone.com [0]. Most of them are around or under $25, and if it's your kit, you always know who the last idiot to use it was :-)
[0] I haven't bought from them, but probably will when I need one. The shop I worked in has sadly closed.
> a bicycle disc brake flushing kit
With the right gear, the job is still horrible. SRAM brakes give me an unlimited number of maintenance chores.
To be fair SRAM are particularly a pain to bleed. Shimano, Magura etc are much easier
Yeah, the SRAM ones require two syringes and seven hands to bleed. And DOT fluid is great at removing paint if you spill it. I haven't done any Magura ones, but the Shimano ones were clearly engineered to be maintained by someone who isn't an octopus.
I recently learned that if you live in a place where Citroën LHM is readily available, it's a less-expensive and compatible substitute for Shimano mineral oil brake fluid. Conversely, if you're in a place where LHM isn't available for love or money, you can substitute Shimano mineral brake oil instead of going on a wild goose chase of the Citroën product.
Wow wait, I basically live in bicycle land (the netherlands), but I've never heard of fluid breaks for bicycles. All I've ever seen are cable breaks. Fluid breaks on motorcycles, sure, but I'm pretty surprised they are used on regular cycles as well!
They came on to the downhill MTB market 25-30 years ago now, spread into XC and from there into road and gravel. Sadly, they've now made their way down to the mid-low end of the hybrid/city/comfort market as well. Low-end hydraulic disc brakes are a huge downgrade from cable-actuated brakes.
The components range from OK to outright crap and the labor to screw around with them easily adds up to a significant fraction of the cost of the bicycle. What would've been a 15-30 minute cable and housing job can easily turn into a 60-120 minute hose and bleed job. Assuming you have the parts on hand to terminate the hose on both ends, that is.
In 10 years, there will be an absolute glut of bicycles that are basically fixable except for their totally unsupported hydraulic brakes.
The braking performance ranges from better than the equivalent price-point rim brakes to absolute crap. I hadn't ridden my mountain bike for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to realize that the 20 year-old Avid BB-7 cable-actuated discs on it compare favorably to most of the hydraulic systems on the market.
I got back into cycling after 20 years off.
Good hydraulic disc brakes are just so good.
Sadly I need them more, I’m a chicken on the decent and there is a lot more of me to stop.
Whoa are they that different from a typical motorcycle brake? Because I never had a problem with those, all the way from 1990s japanese scooters. They are simple, reliable and don't require much maintenance. They even work ok on 75% water-dot mix on completely weared-out pads if you can't fix'em on the road. Worst thing that can happen is hose rupture, which is extremely rare, good hoses just work forever, brakes becoming a bit mushy after about 10-15 years, which you adapt to.
I think hydraulics are overkill for bicycles, but apart from that what's the problem?
They can be very very fiddly.
They get contaminated fluid - presumably from shit cylinder seals. They can be difficult to tune (too much travel, not enough). They can be fiddly to change pads. The pistons stop working on one side (binding up), they can leak, etc.
Combine all that with an electronic, wireless gear shifter that’s in close proximity and the roadside repair in the rain can be miserable.
Don’t get me wrong, I like them a lot but most my shop visits are for brake repairs. I have to work on them every few weeks as I go though pads in as little as 6 weeks.
I've never worked on a motorcycle, but I have worked on hydraulic brakes on several cars, including when I was recently given the opportunity to learn how to bend and flare rigid brake lines.
The problem on bicycles is that everything is small and light, and that nothing is really standardized at this point. You need a bleed kit for mineral oil, and a different one for DOT fluid. Each of those probably comes with a few different adapters for the various threadings. Barbs, olives, and flare nuts aren't standardized across manufacturers either. There are three or four different ways to just put a caliper on a fork or frame. There are a further three or four ways to put a rotor on a hub. That means you're stocking more hubs and pre-built wheels as well as rotors. There are easily a dozen common brake pads, probably many more if you start looking at the obscure stuff.
At the handlebars, the drop-bar brake and shift levers are super tightly packaged and integrated. At the high end of the market, you might be able to get rebuild parts, though I never had to do that. Otherwise you're replacing a pretty expensive component, assuming it's even available. The market is still moving pretty fast as we've gone from two-by to one-by drivelines.
Cheaper non-integrated flat-bar brake levers are relatively benign to replace if you have to, but you still have to chop and reterminate the hose and bleed them. On the flip side, you can probably forget about getting rebuild parts.
Compared to a car, and I assume a motorcycle, the tolerances on everything are tighter. The room for gaskets and O-rings is smaller so leaks develop more easily and water contaminates the fluid more easily. The size of the fluid reservoir is vastly smaller so there's less reserve if you have a small leak. You're moving less fluid overall, so the margin between mushy and useless is pretty small.
We've come from a world where you needed two types of cable (road and MTB), one type of housing, and generously a half-dozen kinds of pads for cable actuated rim brakes to this. It's all doable, but the amount of stuff and tools you have to have on hand in a bike shop has goddamn exploded.
I didn’t know this - I’ve never had to work on my Shimano brakes, they just work.
Auto part stores often will lend both weird and specialized tools, and relatively basic ones, too.
Usually the way it works is you "buy" the tool and then "return" it.
While I understand some people think this is clever, all it does is increase costs for businesses which ends up increasing costs for honest consumers. Worse yet: it tends to increase the cost for local businesses, or at least businesses employing local people, so it's giving the finger to your neighbours rather than to the man.
Many autoparts store have a formal tool lending program that is structured as buy/return. I know it sounds like @bombcar is suggesting some “lifehack” that is closer to stealing. But, no, this is an actual service provided by actual auto parts stores.
https://www.autozone.com/lp/loan-a-tool
If it is a formal policy of the store, then it's a different story. They could also manage it in a way to minimize costs. That said, I have run into people who are proud of "discovering" the lifehack version.
Ok, so they don’t call it a ’buy’ program.
It’s a lending program, for free. With a deposit for full value so it becomes a purchase if you don’t return it in time. Same structure but the phrasing matters.
Cool idea.
From the website it seems like they're expecting that some people will do this with the intention of renting, but then decide to keep or not get around to the return process.
They make money on the parts you buy. the tools are a loss leader
The local library system has in addition to niche services like 3d printers and circuit card printers a humongous board game collection. You can reserve a board game online, it eventually appears at your local branch of the library and then you check it out for 2 weeks.
Really great way to test before you buy.
Our little town in Minnesota has some of these too (https://winona.lib.mn.us/library-of-things/) it's really cool! There's also a new maker space getting set up now which will have a tool library open to the community.
Do they have a fusion splicer ? I know it might seem random… but I feel like might come in clutch in the future
The Washington County library system is excellent; I love that one card will get you access to the entire area.
That's my library system too! I go to tualatin and it has a dedicated room for their makerlab and have classes every day for all kinds of stuff. Whenever I go in its pretty well attended.