Ready Kids › Road Badge › Badge 1 › Lesson 1.3
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The check before you ride
Run the ABC Quick Check plus the e-bike additions on your own machine, out loud, in under a minute, every time you ride.
1Watch
The lever nobody looked at
The lever nobody looked at
A rider swings a leg over and reaches for the bars; the camera has already shown the front quick-release lever standing open, and the frame freezes with the rider's foot on the pedal.
18 secondsEverything in that shot is ordinary except one thing, and catching it takes about four seconds.
2The idea
The check has a name and an order
It is the ABC Quick Check, and it is what bike mechanics teach.
A is air — squeeze both tyres.
B is brakes — pull both levers, and look at whether the pads have anything left on them.
C is chain and cranks — secure, and not dry or filthy.
Quick is quick releases: every lever closed, front wheel, rear wheel, seat post.
Check is the last one, and it is a ride — roll a few metres slowly and use both brakes before you go anywhere real.
3The idea
The three an e-bike adds
Inspect the brakes, the tyres and the battery charge before every ride. The battery is the one people skip, and running out halfway is how a rider ends up pushing 30 to 60 pounds of machine home in the dark.
Then lights and lock, before you leave, rather than when you notice. And read the owner’s manual for your own machine, particularly the charging pages. That is a real instruction from the people who train adults on these, not a line to fill the page.
4Build it
Build the check
The check, in order
Eight shuffled cards: air, brakes, chain and cranks, quick releases, roll-and-brake, battery charge, lights, lock. Drag them into the order you would actually do them; the finished order is shown when you are done.
There is no trick in this one. Do it once and the order stops being a list you have to remember.
5The idea
Why brakes are the ones to be fussy about
The added weight of an e-bike may put more wear on the brakes than a conventional bicycle does. Same pads, more machine, more stops in a day. So they go from fine to not fine faster than the brakes you grew up with did.
Pull both levers hard before you set off, every single time. A lever that feels soft, or that comes almost back to the bar, is the end of that ride. It is not something to find out about halfway down a hill with a junction at the bottom.
6Decide
You squeeze the rear brake in the drive and the lever comes nearly to the bar.
Pick one to carry on.
7Look
Open, and closed
Two quick-release levers
The same front wheel photographed twice: once with the lever standing straight out from the fork, once with it folded flat against it.
Only one of those is holding the wheel in, and it is the flat one. This is the check that takes a quarter of a second and gets skipped anyway.
8Find them
Which of these belong in the check?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
9Say it
Five words, in order
Say it out loud while your hands are on the machine
“Air, brakes, chain, quick, check.”
Saying it while you do it stops you losing your place halfway through. In a month you will not need the words any more.
10Do it
Before you leave this page
Go and run the whole thing on your machine now, out loud: air, brakes, chain, quick, check, then battery, lights, lock. Time it. If it took more than a minute you were being thorough, which is fine for a first one.
Tick it when you have done it.