Books for Bicycle Tinkerers and Armchair Mechanics

If you like to work on bikes, or just like to think about bikes, here are a few of my favorite titles that you might find interesting. I've divided the list into two rough categories, "practical" and "technical", though of course there's some overlap. A really good how-to manual will also tell you why, and sometimes a good explanation of why will make how self-evident.

For convenience, I've linked titles to Amazon.com, though if you have a good local book store I would certainly recommend keeping them in business. Book stores, like bike shops, are part of the soul of a community, usually run by underpaid devotees who find the fastest route to a small fortune is to start business with a large one. Still, Amazon is very fast, has excellent selection, and beats the pants off of chain bookstores in the mall.

Practical Bicycle Books

The Haynes Bicycle Book is, in my opinion, the best basic maintenance manual around for the average home mechanic. It has excellent descriptions, very clear photographic illustration of parts, and good coverage of almost everything a home mechanic will want to tackle without professional help.
After being out of print for several years, a new edition came out in the fall of 2001. I haven't seen the new edition yet myself, but if it lives up to the first edition, it would be my first suggestion for either road or mountain bike general maintenance.
Zinn and the Art of Road Bike Maintenance is specific to road bikes, though some of the information also applies to mountain bikes. Not quite as good as the Haynes book in my personal opinion, but Zinn's books stay in print and do cover everything the average home mechanic will ever attempt.
Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance is the mountain bike version of Zinn's maintenance manual, and it's the best mountain-bike-specific maintenance manual I've seen for the home mechanic.
Barnett's Manual: Analysis and Procedures for Bicycle Mechanics is an extremely comprehensive guide to almost everything that a shop mechanic will need to do on most bicycles. It goes into more detail than your average home mechanic will need, including thread specifications and torque values, for example. Many professional bicycle mechanics consider Barnett's the definitive reference on mechanical procedure. It's in a 3-ring-binder format for easy updating and adding your own notes, too.
Sutherland's Handbook for Bicycle Mechanics is an excellent companion to Barnett's Manual. While Barnett's tells you how to perform particular procedures, Sutherland provides encyclopedic references to specifications for just about every part on a bicycle, with huge lists of rim diameters and hub specifications for determining spoke lengths, headset specifications, bottom bracket spindle dimensions, hub bearing counts and axle threadings, cable and casing dimensions, internal assemblies of modern geared hubs, derailleur specifications, etc.
If you just have one bike to work on, Sutherland's is overkill. If you work on many different bikes and always need to find information on compatible replacement parts, Sutherland can save you many hours. It's also handy if your designing a new bike and want to ensure maximum compatibility with a wide range of components.
The Custom Bicycle: Buying, Setting Up, and Riding the Quality Bicycle Kolin and de la Rosa, Rodale Press, 1979.
Effective Cycling by John Forester is a clearly-written, simple guide to safely riding on ordinary roads with other traffic. It's sad to think that such a book is necessary, but while public schools spend years getting kids to play sports, and offer driver's education to older students, they generally don't bother showing younger students how to safely enjoy the lifelong ability to ride a bicycle. Forester's basic premise is simple: bicycles are vehicles, not toys.
Forester also includes other practical information on bike selection and equipment, maintenance ideas, etc.

If you spend much time on Usenet or various cycling mailing lists, you may know John Forester as a rather irritable and often irritating online persona, but his book does not display the same style, it's well written and well reasoned.

Encycleopedia 2001 is the latest in a series of annual guides published by the folks at Bike Culture Quarterly. It's filled with interesting bicycles and accessories, and highlights the many alternatives to the traditional road bike design. You'd be hard-pressed to find as many recumbents, folding bikes, and special-needs bikes in one place anywhere else.

Technical (Impractical?) Bicycle Books

Bicycles & Tricycles: An Elementary Treatise On Their Design and Construction by Archibald Sharp is probably the most comprehensive bicycle text ever written, even though it was written more than 100 years ago. (Or perhaps *because* it was written in 1896, before the automobile displaced the bicycle as the pinnacle of personal transportation engineering.) Besides detailed examinations of geometry, bearings, drivetrains, etc., it has details of many historical designs that were tried and found wanting, including many that crop up again and again as radical new "improvements", only to be discarded yet again. This book has gone in and out of print repeatedly over the years, the current edition is much better made than the last one I saw in the 1990s.

Bicycling Science by Whitt & Wilson isn't a design manual, but rather a good summary of much of the science behind the design and operation of bicycles. It has extensive discussions of steering and handling, aerodynamics, efficiency, etc. Anyone interested in the evolution of bicycles will find something worth reading here. Many better libraries have this book.

High-Tech Cycling be Edmund Burke is a collection of articles and study information on cycling technology and efficiency, biomechanics, aerodynamics, etc. If you want a better understanding of cycling physics, this is a must-read. Burke is a serious writer on cycling who provides an antidote to the lore and marketing that drives so much of the bicycle business.

Bicycle Design: Towards the Perfect Machine by Mike Burrows is a technical and historical look at many aspects of bicycles, by a bicycle designer and engineer at Giant Bicycles known for his work on carbon fiber, compact frames, and recumbent bicycles. Not a how-to manual by any means, but loaded with information that can help you decide what you want to do and what might be the better ways of doing it.

Bicycles & Tricycles; Past and Present by Charles Spencer is a brief historical review of bicycle design as of the 1880s. It has plenty of interesting illustrations, and shows how few of today's "new" inventions are even new to this century. Don't confuse this book with the seminal Bicycles and Tricycles by Archibald Sharp, it doesn't have any of the physics/mechanics that Sharp provides, but it gives another view of designs of the past.

Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist" has, I'll admit, almost nothing to do with bicycles. But if you've made it past Archibald Sharp and Charles Spencer, you probably enjoy general tinkering as much as anything bicycle-specific, so I have to recommend this CD, which contains 2600 pages of the Amateur Scientist column from Scientific American. You may remember C. S. Stong's classic Book of Projects for the Amateur Scientist, a wonderful book with dozens of fascinating projects, some of them actually useful, too. If you're lucky you can find that book used for under $100, or you can get all that and more on CD for less. So if you've ever wanted to build your own linear accellerator, or a cloud chamber, or a half-million-volt van de Graaf generator, here are all the details.

The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt is the most thorough discussion iavailable of how bicycle wheels work. It debunks many hoary old legends and gives sound engineering analysis of these very elegant prestressed structures. Much of what Brandt writes is counterintuitive to many people, even though it's accepted engineering backed up with both finite element analysis and practical demonstrations. For example, when you add weight to a bicycle wheel, the tension on the top spokes doesn't go up, but the tension on the bottom spokes goes down, so for practical purposes a wheel stands on its bottom spokes rather than hanging from the top ones. Brandt also includes step-by-step instructions on how to build and true your own bicycle wheels, and the instructions work even if you skip the technical chapters.

The McMaster-Carr Catalog isn't a bike book, it's not even really a book, though it's over 3500 pages. But if you like to tinker, it's a big-kid's toy catalog, the most complete hardware store you've ever dreamed of. The only problem is, they don't give out catalogs to just anyone -- it costs a lot to print 3500 pages of onion-skin. You can browse it as a PDF at the McMaster-Carr web site.
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