This is certainly the best cycling manual I've ever read.

This is a fantastic book - I was lucky to find a copy way back in 1975 when I wanted to get a sports bike.

10-speed bicycles were very popular at the time, good ones were not easy to get where I lived at the time. I decided it would make sense to build one, from parts purchased at the stores, and putting it all together myself.

With the detailed information, illustrations and know-how presented in this book, I had fun, learned a lot, and built a better bike than I could buy in the stores. Fantastic book!

After so many years, I am back to cycling very intensively, and the mechanical knowledge I learned from this manual still serves me well. I love Classic and Vintage bikes, and their mechanics are all covered in detail in the book.

The only thing the book might not cover is the newer technologies like brake/shifter combos, so if you are interested in maintenance of more modern bikes you might find a better, more recent book.

Excellent reference, used copies are very low priced, recommended. ( )

Excellent and enjoyable ( )

My copy of this book is wonderfully dog-eared and oil-stained. It was the book I used to learn how to fix my bicycle. It was also the book that first suggested to me the legitimacy of cycling as a form of transportation.

This book was published in the long lean years of cycling in the UK. Numbers cycling had declined and Margaret Thatcher was about to come to power with her calls to the great car economy. Ballantine was therefore ahead of himself when he was writing about bicycling as transportation and not as a hobby, or a child's toy.

Of course, the most controversial part of the book, was Ballantine's instructions on how to deal with an attacking dog, up to and including how to kill it. This was edited out of later editions. ( )

Still not perfect, but great for routine maintanence. Probably due for the next issue as things have moved on quite a bit in the interviening years. ( )