i'm steve guggenheim we're here at the capital plaza in trenton new jersey at the bike exchange what happens is people donate their bikes the volunteers then fix the bikes and sell them for a very low price and all the money goes to the boys and girls club of mercer county ira you're the manager how did you get involved with this it started for me about six years ago i retired seven years ago now i retired and one of the things that i wanted to do in retirement was to work for the for the bike exchange and it's been a very rewarding experience started out doing all kinds of things selling managing i tried repairing not so good at that help deliver bikes and now i'm in charge of the entire program and it's an exceptionally rewarding program why did you want to get involved i wanted to give back to the community i like working with bikes a lot of the people here are friends of mine because this club this organization started through a bike club i'm affiliated with the princeton free will or so many of my friends from that organization also work here so it's nice doing something that i like that is working with bikes also nice being with a lot of friends that i've had for many years how does the bike exchange get so many bikes and yeah we have many bike drives throughout the year anywhere from churches synagogues large companies mall companies real estate companies all kinds of organizations to buy tribes for us in addition to that we have drop off points in just about any  bike shop in mercer county we also have a drop off point at the d n r greenway in rosedale avenue in princeton so we get and sell about seventeen eighteen hundred bikes a year we have sold since the beginning over sixteen thousand bikes and we have raised just shy of eight hundred thousand dollars for the boys and girls club and that's after expenses our gross sales this year in a matter of weeks will hit one million dollars and that's something we'll be celebrating in a few weeks that's amazing how did so why is it growing like this why is selling so many bikes well we our bikes are very well priced anywhere adult bikes are anywhere from forty to several hundred dollars because we'll get some very nice bikes even up to five six seven hundred dollars but the bulk of our bikes are in the fifty two hundred fifty dollars range and it's very economical for people to come in and buy something that we've repaired and we know that it's good and and people are happy of buying bikes and giving back to the community and to the boys and girls club by buying bikes from us there are a lot of people in the store right now looking at bikes where do you people come from we get a lot of people from the greater trenton area in addition to that we get people from the surrounding areas as far as certainly princeton west windsor plainsboro somerset a lot of areas like that and addition to that we have many bikes listed on craigslist and those would be better bikes that cost from one hundred fifty on up and those will draw people customers from as far away as thirty forty fifty miles away to come and buy a bike from us either similar stories like this or elsewhere in the state of new jersey or even around the country in new jersey there are two other bike exchange operations that are not close affiliated with us but but they work on the same program there's one in new brunswick and there is one in plainfield around the country there are organizations like  this not necessarily if philly added with the boys and girls club but there are other organizations like this we are the largest one in new jersey by far and everyone here is a volunteer everybody's a volunteer we have a list of one hundred volunteers about forty five or fifty of which do the bulk of the work and it's it's amazing to see them come out even on a rainy night like this we have probably have twelve or fifteen people working in the shop and it's a lot of fun to the volunteers have to know anything about bikes if they want to help they not necessarily are there a lot to a lot or lot of people who volunteer here are cyclists those that aren't or don't know how to repair bikes will be trained by us will have  repairs training sessions that we give throughout the year when can people come in get a bike in the spring through the end of the year we have our regular hours who are church tuesday and thursday five to eight pm saturday ten to four pm if people have a bike they want to donate whatever they do they can bring it to the shop during our opening hours or they can bring it to any bike shop in mercer county area you'll see a sign in the window don donate bikes here for the trenton boys and girls club are you surprised at how many bikes you get every year i'm concerned that we're not going to get enough bikes to make our goals for the year and every year we come up with more bikes right now in the shop we have about six hundred bikes that are in various stages of repair most most at this point have been repaired and ready for spring with a huge inventory of repaired bikes i would guess that spring is your best selling season spryte say that the month of may june july and august are the book the bulk of our sales come in those months the choice of bikes is quite amazing from these  s only sell for about twenty dollars or so and then you've got some bigger ones here that all kinds of styles and all style like this black and silver bike this bike sounds for let's check it out for forty five dollars here's an old rusted bike that one sells for twenty five we've got this one for thirty five this bike is for somebody a lot taller than me for eighty dollars we've got some of these beach cruisers this yellow one for example that was to our turning to be very very popular in a lot of people as summer comes comes and by coming by these bikes and you've got some of the old style three speed bikes you've got a whole range of bikes over here and it goes on they've got hundreds and hundreds of bikes here they've got some that are priced for well over one hundred but most are well under one hundred i'm tom armstrong eleven branch burke township of somerset county tom what are you doing with this bike this is a nice bicycle it was donated by a local bicycle shop but we can't fix the frame on this one because it's the aluminum is cracked up here the shop said this is a fairly common occurrence for a bicycle of this brand disadvantage so it's got a lot of good components on that the d reller zur good the shifters are good the handlebar grips are good the seat pos the pedals and cranks are good the chains even usable so we make use of parts taking off of bikes that we can't fix to fix bikes that have beat up or broken parts and we replaced the parts on the bicycles with the good parts we keep in inventory so i'm just putting these good parts and inventory tonight what would cause a bike to crack like that probably it was a design failure didn't have quite enough and why do you do it well i enjoy working with my hands i enjoy the camaraderie we've got with the other people volunteer here and like the idea that when i am having a productive night i can get three four sometimes five five bicycles out onto the sales floor and that's a couple hundred dollars maybe upwards of five hundred dollars of money that can command to support the boys and girls club programs what's the most common problem you find in a bike well flat tires brakes out of adjustment shifting out of adjustment bent the rail or so torn up seats and we won't make them look better for the sales floor that's about it my name's dave spencer and i'm from langhorne pennsylvania they've what are you doing with this bike this is a bike i just pulled out of the inventory in the back to be repaired so i'm just going over it basics basic structure check the air in the tires i just filled those back up see if they all day or next i'm checking the the ability of it to shift gears properly to go into the years that are needed i just notice that some of the mechanism in the back here needs to be some some has the or cation added to it so that's what i'll be doing next how do you add lubrication just get some oil cans and squirted on the chain work it around and just take it through the gears so the oil spreads through the cassette and through the chain or by generally hard to work on with a fairly easy for a novice for a beginner which is what i am a novice i've never worked on bikes before i've been here about a year and everything i've learned of learned here so you and a beginning it was very difficult but now i find it pretty much just common sense why do you work  here joy the camaraderie i enjoy doing something with my hands that's about it the camaraderie and just working for a good organization the boys and girls club of new jersey it's quite an impressive organization just in market chefs you know i'm from trenton new jersey just what do you do here i kind of help fix by trying to give volunteers hands when they kind of get stuck trying to figure something out i could help guide them get an understanding on how to actually fix the bike and really teach them how to fix it like you're kind of the chief mechanic i guess and supplies where do we get all the supplies that are fixed so the supplies we get bikes and parts and things like that donated from all the bike shops in the area stuff walked in through the doors so we get all kind of parts and everything bikes from all over the place in the area how do you determine when a bike is worth fixing or when it's worth scrapping if there's a extreme amount of rust on it and it's not a bike shop quality bike it's not worth putting a lot of time into fixing a bike that we could probably sell for forty dollars it's just not worth it it's not worth our volunteers time we'd rather spend more time on of like that's worth a lot more money it's better for the community it's better for the boys and girls club and it's much easier to work on and it's a lot easier to learn on as well you're a professional bike mechanic but you also come here and volunteer how come because it's fun i live a couple  blocks away it's it's kind of like work but then it's kind of it's fun it's a hobby you have a lot of bikes i do any should i say forty what do you do with forty bikes it's a hobby it's a it's a museum and i just have to collect them first names bodo and i'm from titusville photo what are you doing with this bike well i'm trying to get a read road ready for some young person hopefully to enjoy it and hopefully make it safe they can take it on the road and do what they'd like to do with it what do you do to make sure it's safe well we checked the brakes checked the change of tires basically checked the entire frame make sure it's  solid make sure the gears are working well make sure that it's road ready and safe do you have experience fixing bikes before coming here what did you learn here i had some experience before i came here i built some bikes in the past and i usually service my own bike so coming here it's a new experience i get to work on a lot of different bikes i've never touched before so it's pretty much new to me a lot of this is a difficult thing bikes not really upset you know it's pretty much common sense you know there's some things that are more difficult than others but in general it's pretty much common sense you know if you take it apart you can usually figure out where to put it back and you you can tell pretty quickly if something's on safe when you volunteer here i felt it a good cause actually i retired about a year and a half ago when i was looking for volunteer opportunities and i heard about this actually through a bike shop local bike shops i forgot to check it out came here and i enjoy it and i try to come here as often as i can do you do a lot of biking yourself i used to my wife's the big bicyclist but i used to do thousands of miles a year but i got injured a few years back and since then i haven't been the same so now i just fix bikes and i volunteer for for bike organizations how did you do thousands of miles a year well we used to do a lot of training for some of the rides we want to we did bicycling trips with the organization organized bike trips and we would and i stopped for many many years and then there was like a you know how you always have an epiphany or whatever in your life or some kind of event that happens i became single and i said what the heck let me go buy a bicycle and i started bicycling again and that's where i met my current wife actually bicycling so that's got me back into and then we she had a common desire to bicycle more of a desire than me so we would push each other and just keep riding jim how do we know at this bike needs when we take a bike and from a donation we basically go over a couple of things on it before we're going to go ahead and start working on it so one of the things i like to test is just the front brake work does the back brake work is the seat of hatched are the handlebars attached or does it move to sit move back and forth like this which it shouldn't so that's one thing it needs to get fixed are the gears any good on it i have a three speed on this particular bike the gears work good and then this is loose as well so i would likely give this to one of our mechanics and tell them to tighten up the stem on this fix the two flat tires tighten the shifter adjust the gears and look for any bo loose and that would be our start how do you know when a bike is not where it is a lot of times the bike will require so much repair that it's between the cost and parts and the effort of the mechanics gets us to the point where we say i'm just going to take it apart and use those parts on a different bicycle and time is spent on fixing it it varies and steve some some bikes are fixed in ten fifteen minutes while other bikes are you know it could be an hour it all depends and that's what the the gauge that we try to do when we do the tree osh to say is this a good bike to fix or not what percentage of which is the bikes ready to go they get moved up to the front customers come in and pick out a bike that they want to buy and we sell proceeds go to the boys and girls club a trend are you surprised at the quality of the bikes you get are they add mixture it's the entire gamut steve and the some of the bikes are so nice i mean i have what five bikes from here that i ride myself and some of them also we look at and say ok well this this is just going to be scrap metal it runs the entire gamut why do you do this this sort of brings me back to junior high when guys hung out together and just did things and it's it's like a club or a community what about the house thank you and i'm happy to help the boys and girls club and i'm happy to help them reach their funding funding goals it sounds like that bike exchange quite successful i think so yes hello my name is leo i'm a mechanic here at the bike exchange and today we're going to talk a little bit had a change a flat tire first thing you had to do was get your tire wheel off your bike there's two ways you can do that one has nut where you need a wrench to get that off and there's an easy way it's called the quick release and his flip a lever and your tire kind of comes right off but let's get started well the first thing we have to do is release our brakes because with this guy over and we're going to be least are quick release on the wheel and we just flip the lever and have to unscrew with a bit and the wheel comes off some tires you can just reach in with your fingers and pull in right off and come off otherwise you have to use what's known as a tire lever hooked up under the tire frizer right off sometimes you need to sometimes want to work it all depends where they have a big tire skinny tire once you get the tire off or half way off in this case pull your old tube out with a hole in it and you want to talk to to be inside the tire work it all the way around and once you have the tube back in your tire starting at the valve you put your tire be back in the room again working your way around the time and we go and tires back in there and now if you have to put air in your tires were still flat so in this case we're going to take our pump and because we're in the shop we have a shop pump there's different kinds you can have one frame a little tiny mini pump you want to stop about halfway through just to make sure your tire is still on the rim sometimes you can put it on wrong and it's popped right off again and you just keep pumping your tire your quick release a little bit and then put the quick release lever to tighten everything up metallic now and then has a small cap on top that you screw in a screw out for you can put air can do is you can do a check your adjustments make sure your seats high enough make sure your handlebars in the right spot and before you ride you always want to check your brakes because even though you have a good go you want to have a good w make sure they work and then once you start to ride the suit your ride just a little tiny bit you want to check your gears make sure you can shift gears up and down because you don't want to get way way out of the ride and find that your bike is broken that's pretty pretty bad and you also want to make at the bike exchange at the bike exchange been here about nine years i think now it sounds like you've been fixing things before that yeah pretty much all my life what's the hardest thing to fix on a bike the hardest thing to fix on a bike have your cables too loose or cables too tight your brakes won't work on those conditions so that kind of have to be just right why do you volunteer i like help of people and i like working on bikes i'm a bike geek we all are donate a bike all you have to do is bring your bicycle over to your local bike shop and they'll send it over to the bike exchange here in trenton new jersey or you can deliver it yourself the store is open tuesday and thursday nights and on saturdays i'm steve