Welcome to Home Mechanics' Week - a seven-day DIY extravaganza

A week of learning new skills, tips and tricks and becoming a better home mechanic in the process.

Aaron Borrill

Feb 20 2025

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Welcome to off.road.cc's first themed content hub of the year – Home Mechanics' Week, a seven-day DIY workshop where our team of in-house experts will share all the tips and tricks we've learned over the years, all to help you master some basic skills for yourself. Apart from saving you costly bills in the long run, this series aims to improve your skills so that you can eventually perform bigger tasks and services on your bike and all its components.

Our editorial team have curated a seven-day crash course focussing on basic mechanic skills to advanced servicing techniques. By Sunday, we guarantee you that you'll have the confidence to bleed your brakes, fix your chain and even replace your headset bearings – all without setting foot in a bike shop.

While these tasks can be carried out at home, we still advise bigger jobs or any tricky/complicated sessions to be taken care of by a bike shop or experienced mechanic – we're very much supporters of the local bike shop and local businesses.

So what have we got planned for the week? You can expect a masterclass on chain management, tubeless tyre conversion tips, headset maintenance, fork servicing and winter bike protection to name a few.

You can also expect a collection of reviews and news stories around the subject of DIY. For road bike-specific tips and tricks, be sure to follow or frends at road.cc.

Regular readers may recall our last themed week, which was a big success. As per tradition, once each story is published, it will be listed below making navigation easy and ensuring everything is neatly organised in one dedicated space. Lastly, let us know what you think and if there's a specific themed week you'd like us to cover in the future – e-mail us at info@off-road.cc.

Home Mechanics' Week 2025 - all the stories in one place

Author block

Aaron Borrill

Aaron is the editor of off-road.cc. Born and raised in South Africa he completed his BA honours at the University of Cape Town before embarking on a career in journalism. As the former tech editor of Cyclingnews and Bike Perfect, digital editor of Bicycling magazine and associate editor of TopCar, he's travelled the world writing about bikes and anything with wheels for 19 years. A competitive racer and Stravaholic, he’s twice ridden the Cape Epic, raced nearly every mountain bike stage race in South Africa and completed the Haute Route Alps. He's also a national-level time triallist and eSports racer, too – having captained South Africa at the 2022, 2023 and 2024 UCI Cycling eSports World Championships.