Vincent’s tire and wheel shop?

The team mechanics (5 of us here for camp) arrived Thursday night as well as Dave (Soigneur) Louise (Logistics) and Margie (Nike sponsor Liaison). The remainder of the soigneurs arrived tonight.
We basically have Friday to Monday to build the 28 race bikes, 4 spare bikes and 50 pairs of wheels before the riders arrive on Monday night.
Friday morning was inventory time as we took stock of shipments most of the morning. Things like (tires/tubes, Shimano groups, bars/stems, Saddles, H2O cages, etc.) We then made calls to those who were either delinquent or short on supplies for one reason or another.
In the afternoon we went straight to bike building. There was some sort of assembly line to our bike builds. Julien would do headset installs, Juan would do Bottom Brackets, Chris would “hang parts” including the correct bar/stem for a particular rider and then label it with the riders name. Geoff would be the only one who would go straight to completing a bike build. Julien, Chris and Juan would go into bike builds after all the other tasks were finished (Headsets, BBs and part hanging).
I would be Tire and wheel guy. We all pulled wheels out of the box and then I went into taking them out of the plastic bags, adding cogs, punching holes in rim strips and finally adding tires and tubes and QR skewers. We “ONLY” got 30 pairs of our 50 pairs or wheels needed for camp. So I “ONLY” had to prep 30 pairs of wheels. That pretty much took Friday afternoon and up to just after lunch today. Real time it was about 8 or 9 hours or so to do them. That translates to about 15 to 20 minutes per pair of wheels. Not a world record by any means. But to do 30 pair of them in 8 or 9 (or so) hours with little down time is not a simple task no matter how fast you could be. My hands are nearly wasted from “rolling” the tires onto the rims. But I feel like I got a decent size job done relatively quickly.
I think I should open a tire and wheel shop.

CClinton

Owner of Promechanics.com and long time professional race mechanic.