May 2026 – LoBall Bikes

Why an anti-racist bike shop — and why we say so out loud.

Posted on May 8, 2026June 24, 2026 by

There’s a sign on our door. It says Black Lives Matter, and below that it says this is a safe space, and below that it says Nazis are not welcome. It’s been there since before we opened. Some people walk in anyway and tell us it’s too political. We tell them, politely, that it’s actually the least political thing in the building — it’s just us saying who we are.

Why we put it in writing

Because silence is a choice. The average bike shop is a white dude space. Not always on purpose, not always with malice, but by default — by what’s on the walls, by who gets ignored when they walk in, by what music is playing, by how the staff talks to a 55-year-old Latina asking about cruisers versus how they talk to a 28-year-old white guy asking about gravel bikes. That default costs people. It costs them comfort, access, money, and eventually it costs them cycling altogether. We didn’t want to run that shop.

“A shop that doesn’t say anything says something. We decided to say the thing.”
— Dan

What a shop owes its street

We’re on South 4th Avenue. That’s not an accident. Our neighbors are working families, renters, students, retirees on fixed incomes, people who need a bike to get to work and can’t afford to have it down for two weeks while some shop orders a part from their one distributor. A bike shop that serves that street needs to actually serve that street — not perform accessibility in a press release and then charge $150 for a basic tune-up.

Gatekeeping in cycling is real and it is expensive. It shows up in the language — performance components, entry-level (said like an insult), serious cyclists — and it shows up in who gets eye contact when they walk through the door. We try to notice when we’re doing it and stop. We don’t always get it right. But we’ve made it a practice to ask ourselves: who is this shop for? And the answer we keep coming back to is: everyone who needs a bike to move through this city.

The practical stuff

Here’s what anti-racism looks like in a bike shop on a Tuesday afternoon:

We greet every customer the same way, regardless of what they’re wearing or what bike they rode in on.
We explain things without condescending. You can ask us what a derailleur is and we will tell you without making a face.
We stock bikes under $300 because that’s what a lot of our neighbors can spend.
We do free safety checks — no purchase required, no up-sell, just come in.
We donate a percentage of every sale to local organizations doing equity work. See our journal for the current list.

None of that is heroic. It’s just running a shop that actually gives a damn. The sign on the door is the easy part. The hard part is the daily practice of making sure the shop behind it earns it. We’re working on that every day. Come find us at the shop or call us at 520-365-0754 — whoever answers will be glad you called.

Who gets to ride: gatekeeping in cycling.

Posted on May 7, 2026June 24, 2026 by

Cycling has a gatekeeping problem. It’s not unique to cycling — plenty of outdoor sports have the same disease — but cycling’s version is particularly well-dressed and expensive and self-righteous about it, and that combination makes it harder to call out. So let’s call it out.

Kit culture is a dress code, and dress codes are about exclusion

There’s an unspoken rule in certain cycling circles that says you’re not a real cyclist unless you’re wearing the right clothes. Bib shorts with a chamois. A jersey with pockets. Clipless pedals — and God help you if you call them “clipless” without knowing why they’re called that. Matching helmet. Cycling-specific sunglasses. The total cost of entry to look right on a group ride can easily run $500 before you even touch a bike. And if you show up in basketball shorts on a flat-bar hybrid, you can feel it — the glances, the condescension, the way people drift ahead when you’re trying to keep up.

“Nobody needs bib shorts to ride a bike. The bib shorts are a signal, not a tool. The signal is: do you belong here?”

Price as a structural barrier

The average new bike sold at a traditional bike shop in 2024 costs over $1,000. The average American worker makes about $23 an hour. Do the math. A “starter” road bike at a boutique shop is 40-plus hours of labor for someone at median wage — and that’s before you add a helmet, a lock, lights, and a tune-up after six months. The industry has convinced itself that this is just the cost of quality, but what it’s actually done is sorted cycling into a leisure activity for people with disposable income, and left everyone else on Walmart bikes with no support when those bikes inevitably fall apart.

That’s why we exist. Our shop floor is built around used bikes in the $150–$500 range, inspected, adjusted, and ready to ride. Not every bike is a project bike. Not every customer has a Saturday afternoon and a YouTube education in bottom bracket threads. Some people just need a bike that works, priced like something a person can actually buy.

Jargon as a gate

This one is sneakier. Cycling language was invented by cyclists for cyclists, and that’s fine, but it gets weaponized. Someone walks in and asks for a “regular bike” and a shop employee launches into a Socratic dialogue about riding style, terrain preference, and Q-factor. That’s not helpful. That’s performance. Real help sounds like: “Tell me where you’re riding and how far, and I’ll show you three bikes that might work.”

Here’s the actual minimum vocabulary you need to interact with LoBall:

Bike — you have one or want one. That’s it.
Broken — something’s wrong. Bring it in.
Ride — what you do on the bike. We want to know where.

Everything else we’ll explain as we go. No quiz at the door. No eyebrows raised at your terminology. Our service desk runs the same way — tell us what’s wrong in whatever words you have, and we’ll figure it out together. That’s the shop we want to be. Call us at 520-365-0754 if you want to talk it through before you come in.

Kill ur phone (a modest proposal).

Posted on May 6, 2026June 24, 2026 by

Leave it in your bag. Or better yet, leave it at home. Put it in a drawer. Tell people you’re going for a ride and you’ll be back when you’re back. This is not a bit. This is a sincere request from someone who has watched the joy drain out of group rides because everybody’s got their Strava going and their phone mounted and they’re worried about the segment and also they just got a notification and they need to check it real quick while we’re waiting at this light.

What your brain does after about 11 minutes

There’s research on this — not bro-science, actual neuroscience — that says it takes roughly 11 minutes of uninterrupted focus for your prefrontal cortex to fully disengage from task-switching mode and drop into something closer to present-tense awareness. Eleven minutes. On a bike, that’s maybe two miles at a casual pace. Two miles in and your brain starts doing something different. You stop cataloging your day. You start noticing the street — the way the afternoon light hits the Santa Catalinas from the Broadway bike lane, the smell of whatever’s cooking at the taqueria on 6th, the sound of your own chain, which you realize needs lube.

“Riding without your phone isn’t a productivity hack. It’s more like a small act of reclaiming your own attention span, which the internet has been eating for about fifteen years.”

What actually happens on a phoneless ride

You talk to the people you’re riding with. Wild concept. You make eye contact with strangers at intersections. You get a little lost and figure it out. You miss a turn and discover a street you didn’t know existed. You stop when something looks interesting because there’s no app waiting to penalize you for it. You get home and feel like you actually went somewhere, even if you went in a circle.

This is what our Tuesday Night Ride is built around. No Strava segment of the week. No fastest group wins. No one’s looking at a screen while we’re moving. We stop at the park and talk. We ride back slow. We end up on the patio and talk about bikes and Tucson and whatever else comes up. It costs nothing and it’s the best thing we do.

A modest practical proposal

Here’s what we suggest, incrementally, if going full phoneless sounds like too much:

Start with one ride a week where you don’t mount the phone to the bars. It can still be in your pocket for emergencies.
Turn off all notifications for the duration of the ride. Just airplane mode. You’ll survive.
After two weeks of that, try leaving it at home for a short loop — 45 minutes, a route you know.
Notice how you feel at the end of that ride compared to a monitored one.
Keep doing the thing that makes you feel better.

The bike existed before the algorithm. The feeling of riding it existed before the app that tracks it. We’re not Luddites — we’ll happily help you pick a good cycling computer if you want navigation or basic metrics without the social media layer. Come by the shop and we’ll talk through what actually serves your riding versus what’s just collecting your data. Or call us: 520-365-0754.

How we price a used bike, line by line.

Posted on May 5, 2026June 24, 2026 by

People ask us all the time why a used bike costs what it costs, and it’s a fair question. A bike sitting in a garage for three years and a bike someone rode every day are not the same bike, even if they’re the same model. Here’s exactly how we think through pricing — no mystery, no markup theater, just the actual math we do on every bike that comes through the door.

Step one: the frame

The frame is the bike. Everything else is replaceable; the frame either works or it doesn’t. We check for cracks at the welds on steel frames, near the dropout on aluminum, and around the head tube on carbon — which we basically don’t stock because carbon damage is invisible and the consequences of missing it are severe. We check for bends. We check that the frame is actually straight using a string-line on the dropouts. A bent frame is a parts bike; we’re honest about that. A clean frame in a useful size adds maybe $40–$80 of baseline value depending on material and geometry.

Step two: the drivetrain

This is where most used bikes lose money. Chains wear. Cassettes wear. Chainrings wear. They wear together, and if someone let the chain go too long they all wore together fast and now you’ve got a drivetrain that skips under load. We use a chain wear indicator on every bike. A worn chain is a $15 part. A worn cassette is $25–$60 depending on the range. We factor that in:

Good chain, good cassette: no deduction, adds to confidence in the rest of the drivetrain
Worn chain only: we replace it and fold the cost in, typically $15–$20
Worn chain + cassette: bigger deduction or we replace both and price accordingly
Worn chain + cassette + chainring: we decide if the bike is worth rebuilding or if it goes to parts

Step three: wheels

We spin every wheel in a truing stand. A slightly out-of-true wheel is a 10-minute fix; a badly taco’d wheel or one with cracked spokes is a rebuild or a replacement. We also check rim brake surfaces for wear — there’s a wear indicator groove on most rims, and a rim past it is a safety issue. Tires we assess for cracking and tread depth. All of this is labor, and labor is real.

“The honest number is: we probably spend 45 minutes to an hour on every bike before it hits the floor. That time is in the price. If you find a cheaper bike at a garage sale, that inspection wasn’t done — and you’ll find out why when something breaks on your commute.”
— Dan

Step four: the local market

This is the part most shops don’t talk about. We price for South Tucson and the surrounding neighborhoods, not for Scottsdale. The median household income in our zip code is materially different from the east side, and our prices reflect that. We could probably get $50 more for some bikes if we posted them on a different platform. We don’t, because we want the person who needs a bike to get to work to be able to buy a bike and get to work.

All of our current inventory is on the shop page. If you’ve got a bike you’re looking to trade in, read our journal post on trade-ins for the breakdown on how that math works. Questions? Give us a call.

What Lifetime Lube actually means.

Posted on May 4, 2026June 24, 2026 by

When we tell people about Lifetime Lube they usually look at us the way people look at a sign that says “free” — like there must be something hidden. There isn’t. You pay $30 once, and for as long as you own that bike, you bring it in and we lube your chain for free. No asterisk. No expiration date. No “up to 3 visits per year” fine print. Just: bring the bike, we lube the chain.

Why chain lube matters more than people think

A dry chain is the most common reason a bike develops problems it didn’t used to have. The chain wears faster. The cassette teeth catch and wear faster. The chainring wears faster. What starts as a $5 problem — a dry chain — becomes a $60–$150 problem if you let it go. Tucson is also a dusty, dry desert city, which means chains here accumulate grit in a way they don’t in wetter climates. That grit acts like a grinding compound between your chain and your cassette. Lubing regularly isn’t optional maintenance here — it’s the difference between a drivetrain that lasts two years and one that lasts six.

“We’d rather have you come in every six weeks for a two-minute lube job than have you come in once a year with a destroyed drivetrain. The lube costs us almost nothing. The goodwill is worth a lot more.”
— Dan

The actual math

We use a quality wet lube on desert bikes — around $12 a bottle, and a bottle does maybe 30 chain applications. So the cost to us per lube is about $0.40 in product, plus maybe 2 minutes of a mechanic’s time. If you come in once a month, that’s $4.80 in product per year and maybe 20 minutes of labor. Over five years of bike ownership, that’s roughly $24 in product and under two hours of labor, total — paid once by the $30 you gave us upfront.

The part that makes it make sense for us:

You come in regularly, which means we catch other problems early
You feel good about the shop, which means you come back for bigger purchases
Your bike runs well, which means you keep riding it, which means you stay a cyclist
A well-maintained bike doesn’t need expensive emergency repairs

Why we keep offering it when we could drop it

We’ve been asked this. The answer is that Lifetime Lube was one of the first things we offered when we opened, and it’s part of the promise the shop makes to the neighborhood. Our whole model is built on the idea that bikes should be accessible and maintainable without a finance plan. Dropping Lifetime Lube because it’s not a profit center would be exactly the kind of corporate logic we’re trying not to do. It’s not for sale to us. It stays.

You can add Lifetime Lube to any bike you buy from us or any bike you bring in for service. Come by or call 520-365-0754 and we’ll sort it out. It’s 30 bucks. Just do it.

Point Break: the remake (we made it).

Posted on May 3, 2026June 24, 2026 by

Last fall we made a movie. Not a short film in the modest-expectation sense — we mean a full remake of the 1991 Kathryn Bigelow heist classic Point Break, except all the bank robberies are on bikes, the surfing is trail riding at Starr Pass, and the FBI agent is played by our mechanic Carlos, who had never acted in anything before and turned out to be a natural. It runs 47 minutes. It is absolutely ridiculous. We screened it in the parking lot on a bedsheet and about 80 people showed up.

How this actually happened

It started with a dumb idea at a Tuesday Night Ride. Someone said “you know what movie would be better if all the cars were bikes” and the answer was obviously Point Break. Two weeks later Dan had a script outline, a borrowed camera, and a list of locations that were either within riding distance of the shop or accessible via a group ride. Filming took eight Saturdays spread over two months. The “car chase” scene was shot on the A-Mountain loop at 6 a.m. before the trail got crowded. The climactic confrontation happens in the Rillito River Park. The surfing-equivalent scene is three people doing wheelies in the Rillito riverbed and it is the funniest thing we have ever filmed.

“We had no budget, two lights borrowed from a theater friend, and a crew of people who were mostly there because the ride afterward was going to be good. It turned out to be the most fun we’ve had making something.”
— Dan

The cast, in full

Johnny Utah: Dan (shop owner, reluctant protagonist)
Bodhi: Maria (regular customer, actual good cyclist, zero ego about it)
Pappas: Carlos (mechanic, scene-stealer, now considering a second career)
Tyler: Keisha (Tuesday Night Ride regular who we had to convince was actually good on camera)
The Ex-Presidents (the gang): Various Tuesday Night Ride people who showed up for the promise of tacos afterward

Where to watch it

We’re screening it again this fall — date to be announced on the journal and our socials. We’re also trying to figure out if there’s a way to host the video directly without giving it to a platform that will monetize it with ads for car accessories, which feels wrong for reasons that should be obvious. In the meantime, if you come by the shop, you can watch it on the laptop behind the counter. Bring snacks. It’s 47 minutes and worth every one of them.

Next up: we’re taking pitches for a Mad Max: Fury Road adaptation. Requirements are that it has to be filmable on bikes, it has to make sense in the Tucson landscape, and everyone involved has to have fun making it or we stop. Call us at 520-365-0754 if you want in.

Mutual aid and bikes: a partial list.

Posted on May 2, 2026June 24, 2026 by

This is a list of organizations doing work we believe in, and what we do with or for them. It’s a partial list because the full list would take longer to write than this post, and because the work changes — organizations grow, shift focus, merge, dissolve, get defunded, restart under new names. We update this when we can. If we’ve missed someone doing good work in Tucson, tell us and we’ll look into it.

Organizations we donate to directly

Barrio Bicicletas Collective — A community repair collective operating out of the Barrio Viejo neighborhood. They do free repair clinics on weekend mornings and build up donated bikes for people who can’t afford to buy. We send them parts and occasionally a mechanic for their bigger events.
Desert Roots Mutual Aid — A Tucson-based mutual aid network focused on food and transportation access in the South Side and Midvale Park neighborhoods. We’ve donated bikes for their volunteer delivery program and we refer people to them when they’re looking for more than just a bike.
Frontera Bike Project — Works at the intersection of migrant community support and cycling access. They run basic repair workshops in multiple languages and have a small lending library of tools for community members without their own. We do an annual parts drive for them every October.
South Tucson Youth Rides — A youth program that gets kids on bikes in the South Tucson area, with an emphasis on traffic safety and bike maintenance as a life skill. We’ve donated bikes, hosted shop tours, and sent Dan to do a basic-maintenance demo for their summer program.

“Mutual aid isn’t charity. Charity maintains the gap. Mutual aid tries to close it. We try to be clear about which one we’re doing.”
— Dan

Rides we organize for or ride alongside

Several times a year we participate in or help organize rides with a civic or community purpose. Past examples include a ride to the polls during local elections (nonpartisan logistics, partisan enthusiasm), a Day of the Dead memorial ride through the Southside, and a summer safety ride with Desert Roots that doubled as a community introduction to the neighborhood’s new bike infrastructure.

How this connects to the shop

A percentage of every sale at LoBall goes toward this work. It’s not a huge percentage — we’re a small shop and margins on used bikes aren’t fat — but it’s consistent and it’s written into how we operate, not treated as optional based on whether it was a good month. If you’ve ever bought a bike from us or had your bike serviced at our service counter, some of that money went somewhere in this list.

If you want to get more involved — volunteering, donating parts, coming to a community ride — reach out through our contact page or call 520-365-0754. We can usually point you in a useful direction.

Trade-ins demystified: what your old bike is worth.

Posted on May 1, 2026June 24, 2026 by

Your old bike is worth something. Maybe not as much as you think, and maybe more than the garage sale down the street offered you — but it’s worth something, and we’ll tell you exactly what and why, to your face, without making you feel bad about it. Here’s how trade-ins work at LoBall, broken down by the three options we offer.

Option one: cash

Cash is the simplest and the lowest number. When we buy a bike outright for cash, we’re taking on all the risk — that it sells, that it sells quickly, that nothing breaks during our inspection that we didn’t anticipate. So cash offers are typically 20–35% of what we expect to sell the bike for. If we think your bike will move for $200 on our floor, we’ll offer you $40–$70 cash. That sounds low, and it is, relative to the sale price — but the money is in your hand today, with no waiting, no uncertainty, no checking back in six weeks to see if it moved.

Option two: store credit

Store credit is a better deal if you’re planning to spend it here, which is probably why you’re trading in a bike in the first place. Store credit runs 40–60% of our expected sale price — so that same $200 bike gets you $80–$120 in credit. You can use it on another bike, on parts, on service, on Lifetime Lube, on anything we carry. Credit doesn’t expire. We write it down, we remember, and if you’re not sure what you want yet you can sit on it.

“People sometimes feel weird about store credit, like it’s a consolation prize. It’s not — it’s the best deal we can offer on your end. The only reason to take cash instead is if you genuinely need the cash.”
— Dan

Option three: consignment

Consignment means we sell it for you and take a cut when it sells. Here’s what that looks like:

We agree on a sale price together, based on condition and the current market
The bike lives in our shop and we do all the selling
When it sells, you get 70% of the sale price and we keep 30%
If it doesn’t sell within 60 days, we renegotiate or you take it back — your call

Consignment makes the most sense for nicer bikes — anything we’d price over $300 — where the 70% cut is meaningfully better than a cash or credit offer. It requires you to be patient and okay with uncertainty, but the upside is real.

What actually affects value

Condition of the drivetrain (worn chains and cassettes cost money to replace)
Frame integrity — cracks, bends, or corrosion are significant deductions
Size — mid-range sizes (M/L on most frames) move faster in our market
Brand and components — Shimano moves faster than no-name, but brand prestige matters less than component quality
Tires — cracked or flat tires are a cost we factor in

Bring your bike by the shop and we’ll take a look and give you a number in person. No appointment needed, though if you’ve got something unusual or a full fleet to trade, call ahead at 520-365-0754 so we can make sure we have time to do it right.