In our household, we have plenty of bike tools. The problem is finding them. So when I recently wanted to switch out my crummy old bike seat for one that my husband had recently discarded, I decided to try out one of the city’s handy Bike Fixit Stations. I tossed the seat in my bike basket and figured that whenever I pedaled past a station, I’d stop and change the seats out. So it was that just a couple of days ago I stopped at 215 N. Mason (which is a city services building) and used an Allen hex key to pop off the old seat and set up the new.

Skanky old seat was literally falling apart.

Pretty much any tool you might need to repair a bike issue is available at one of these stations.

The new seat is installed. (And yes, it is tipped too far forward in this shot. Believe me, I’ve noticed. Went to fix it…. Well, that story is coming. Keep reading.)

These fixit stations are all free to use and they’re located (sorta) throughout the city. You can find the nearest station using the all new Fort Collins Bike Map.

Thanks in part to a grant from Kaiser Permanente, all four high schools in Fort Collins now have Bike Fixit Stations.

Every high school has a fixit station available to the public, and soon every middle school will as well.

There’s a fixit station at the South Transit Center.

One notable miss is Front Range Community College. While CSU has the Spoke for free bicycle services for students, FRCC doesn’t appear to have anything — not even a fixit station. (Given that it’s within a mile of the MAX line, it’s also notably lacking comfortable bicycle connections to the Harmony stop or South Transit Center.)

Some fixit stations have been around longer than others.

I needed to adjust my seat, so I pulled out my bike map and located a fixit station near a cafe where I could get some work done. The station at Northside Aztlan is near the new Flat Hat cafe in the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, which would also put me near the Archive for history research that I was hoping to do. It sounded like a win-win-win to me. So I pedaled on over, only to find that the tool I needed had been snatched by vandals. Curses!

Grrrr!

Thankfully, the 215 N. Mason station will be on my way home from the museum.

If you’re new to biking and don’t have all the tools you might need, or if you don’t want to clutter your house up with tools that you’ll end up not being able to find when you need them, you might want to check out these handy, free fixit stations throughout town.