Volunteers at this Anchorage repair shop won’t fix your bike for you, but they will show you how

Nov 17, 2023

An unorthodox bicycle repair shop in Anchorage won’t fix your bike for you — but they will show you how. Travis Smith, a volunteer at Off the Chain, said people don’t just drop their bikes off to get fixed. They get their hands dirty.

“What differentiates us is you work on your own bike,” Smith said. “We don’t work on the bike for you, we help you get there.”

Off the Chain is a nonprofit bicycle collective that’s entirely volunteer run. The volunteers staff the shop in the evenings, four days a week. They sell spare parts and refurbished bikes, but their main goal is to teach you how to fix your bike yourself. Smith said that some people are surprised by this model at first, but it’s one of the biggest draws of the bike collective.

“People like the opportunity to not just get their bike fixed, but to do it themselves and learn about it in the act of getting it done,” he said.

The bicycle collective started around 2006, originally as the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Bike Club. Over the years, it expanded and moved locations a few times — now it’s tucked away in a garage off of Spenard Road. Anyone can walk in and use their collection of tools and manuals, and their inventory of affordable spare parts. There’s a suggested donation of $5 per hour of shop time.

Smith said he started volunteering five or six years ago, after going there for a while just to fix up his own bike.

“I was really impressed,” he said. “I thought it was a great part of the community and it was something that I admired and I wanted to be a part of.”

Volunteers earn shop credit toward used parts. But Smith said he does it because he loves helping people solve problems.

“Whatever the obstacle was, big or small, if we can get that obstacle out of it for people and get them back on their bike, or on their bike in the first place, that’s really rewarding,” he said.

On a recent evening, Smith was helping Alec Wilson fix up a bike he got on Facebook Marketplace. It was a little older, and it had its problems, but Wilson said it had good bones. Smith showed him how to add spacers to his bike stem so the bike fit him better.

Wilson is new to cycling, and said Off the Chain has really helped him start learning how bikes work.

“This place is kind of a holy grail for people who want to get into biking,” said Wilson. “And it has certainly not disappointed.”

While it might be faster to just have someone fix your bike for you, longtime volunteer Will Criner said that’s not what it’s all about.

“I’ve spent three hours with someone doing a job that I could have done in five minutes, but that’s not the point,” Criner said. “Efficiency isn’t the point. It’s about people doing it themselves, gaining that skill, that independence to be able to do it on their own.”

Criner said he loves being able to donate his time to share that independence with others, and help get more people out on bikes.

“That’s a really good feeling,” he said. “It’s part of the culture here and makes for a really nice space.”

Criner said it’s also just fun to hang out and talk bikes.

Dev Hardikar is Alaska Public Media's 2023 summer news intern. Reach him at [email protected].