Basic Bicycle Parts & Accessories

"Hi, I'm Aaron Phillips for Expert Village. Let's talk about parts of the bike. You're gonna walk into that bike shop, you're looking at, you know, all the different array of bikes, and you're kind of taken aback at how many different choices you have to make, how many different components there are on a bike. Let me just give you here a crash course on the names of some of these components. Knowing the names of them might empower you to know kind of how to choose things. It might also make you sound a little more knowledgeable to those shop folks who might kind of condescend to you if you walk in and you just kind of don't know what you're talking about. Alright, so, pretty basic stuff. This is a handlebar. On a road bike, it's a drop bar like this, little bit more aerodynamic. On a mountain bike it tends to be flat or slightly raised. Whatever the case, it's a handlebar. These are brake levers. On a road bike you got brake levers that are incorporated into the shifters. So you got shifters, brake levers. The shifters are the things that make your bike shift, and they're the things that are on the handlebar. The brake levers are also always on a handlebar. Your brakes are down here. You've got brake pads, here you've got a caliper body, which essentially a side pull brake. If you've got a disc brake, there's a disc, a rotor. There's a caliper and there are pads, just like a car. Wheels, this whole assembly is called the wheel. This is a hub, this is your tire of course. Here, this is called a fork. So whether it's a suspension fork which is also called a shock sometimes, or whether it's a rigid fork like this, it's a fork. Forks vary in the type of material they're made out of. This is carbon. Some will be steel, some will be aluminum, some will be titanium. Increasingly if you're looking at a road bike, you're gonna get a carbon fork. If you're looking at a mountain bike, you're gonna get a suspension fork that gives you, some give and helps soak up the pressure on those bumps, and they're generally made out of aluminum alloys and other metals."