Customer brought in a bike with peanut butter in the shifters

Last Tuesday some guy rolls in with a mountain bike that wouldn't shift past 3rd gear. I popped the shifter cover and there was a thick brown paste all over the ratchet mechanism, smells like Skippy. Turns out his kid used the bike to carry lunch to school for a week, the sandwich melted in the frame bag and seeped down the cables. I spent $80 worth of labor cleaning it out with degreaser and a pick set, the customer just laughed and said he thought the shifting felt sticky. Has anyone else dealt with food getting into drivetrain parts in a weird way?

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dylan_stone331mo ago

Wait, is peanut butter in the shifters actually a bad thing? I mean, that kid basically packed his lunch in a bike bag that was never meant for food, and the sandwich melted... that's on him, but you just charged $80 to clean it out and the guy laughed about it. Sounds like you did the job and got paid, so what's the real problem here? At least it was peanut butter and not like, a rotting banana or something with maggots in it, that would've been way worse and probably cost you more in shop cleanup. Honestly, I've seen way weirder stuff in drivetrains, like a mouse nest in a cassette or a whole family of ants living in a derailleur, so peanut butter is pretty tame in the grand scheme of things. You're acting like this is a big deal, but bikes are tools, and tools get dirty... sometimes with lunch.

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