Component stats

[Matt2matt2002]

Anyone else keep a spreadsheet showing life/usage of components?

Across top of sheet is milage and time/months of item life.
Down left hand side is item description.
Each month I enter the milage traveled on my Raven.

A formula adds the data accumulative.

As long as I enter milage ever month the information is accurate and useful.

For instance I can quickly see how many miles/Km each tyre had traveled and how old it is.

Once sheet and formula is set up, it ' runs' itself.

Opinions and ideas for improvement welcome.

[martinf]

I started doing this in the 1970's on paper, then with a primitive database when I got my first home computer in 1998, finally migrated to a standard LibreOffice/Excel type spreadsheet a few years ago. It has grown into a monster with over 2,000 entries.

It is useful for :

- knowing what I have in my large stock of spare parts accumulated over several decades without having to rummage through the boxes in the shed. The sensible alternative would be to sell, donate or discard most of this stock.

- knowing the age of critical components. For me these are aluminium alloy handlebars and stems, which are supposed to have a limited service life in years. I should maybe add cranks, but have not yet had any problems and reckon my pedalling method of spinning short 150 mm cranks reduces the likelihood of them breaking.

- keeping track of service intervals for hub gears. 

- keeping track of the kms on wear components (tyres, rims, chains and sprockets, and to a lesser extent chainrings and bottom bracket units).

This is now much less relevant because:
 
(i) I installed Chaingliders for the transmission on the majority of the family bikes and guest bikes.
(ii) I have long-lasting carbide rims on my main touring bike.
(iii) Nearly all my cycling is now on hub gear bikes rather than derailleur.
(iv) I now have the knowledge and tools to check chain and rim wear directly.
(v) modern tyres seem to last much longer than 50 years ago, at least in the wide sizes I now favour on my touring and utility bikes.

Except for bragging about the long service life of some components on this forum, for a lot of stuff it isn't particularly useful. I can feel or see when brakes, levers, pedals, derailleurs, shifters and headsets are worn out. 

So, IMO, very useful a few years ago for keeping track of things when I was maintaining a lot of bikes for different family members, but not really useful at the present time now that I only have my own and wife's bikes plus the 2 guest bikes.

I keep it going because the thing is already set up and doesn't require much effort.

[PH]

I used to do so obsessively, then I got the Rohloff in 2004 and the records become patchy around 2007, there is some relationship between those two, but it's not the entire story.
Partly I just got bored with it, then I moved away from a spreadsheet to online and GPX records, so although I have good records for distance I've lost some of the other fields that were Excel columns.  Then the hub isn't as fussy about components, I do a service twice a year and rarely touch anything in between other than brake pads/blocks and oiling the chain.  I do keep a financial record of what I've spent and on what, so at the end of a year it's easy to do a £ per mile, though that's across all bikes and includes stuff that might be used on more than one, like tools. 
Having read that through I realise some will still consider that as obsessive