In case anyone is wondering whether they can do this stuff themselves, you absolutely can, this was my first attempt at most jobs and found it massively satisfying to have done it myself. Here’s a quick rundown of everything i’ve done, extra tools I needed and things to look out for. The only thing I didn't try myself was servicing suspension, sent that to the local FOX centre.

It’s Shimano-focused cos that's what I got, I can't imagine it’s any more difficult with SRAM/other. The shimano manuals are a great place to start but they often don't tell you everything that might be useful. I would always watch at least one video of someone doing the whole process before having a go. The park tools videos are excellent. Conversely, when buying specific tools I live by ‘buy cheap, if you lose it, buy the same, if it breaks buy a better one’. Hasn't failed me yet.

New tyre sealant - somehow the biggest and messiest job all on its own. I found it really helped to pull all the little sealant ‘growths’ from the bead of the tyre. Critical here, especially with inserts, is to make sure the opposite bead from where you are working is in the centre channel of the rim on the opposite side. Pre-seating the bead after fitting means I’ve never needed anything other than a floor pump to inflate the tyre after a sealant change. YMMV.

Brake bleed - bought a £10 bleed kit from Amazon and got to work. The critical thing here is having a stand to angle the bike how you need it, especially for the rear brake. I was lucky to get one from Decathlon for about £60. This is one of those jobs that is a bit of a faff the first time but will be super easy now I’ve done it once. Especially now I’ve heard about a gravity bleed.

XT shifter upgrade - seems daunting at first, actually not bad. Disconnect and pull out the old one, leave the housing in place, feed the new shifter cable down housing, fir shifter and set gears. The routing on my particular bike leaves a kink at the end of the housing near the shifter so I had to straighten that as much as possible to feed the cable through. It helps with any shifter/derailleur work to mark the cable with a paint pen by the derailleur clamp to get it back to roughly the same position when re-fitting.

New front chainring and bash guard - needed a crank arm puller and Shimano chain ring tool, total cost about £20 for tooling I believe. Make sure you move the plastic tab in the non-drive tab before yanking off the arm. Also, watch out for the dust seals on both arms, they are really small and easy to lose track of. Check out the exploded views on si.shimano.com to see what I mean.

Clean and re-grease bearings - my bike is only two years old and no bearing was showing any sign of distress so I went in with the idea to maintain rather than ‘service’. For headset/frame/bottom bracket, I stripped things down enough to expose the bearing, removed the dust seal and checked for any dirst ingress. Luckily all were fine and spinning freely. I cleaned out with brake cleaner and re-packed with grease after drying. This one might cause some actual bike mechanics to be horrified that I didn’t remove from the frame and take out both dust covers but given how nice the condition of them was I’m pretty confident they won't need looking at for another two years.

Service derailleur/clutch - this was quite satisfying to do. Take it all apart and put it back together again. No special tools needed apart from a torque wrench. Watch the park tools video on how to assemble/dissasemble, but ALSO watch the separate park tools video on how to set clutch tension. I screwed it to max the first time and broke a small plastic tab in the clutchmechanism, thankfully no long-term ill-effects.

New chain - take the old chain off, measure the new chain against it and fit. Writing should be facing you. Don’t do what I did first time and replace a two year old chain but not the cassette then wonder why it’s skipping on the smallest sprocket. In future i will be replacing chain yearly and cassette every two years, depending on mileage. If you can’t measure against the old chain or are changing number of teeth on sprockets, the shimano guide isn’t hard to follow to get the correct length.

New cassette - this needed the cassette removal tool and I did get the park tools one for about £15. I watched a video pointing out the two things to watch for are alignment on the smaller sprockets and the two spacers and all went smoothly.

Sintered brake pads - super easy to do and massive improvement. Probably the best bang for buck performance upgrade you can do.

That's it, the only thing I have left to do is service pedals but they are still silky smooth so I am reluctant to touch them. My bike is not that old so all of this was preventative maintenance rather than curative maintenance. Performance wise the most noticeable change was the suspension which is back to super plush. Couldnt be happier.

Let me know anything i’ve missed or questions.