These are mighty good times for the bicycle gear head. Stroll on over to the Park website and you’ll see specialty tools ranging from the jealousy inducing Deluxe Double Arm Repair stand to the somewhat obscure Dummy Pedal. Yup, perhaps there hasn’t ever been a better time to be total and absolute tool maven.
While these times are great for the tool expert, they can be especially frustrating for the casual home mechanic. Ever changing axle standards, headsets and bottom brackets means a casual upgrade can turn into a witch hunt for the proper tool. In response to this, I’ve constructed a short list of three tools that every home wrench should have regardless of their bottom bracket size, headset taperedness or frame constructor. These tools are all readily available from you local hardware store and two retail for around $10 a piece, with the breaker bar coming in at $20.
Rubber Mallet
I bought the rubber mallet for installing a new set of cranks. I had read that it could be hard to get the drive side crank arm and spindle to seat properly without a little extra force and this did the trick wonderfully. You could probably get by with using a rag and a regular old hammer, but the rubber insures you won’t dent your cranks. If your running a Truvativ GXP crankset and your non-drive side crank keeps loosening, this could fix your problem. If the spindle isn’t far enough through the frame, the crank arm bolt won’t have enough spindle to grab and your crank arm could come loose.
I’ve also found a number of uses for the mallet besides installing cranks. Though typically a last resort, it has a number of uses, the least of which is removing a stuck fork from a frame. It’s also pretty useful when changing the oil in Fox forks and you can’t get the lowers free. Just unscrew the bottom bolt to cover the threads, place the socket over the bolt and gently tap it until the lowers come loose. I can’t emphasize enough that the key phrase here is gently tap. You never want to come at something ham fisted, even with a rubber mallet.
Scribe/Awl
This is a necessity for anyone who changes their own shift or brake cables. The specialty cable and housing cutting tools are great, but often they will leave the housing ends slightly smashed. If you use a Dremel type tool, this is less of an issue, but can still be a problem. One remedy for this is to simply push the cable through the end, but that only opens the housing enough to barley accommodate the cable. The scribe is a much better solution because it will create a wide opening for the cable. Even the top of the line derailleur and cables will give poor shifting performance if the housing isn’t smooth. While all scribes probably work the same, Stanley makes a wooden handled version if you want to keep your toolbox extra classy.
Breaker Bar
I like to refer to breaker bars as magic bars as they seem magically unseat the most stubborn of bolts. I typically use mine on crank bolts and cassettes, but they work on most bolts with high torque ratings. Before owning a breaker bar, removing my cranks to service my bottom bracket was a task I always dreaded. I had a small socket wrench and couldn’t get the leverage I needed.
One day I broke down and dropped the $20 for the bar and I haven’t regretted it since. I chose a version with a 1/2 inch drive head so it works with a number bike specific tools such as bottom bracket and cassette tools. I also picked up 8 mm allen head to aid removing my crank arms.
Now, removing crank arms is just routine maintenance instead of a foreboding chore. As I mentioned earlier it works wonders on cassettes as well. I don’t really make a habit of removing my cassette often, but I do like to indulge in the occasional cassette cleaning and this tool makes it much easier.
I have to offer a word of caution about the breaker bar though. While it’s fantastic for removing bolts, using the bar to tighten bolts can easily lead to over tightening. Always use a torque wrench (or a nicely calibrated elbow as my buddy likes to say) for tightening bolts.
These three tools are some of my favorite in my tool box. They may not have the pizazz of specialty Park tools, but they make tough jobs much easier or, in the case of the scribe, give your work a professional finish and components better performance.
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