5 Bike Tools I Wish I’d Bought Sooner!

we've all been there you plan an amazing ride or trip or you've got a race that you've been training for for months the weather forecast is amazing and then bang something goes wrong with your bike that you're unable to fix at home or it's gonna cost you a fortune in your local bike shop well fear not in this video I'm going to show you five tools which you can buy for your home Workshop which will help you fix five common problems that you're likely to encounter at some point saving you time and money in the long run the things I'm showing you are things that I've encountered in the past either through working in a bike shop or problems I've had on my own bikes they can all be an absolute right pain so hopefully by watching this you'll be able to avoid that now the first one is buy high quality tools so not a specific tool but more of a mantra for all tools like many things there are cheaper options available but these can often be a false economy and I'll tell you why a high quality tool will keep its sharp edges and the tolerances ensure repeatable quality Hex wrenches are the most obvious example because cheaper options lose their Edge quicker than the more premium options either the alloy is too hard or too soft and they're more likely to therefore round out your bolts a rounded out bolt is a right pain it's going to be a massive hassle to remove it from your bike or it's going to involve a lot of money and time taking it to a bike shop to get it fixed The Simple Solution by high quality tools therefore it's much less likely to happen and the adage Rings true you buy cheap you're likely to buy twice meaning that it is a false economy another example is using a cheap Phillips head screwdriver to adjust limit screws on derailleurs now Shimano derailleurs have often used something called jizz that stands for Japanese industrial screwdriver Shimano Mechanical group sets often had bolts that look like Phillips head bolts to adjust them they're actually Japanese industrial screwdriver bolts which means that the head is subtly different they are being phased out and being used less and less but there are loads and loads of them out there and a common thing that I've seen when working in bike shops is people rounding out the limit screws on their derailleurs because they've used a cheap Phillips head screwdriver to adjust them rather than a dedicated JIS screwdriver such as this one the dsd2 from from park there you go next is a Mech hanger straightening tool now if your rear derailleur has taken a knock the hanger can bend that's this little sacrificial part here I'd recommend always try and get a spare hanger for your bike and have one ready in your toolbox to go if you need it lead times on Mech hangers are at best going to be a couple of days if they're in stock and it's often a lot longer and let's face it you're going to want to ride your bike now a spare gets you out of jail straight away but sometimes you bend your spare or you don't have a spare a straightening tool is the solution it's a five minute job simply take off your rear Mech and attach the tool into where the rear met goes into the hanger with the hanger attached to the bike we have a dedicated video on how to adjust your rear Mech hanger and bend it back into place but this dedicated tool from Park well it makes life very easy especially now it's been updated next up cable cutter tool Right This falls under the category of things that I wish I'd bought sooner at some point in your cycling life you're gonna have to change your cable now changing a cable is a pretty simple job to do whether it's gear or brake cable however people often don't have appropriate Cutters and so then they start thinking oh I can just do it and cut the cable with anything I've seen people use all sorts of stuff like kitchen scissors garden shears just a massive knife also none of it works what you need is dedicated Cutters and the reason why is because if you use something else it will crush the cable and it will Fray it and won't result in a clean cut you need a clean cut in the cable for the cable to be passed through the outer housing and fed through the brakes or the gears or the Drillers or whatever it is that you're connecting it to a crushed cable just doesn't work you need Cutters and good ones like this they also have a little extra on them you can see here there's actually a crimp tool built into the back of the cutter to crimp the little ferrule to cap off the end of your cable next is a hydraulic brake bleed kit now increasingly more and more road bikes and gravel bikes come with hydraulic disc brakes it's kind of become the standard now yet hardly any Roadies seemed to have brake bleed kits mountain bike has all seem to have them but I think Roadies are scared of them you needn't be though because well once you've done it a couple of times and you've used a brake bleed kit it becomes pretty easy and you pick it up and how to use it fairly quick now the advantage of having one is that if you do need to sort your brakes out or work on your brakes ahead of that important race or ride you can do even if the bike shop is shut which is a huge Advantage now to be able to work out how to use this don't worry we have got a really detailed dedicated video showing you on how to bleed your brakes although a lot of the time a full brake bleed isn't actually required to get your brakes working Tip-Top from where they might be just make sure that you've got spare olives and Barbs and brake fluid because you'll need that too and sometimes sourcing those components can take a couple of days if you don't have them ready to go and finally we have a cable routing kit but this is one of my favorite tools in the entire world most bikes now come with internal cables it's just become the norm it's become the standard and yes they are harder to work on but having an internal cable routing kit makes them much much easier I'm an idiot sandwich recently I managed to snap the di2 rear derailleur cable on my TT bike when I ham-fistedly took it out the back of a van now changing that cable and getting me back on the road was made much easier by a modern routing kit and that's because they contain various different cable routing options with different attachments on the ends of them now these attachments on the end cater for any of the different types of cables you might be re-routing so they cater for hydraulic lines for gear cable outers inners they also cater for di2 cables so you can see the this one for example is designed to attach into the modern style of di2 cable whereas this one is designed for the older style of di2 cable you can see that one goes in there and on the other end we have a magnet which is then used with a magnet on the outside of the frame to guide the cable through the frame or bars wherever you want they really are a lifesaver they'll save you so much time hassle stress and deposits into your swear jar so yeah I hope you found this useful and for all the maintenance jobs that we've discussed in this video if you want to do some maintenance at home we have a handy essential maintenance book available in the gcn shop which you can buy and help you take you through all these jobs step by step I hope you found this useful if you have give it a thumbs up and I'll see in the next one love you bye

Channel: GCN Tech

Views: 120,574

Keywords: bike tools, bicycle tools, tools, park tool, screwdriver, allen key, hex key, mech hanger, cable cutters, bleed brakes, brake bleed kit, cable routing, internal routing, derailleur, GCN Tech, GCNTech, GCN, GCN Cycling, Bike Tech, Cycling Tech, Cycling, Pro Cycling, Road Cycling, bike tech, cycling tech, cycling, tech, road, bike, road bike, bicycle, maintenance, how to, bike maintenance, bike repair, monday maintenance, Ѡ, 5096, 𑢭‎, ꛟ, Ѯ, ҩ, Ҁ, Ѿ, ӓ, Ѧ, sca15, gc21s, ិ, c1, ፕ16, ସ, ィ, f3, ළ, ዮ

Id: QgJmwZW2UNE

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023