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I’m often amazed by the sheer mass of tools some riders carry.
I’m the first to admit I’m often the one who benefits from the hardware others have on board – hardware I myself neglected to pack or declined to carry. But it’s not always the catalogue of tools I see that amazes me.
Sometimes it’s the individual tools that have me goggle-eyed.
I come from a predominantly enduro and trailriding background, so in my formative years I was taught to fight against every gram of unnecessary weight. It was ingrained into me that every skerrick of additional ballast, no matter how tiny, would contribute to the overall difficulty of steep hills, bogholes and dealing with obstacles. From a racing point of view that extra weight meant more energy I had to expend to keep the bike moving as fast as I could, and it meant a sacrifice in handling and performance from the bike itself.
So I learned to look for opportunities to save space and mass. I’d cut tools up and weld the bits together so I had the same amount of room and weight taken up by something that would do several jobs instead of something that would only do a single job.
I’ve had to modify my approach a little since I moved into adventure riding.
The performance of adventure bikes now is such that my stubby little cut-down tyre levers with the axle-spanners welded on the ends just can’t deal with the tyres and rims needed to cope with the horsepower on offer. I need more leverage to get those tyres on and off.
And where two ring spanners with different sizes on each end – so four different sizes – would cope with just about everything I’d need to do in an emergency on a race bike, these days I need a selection of Torx drivers, sockets and open-enders as well. Thankfully there are some really excellent mutlitools on the market now, and I think I carry two or three different types, along with a really good-quality shifter when I can, and a brilliant, tiny socket/allen-key/Torx-drive set I bought from Andy Strapz. It’ll fit in a regular-size pocket.
So it brains me when I pull up beside a problem and the rider starts unpacking full-length tyre levers, complete socket and spanner sets, a chainbreaker, vice grips and a heap of other things I only have in the shed. I would never consider carrying those big, heavy items.
Sometimes I feel the weight of those toolkits must be close to weight of some of the bikes I’ve ridden.
But then I see how easy it makes the “I’d cut tools up and weld the bits together so I had the same amount of room and weight taken up by something that would do several jobs. ”
repairs. I start to wonder if I’m being a bit narrow-minded. I mean, these bikes have something like half-a-million horsepower, and the suspension on even base-model bikes is far in advance of anything I even dreamed of when I was trying to ride fast.
The bikes should be able to carry that gear, right?
And I’ve been the one whose fat was pulled from the fire by some of these Samaritans often enough. Maybe I should learn a lesson?
Yeah…nah.
I can’t bring myself to carry huge chunks of metal to cover a single situation that may only arise once a year.
Naturally, the best situation is to team up with a group and share the tools around so everyone carries something and no-one has to carry everything.
But I ride alone a lot.
As usual, the best I can do is compromise. I’ll continue to try and combine tools and make sure everything I carry has multiple uses, and I’ll do lots of research to find quality tools made from lightweight alloys.
Most of all, I’ll keep trying to ride with great people who I know carry a tonne of equipment and who know how to use it.
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