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BUYER'S GUIDE
Beginner's guide to bike tools Nov 2021Beginner's guide to bike tools - get all the vital gear for basic bike maintenance
You don’t need a vast array of specialist bike tools. Most essential jobs can be done with a few good quality standard tools and just a handful of bike-specific ones. Here's our guide to basic bike maintenance equipment.
If there’s an area where the adage ‘buy quality, buy once’ applies, it’s bike tools. Good tools work better, last longer and are less likely to damage the parts you’re working on. Think of them as an investment, not a cost.
Each bike’s different, but there are many tools common to almost all bikes. Here’s what you need for straightforward jobs such as changing cables, adjusting brakes and gears, tweaking saddle position and angle, setting up handlebars, changing and inflating tyres and changing your chain and sprockets.
Ball-end Allen keys. Don’t skimp on these; you’ll be using them a lot. Ball-end keys allow you to turn a bolt from an angle, which speeds up many jobs. As well as being harder and more accurately made, and therefore less likely to mash the bolts you tighten with them, high-quality keys have a narrower neck for the ball, and therefore work at steeper angles, making them more versatile.
Recommended: Bondhus 1.5 - 10mm Hex Key Set — £10.90 | Park Tool PH1.2 P Handled Hex Wrench Set — £68.13
Screwdrivers. You want a couple of flat-blade screwdrivers and Phillips (cross-head) No 1 and 2, and possibly a size 0 too. A more extensive set will include sizes that are useful round the house too.
Recommended: Stanley Cushion Grip 8-piece Screwdriver Set — £24.07 | Draper 43571 16-Piece Screwdriver Set — £37.98
Combination spanners. I almost hesitate to include these because bolts with spanner flats are now rare on good quality bikes. You will almost certainly never need more than 8, 9 and 10mm, plus a 13mm if you have bolt-up hubs. If you need spanners for other jobs, then the sets we've suggested have everything you need for the bike too, but if bike fettling is your only need, then it'll be cheaper to buy individual spanners.
Recommended: Draper 11-Piece Metric Combination Spanner Set — £28.67 | Bahco 12-piece Metric Combination Spanner Set of 12 — £88.38
Pliers. A set of combination pliers has lots of uses, from generally holding and pulling parts to crimping cable ends.You'll also find lots of uses for long-nose pliers, so a set of three with side cutters is good value.
Recommended: Draper Redline Plier Set — £9.99 | Stanley Tools FatMax Compound Action Plier Set of 3 — £44.50
Torx keys. Torx fittings are becoming increasingly common. Like Allen keys, you can get them with plain or ball ends.
Recommended: AmTech Torx Star Key Set — £8.99 | Wera Multicolour Tamper-proof/Ballend Torx Key Set — £27.50
Specific bike tools
Tyre levers. You need a couple of sets, one for your home toolbox and one for your on-bike toolbag.
Recommended: Lezyne Power XL Tyre Lever — £4.99/pr | Park Tool TL-5 Heavy Duty Steel Tyre Levers — £21.59
Floor pump. It’s much easier to keep your tyre pressures up to snuff with a floor pump (aka a track pump) than any portable pump.
Recommended: Topeak Joe Blow Sport III — £39.90 | Beto Surge — £54.00
For more options see our Buyer's Guide to track pumps
Pedal spanner. If your pedals have 15mm flats, then you'll need a 15mm spanner to take them on and off. A standard 15mm spanner will fit some pedals, but others need the thinner jaws of a specific pedal spanner.
Recommended: Lezyne Classic Pedal Spanner — £219.49 | Halfords Bikehut Pedal Spanner — £8.99
Cable puller. Owners of hydraulic-braked bikes with electronic shifting can ignore this. The rest of us will find fitting and adjusting brake and gear cables a lot easier with a tool that pulls the cable snug and holds it in place while you tighten the clamp bolt.
Recommended: Draper 31043 Cable Tensioner — £14.99 | Park Tool BT-2 cable puller — £37.99
Cable cutter. Do not try and cut cables with pliers, sidecutters, tin snips or any other vaguely sharp snippity-chop tool you have kicking around; you’ll just make a mess of them. Get yourself a proper set of cable cutters with blades shaped to keep the cable strands together. Also useful for sending defective iPhone cables back to the Great Apple Shop in the Sky.
Recommended: Draper Expert 57768 Cutters — £14.53 | Shimano TL-CT12 — £43.49
Chain wear gauge. You can keep an eye on the wear of your chain by measuring its length over 12 full links with a good quality ruler. If it’s 12 1/16in long, then it’s time to replace it and if it’s reached 12 1/8in you will probably have to replace the sprockets too. A wear gauge makes this easier by telling you when your chain needs ditching.
Recommended: Pedros Chain Checker Plus II — £15.59
Chain tool. Essential if you want to replace your own chain. If you've a Campagnolo 11-speed transmission you'll need a tool with a peening anvil like Campagnolo's, which has a wallet-clenching £153 RRP. Fortunately, Park Tool and Lezyne, among others, have cheaper alternatives that will tackle other chains too.
Recommended: Lezyne Chain Drive Tool - 11 Speed — £30.00 | Park Tool Master Chain Tool — £60.62
Chain joining link pliers. Almost all chains now come with a joining link. SRAM calls it a Powerlink, KMC a Missing Link and Shimano a Quick-Link, but they're all basically the same thing: a pair of outer link plates with a permanently mounted pin in each that fits into a slot in the other. Once upon a time, joining links like this could be opened by hand, but for 10-speed and 11-speed chains there's just not enough room to leave slack for hand operation, and they have to connect tightly enough that you need these pliers to separate them. Shimano's 11-speed master links are an extremely tight fit and need force to join them too, which is why these pliers have an extra set of jaws.
Recommended: Shimano TL-CN10 Master Link Pliers — £46.99 | SuperB_ToBe 2 in 1 Master Link Pliers — £9.59
Workstand. On the one hand, this is a bit of a luxury; on the other being able to hold your bike steady and well clear of the floor makes any job easier. Your back will thank you for not leaning over a bike for hours on end too.
Recommended: B'Twin 500 Bike Workstand — £69.99 | Feedback Sports Pro Ultralight — £172.00
Torque wrench. Expensive, but essential to prevent damage if you're wrenching carbon fibre or other super-light components.
Recommended: Effetto Mariposa Giustaforza II — £118.99
Sprocket tools. Two very specific bike tools here. To change your sprockets you’ll need a chain whip — to hold the sprockets in place — and a lockring tool to undo the nut that holds them in place.
Lifeline Chain Whip — £6.16 | BBB Cassette Lockring Remover — £11.95
Find stockists
Lezyne
Park Tool
Birzman
Shimano
BBB
Explore the complete archive of reviews of tools and workshop equipment on road.cc
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The aim of road.cc buyer's guides is to give you the most, authoritative, objective and up-to-date buying advice. We continuously update and republish our guides, checking prices, availability and looking for the best deals.
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John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
Latest Comments
- Mark Bickerton 0 sec ago
Ha... I think for us at Tern Bicycles it is normal protocol for the UK!
- Backladder 11 min 31 sec ago
Am I the only one who thinks the brake levers look awful too?
- David9694 43 min 30 sec ago
Yep, it's official - reds under the, er, bonnet...
- wtjs 55 min 20 sec ago
Stephen Aylen, a non-aligned councillor for Southend-on-Sea Borough Council who questioned why the "ugly and out of place" structures had been...
- Rendel Harris 1 hour 22 min ago
Indeed, I was drawing from personal experience – I don't use it that often but it's such a nice bit of infrastructure that I sometimes go out of my...
- paulgardener@gmail.com 1 hour 26 min ago
Except socialism doesn't work like that in real life. It's the capitals countries that try to look after those in need, and the average person's...
- Patrick9-32 1 hour 41 min ago
2020/2021: Bike companies place large orders to attempt to fill pandemic orders which go unfulfilled due to massive lead times. Leaving many bike...
- KDee 2 hours 23 min ago
It's the mass that's the issue. Two people on a petrol powered scooter can really mess up a cyclist. Also the fact so many of the petrol scooters...
- KDee 2 hours 34 min ago
"Strumpjumper"...sounds like a euphemism for something else 🤔
- andystow 2 hours 51 min ago
The new RH tubes claim to solve that issue, but price and availability is a problem. I tried to get some to try out, but they went out of stock on...
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73 comments
I absolutely recommend the B'twin cassette holder tool instead of a chain whip. https://www.decathlon.co.uk/chain-whip-cassette-remover-id_8309913.html. One of the best , and best value, bike tools I ever bought.
How come there are comments from 11 months ago when this article was published a couple of days ago?
.. probably because it's another zombie article which has resurfaced. There has been quite some flush of them recently, some understandable, some quite odd. Holidays perhaps ?
I was quite excited about the Tacx brake pad aligner, but I've tried it a few times now and it seems that using it with my Curve cantis on my getting to work bike with 2.1 knobblies is more trouble than doing it by eye. Shame. Nice idea though and it would probably work better with other setups.
Actually I quite like the look of the Tacx brake pad aligner, it looks as if it would stop the pads rotating as I tightened them. Not that this has ever been a massive problem, but it does mean I have to undo and retighten occassionally.
Never seem to need to toe in the pads on my Ultegra callipers, but them front pads on my mini-vs seem to benefit, it's the difference between silent braking and faint high pitched squeel it seems.
If a brake pad alignment tool was even a little bit essential you can bet Park Tool would be offering you their BPA-2.3 - or something - by now. Instead, their suggestion is a laggy band wound round a few times and slipped over the trailing end of the brake block to help set up correct toe in.
I use a credit card for toe in on brake pads. Seems to work fine.
Cable puller seems overkill when cable generally only need to be hand tight anyway, then adjusted using (errr..) adjusters.
Here's a great ghetto tip for when you lose your quick-link pliers (that would be me, then) that works perfectly is feed a gear inner through the chain on one side of the quick link and back up through the chain on the other side and then cross over the end of the cable and pull hard. It pops the chain apart perfectly with virtually no effort
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<p>[quote=StraelGuy]</p>
<p>Here's a great ghetto tip for when you lose your quick-link pliers (that would be me, then) that works perfectly is feed a gear inner through the chain on one side of the quick link and back up through the chain on the other side and then cross over the end of the cable and pull hard. It pops the chain apart perfectly with virtually no effort <img alt="smiley" height="18" src="/sites/all/themes/rcc/images/smilies/16.gif" title="smiley" width="18" />.</p>
<p>[/quote]</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> Spendid idea,thank you .</p>
I use an older torque spanner that was given to me that's spot on, you can however buy a 'bergen' torque wrench for about £20 (5-25nm) not sure if they are chinese copies or from liquidated stock of the US company, they are calibrated and Bergen used to be pretty good from what I'd read BITD.
Torx keys should be on the list, essential for anyone working on campag or wanting 3T finishing kit etc
Torque wrench? Hand tight and bit more will work for most things. That said, don't listen to me as I stripped my MTB disc mounts......
One Knuckle White 5nm
Two Knuckle White 7nm
Four knuckles White 12nm
Campag ultra torque...hang off it like a chimp on a climbing frame
If you want accurate and reasonably priced, check out Norbar. They do a 1-20 nm torque wrench for about £75. Designed and built in England.
Master link remover pliers are ace, too - save lots of faff when removing a chain.
I found tinkering with older bikes really useful for learning on - you don't have to be so precious when it's made of steel and worth less than £50. I'd therefore sugest also adding cone spanners, a crank puller and a basic set of Imperial sized spanners if you're messing with anything British.
Finally, go on ebay and buy loads of those little aluminium caps that you insert on the end of a cut brake or gear cable. Not strictly speaking a tool, but very satisfying to snap on in the knowledge that the cable you've painstakingly threaded along the length of your bike isn't going to fray like a mare's tale by tomorrow morning.
What do you use to crimp them onto the cable? I never managed to get a neat crimp with anything and, after admitting defeat, run some solder into the end of the cut cable to stop it fraying. Also means you can easily remove it from the inner and reinsert if you need to, for example to clean and lube.
But the anodised ones do look pretty and I would like to be able to fit them in a way that doesn't make them look like the work of a bodger.
The cable cap crimper on the cable cutter.
....on the seashore?
I bought a 20 year old MTB, stripped it down and rebuilt it for exactly that reason. Bike maintenance holds no fears for me now.
As a big fan of Campag, the £150 Campag chain tool makes me very cross - it's almost as if Campag wants to go out of business. I only have 10-speed Veloce but I'd be very wary about buying 11-speed Campag. Even 10-speed Veloce needs tools which a lot of local bike shops don't stock because they are hugely expensive and rarely used.
Campag have always been like this. I remember 40 years back as schoolboy cyclists taking the pee with campag and their specific (expensive) tools they required.
Then Shimano came out and you could put the groupset on with a couple of allen keys.
If it wasn't for the 'Italian Pedigree' and a degree of Romanticism I think Campag would have gone under by now.
Wolf Tooth do a gorgeous one to slip in a jersey pocker or on the road tool kit.
That torque wrench is expensive.
I'd have thought an IceToolz Ocarina for around £20 would be much better for a newbie and it's light enough to carry with you if you want to adjust seat height etc.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=ocarina+ice+toolz&_sop=15
It might not be as accurate, but it is portable.
If you're going to work on your own bike, a workstand isn't a luxury, it's an essential.
Working on your bike on the floor is miserable compared with spannering away at a good working height.
I'd say a front mech alignment tool is much more useful than a brake pad alignment tool.
For anything that's not a specific bike tool, like a torque wrench, screwdrivers, spanners and hex keys, go for Halfords Advanced Professional - always on offer, nicely made and a lifetime guarantee.
Avoided a work stand for many years, by putting bike on workbench in garage - I disagree it's essential, but it DOES make it a lot easier. When I finally gave in and bought one, I got a nearly new ToPeak one from a certain auction site for a fraction of it's new cost.
I'll agree with you on the Halfords Advanced tools, though - what isn't (mainly) Park or IceToolz in my box is Halfords.
What they missed in the article is a decent Torx wrench set - you'll probably need T25 for disk brakes and T20 can be useful for brake/shifter clamps.
Correct. Even on rim-brake bikes, sometimes Torx bolts are used on stems (3T in particular) and on rear derailleurs (I believe SRAM is an example). Not currently as mainstream as hex keys, but a decent Torx key set should cover all eventualities.
I have yet to see a long-handle version of a Torx key set though. My set is from Irwin, and they're barely as long as a "short" hex key set with no ball-ends from Stanley.
I got one of these in a set of Lezyne tools, they're pretty good:
http://www.wiggle.co.uk/lezyne-torx-block-tool/?lang=en&curr=GBP&dest=1&...
I must have being doing it wrong for 34 years, it's an option but not in any way necessary or essential for any task.
I would say it is essential for correctly indexing your gears.
I didn't even know a brake pad alignment tool was a thing you could get!! May be handy but you can align the pads without a tool, you can't bodge chains off & on so readily.
How much of a difference do cable pullers make? They're something I've been aware of for a while, but not invested in a set yet. I'm getting fairly close to new shifter cable time
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