Beginner'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