As ever, Park Tool had a host of new tools on show at Eurobike, and they’re always helpfully marked with large “NEU” labels. It included chainwhips, presses, spanners, sockets, a tray, screwdrivers and, for when all else fails, hammers.
Most notable though was the THS-1 Trailhead Workstation, which they designed to house basic tools and a workstand at trailheads. In Europe though, they’ve observed that a lot of bike shops have areas set aside for customers to clean and fix their own bikes, probably to avert those conversations that go:
Customer: “Can I borrow [tool] for a minute?”
Mechanic: “F*** off!”
(I mean, we understand the mechanic in these cases, but it’s not great for a bike shop to have to say no to people).
The THS-1 consists of a workstand that your seatpost goes in, that can slide up and down on a rail. Below that are screwdrivers, a set of hex keys, a set of torx keys, various spanners, and a pair of burly metal tyre levers all cabled in.
No RRP for this right now, but unless you run a bike shop or a trail centre, you’re probably better off with some of the items below.
Below is the BBT-30.4 bottom bracket tool, which is used to push BB30 bottom bracket bearings out of the shell. This latest version has been updated to work with PF30, EVO 386, BBright, and PF121.
There are also some new chainwhips, one designed to save space and double up as a pedal spanner, and others for singlespeed and 1 speed drivetrains.
The shiniest tool on the Park stand was the BO-4 bottle opener, which as well as that has a foil cutter and corkscrew.
It was difficult to get a good photo with the number of people around them at the time, but on show here are a few new things. The SKT-6 Flat Faced Socket Set has 24, 26, 27, 28, 30 and 32mm flat faced sockets for undoing top caps on most forks without damaging them. The SBS-1.2 and SBS-3 are sets of various sockets and hex driven bits.
There are a few updates to Park’s torque wrenches too, with branded workshop torque wrenches in blue, should you want ones that match the rest of your park gear instead of whatever else you’ve been using – that said, the smaller one covers a much more useful torque range for mountain bikes compared to most automotive-derived torque wrenches. There’s also a new addition to their line of t-handle torque wrenches too. Before now Park have offered present ones, bit the ATD-1.2 can be set to five different presets from 4 to 6 newton-metres.
Comments (1)
Comments Closed
Mmmm, precision screwdrivers…