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The Hands That Guide
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In this time of screens and digital entertainment, I fear we may be designing out tools from our lives. I wonder how many of the houses on your street have garages, and of those garages how many have been converted to some sort of playroom, utility room or subsumed into a kitchen extension? Even sheds have been reduced to mere storage facilities, packed with bikes (perhaps), but more likely a handful of garden implements and some garden furniture. Summertime soft furnishings awaiting their day in the sun.
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I feel like a substantial part of my childhood was spent in sheds or garages where there would invariably be a heavy topped workbench complete with vice and surface layer of grease. Ball bearings lodged in fissures in the aged timber top. That distinctive smell in the air that slightly prickles the nostrils - somewhere between brimstone, burnt rubber and oil.
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I know for sure that I had my own hammer before I was school aged, and a hand drill I could use to make holes in wood like some sort of bug hunting bird. Hours were spent in these greasy, dusty caverns, with grandfathers, or my dad. It wasn’t all fixing bikes - there were woodwork projects and go-kart dreams too - but the space was there to watch and learn. To try and to pick up the tools and see how they worked. I don’t recall hearing the rhyme ‘righty tighty, lefty loosey’ until I was an adult, the workshop upbringing rendering such movements beyond conscious thought.
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You are probably different. Your house is not like the others on the street. You probably still have a toolbox and the means to conduct your own repairs to your bike (even if you prefer not to be doing them). But are those tools out and there for the using? Are they something you share with your kids, or do you retreat, fixing something to be done in private? Are kids to be kept away from the tools (my precious) for fear of them misplacing critical adapters or allowing items to roll away under the freezer? Or is the kids that are precious, and whose skin and fingers must not risk slicing and splicing?
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I don’t think our parents loved us any less, as they allowed us to risk bloodshed. Better that we learned than found ourselves helpless later. Maybe it’s not about risk, but instead perhaps today we’re all just too busy. Too busy to let our kids loosen that nut in ten times the time it would take us to do it? Maybe too busy to do our own fettling in the first place?
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Tools can certainly be sources of immense frustration. But we all know the saying about blaming your tools. It’s not usually the tools (unless they’re from a Christmas cracker) that are the source of the problem, it’s the hands that guide them. I strongly suspect that you will look fondly upon the person, or people, that helped put tools in your hands. If you get the chance, pass that moment along to someone else.
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Hey gang! It's time to gawp at some of bike and bike-adjacent stuff that's landed at STW HQ this week.
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Subscriber Savings
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Singletrack Subscribers get access to a whole range of online discounts. This new deal from Garmin has just been added, giving you great discounts on a range of Garmin products.
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Latest Reviews
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Shut up legs, we’re trying to figure out what that rattle is.
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Goes up to 250mm, new air-over-air design, new battery location and it's cheaper.
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The Privateer 161 (Gen 2) has great geometry, a decent build kit, external routing (yes!) and rides very, very impressively.
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