I have found a lot of the medical type tools invaluable...
Peas in a pod, Dave! This installment of "Tool Time" is devoted to the bike-surgeon's tools.
Like you, I've found medical tools to be extremely useful for my repairs, and that is just as true for bicycle work. I've seen too much of hospitals from both sides, and managed to pick up a few tools along the way. I got a new suture kit every month for the 3.5 years I was a hospital outpatient, and I also managed to snag a few implements from our suture seminars when I taught nursing management and wrote an entire curriculum on the topic and did rounds supervision. These tools have surely come in handy over the years.
First up is a pair of stethoscopes from my automotive days...these are tuned to two different frequencies and are just the ticket for isolating those mysterous creaks, snaps, and pops that arise on all our bicycles from time to time. They're useful for checking bearing condition before a tear-down, and are a nice way to while away time listening to the engaged and freewheeling gearsets in a Rohloff hub. Though I don't use them often, these are among my most valuable tools for problem diagnosis on, well, nearly anything from refrigeration units and heat pumps to alternators and of course, bicycles. They are binaural/stereo and beat the pants off placing the handle of a scredriver against your temporomandibular joints and listening through bone-conduction alone. Yes, that works well, but the sounds are more nuanced with these stethoscopes and so more easily identified, saving lots of time. The greater standoff is not only more convenient, it is safer as well, keeping one's head and vulnerable bits a little farther from spinning things.
Next are the Pakistani dental tools. A sell-off from a Customs seizure, these are ideal for ever-so-carefully removing the shields from "sealed" cartridge bearings, and far more effective than the tip of an Xacto or other craft knife for the purpose. Much safer on the shields, too, which are commonly backed by molded-in, thin brass sheets that can distort and compromise the seal if one gets it wrong. "Sealed" bearings last a whole lot longer if they are periodically removed, cleaned in solvent, and regreased. These picks make a quick job of it.
You'll also see a variety of locking and free forceps and scissors of various sorts and conductive and non-conductive (glass-filled nylon) tweezers that are handy for fishing small parts in and out of their usual recesses. The glass-filled tweezers are ideal for placing and removing ball bearings and have a bit more "tooth" to prevent loss or dropping the balls.
One of my most-loved tools is the offset, box-joint, trapezoidal long-reach foreceps. These things can reach far into the smallest of cavities, while the upper, offset frame actuates the toothed jaws. These have pulled me out of more scrapes than I can recall, and are such a nice adjunct to my usual variety of magnetic and fingered parts-grabbers. These see consistent use on bicycles when I need to reach far into a steerer or fish light wires through some recess. The "feel" is magnificent, and you can apply exactly the needed amount of pressure and the finger-holds make them captive to your hand, so you can "store" it on a pinky if it is inconvenient to lay it on the floor or workbench. They are capable of the most delicate touch yet are extremly robust and strong.
10 of 5 stars on this one; it has stolen my heart.
Next up, we have the "Paper Tools". Paper tools?!? In the pre-Internet/WWW days, things were shared on paper, often of necessity, These tools were intended as an aid to sellers rather than buyers. Let me explain. The larger tool is a cog-sizer and the smaller, L-shaped tool is a brake-reach indicator, intended to determine the drop needed for a centerpull or sidepull brake to properly engage a rim sidewall. These both date from 1976, and are yellow from the epoxy I used to bond them to sheet aluminum to make them more durable and long-lasting than the paper copies alone. I had no idea they'd still be going strong 36 years later!
The cog sizer is a cut-out from an old Bike Nashbar catalog. Arni Nashbar founded the mail-order firm in Ohio, and soon built it into the nation's largest by-mail discount retailer. Nashbar's catalogs were always a thing of beauty, with little hand-drawn line art and nary a photo in sight. An upstart firm by the name of Performance Bikes started in the Snook Family basement in North Carolina and gave Nashbar a run for its money with its slick, glossily-photographed catalogs. In later years, large holding companies acquired both, them merged. Nashbar is now the closeout and discount arm of Performance, both owned by a much larger operation. The brake-reach indicator came from a Bikecology catalog of the same era; Bikecology was a glossy and prettily-photographed effort in bicycle mail-order cataloging, operated by Alan Goldsmith out of Santa Monica (greater Los Angeles), California. Alan also operated a chain of large shops in the area, and his imported brands included Jack Taylor singles and tandems, Mercian, and AlAn screwed-and-glued aluminum frames (AlAn stood for Aluminum, Andodized and the tubes were cut off square, threaded, then screwed to threaded lugs and secured using a variety of LocTite anerobic adhesive. Alan Goldsmith's operation was large enough to include several captive house brands, including the Niko line of bikes...the same as Centurion, but with the Niko name silkscreened atop the clear coat instead of Centurion. These were really colorful and visionary characters in the industry -- pioneers is what they did -- and responsible for a number of mail-order innovations.
In their early days, all these mail-order companies soon ran afoul of the various standards in the bicycle industry -- SAE, metric, Whitworth, French, and Italian threading, various stem clamp and quill diameters, and on and on. Often, customers owned no measuring tools or were mistaken about their needs when placing orders, so restocking and returns-related costs soon mounted. In an effort to reduce and address the problem, catalogs came printed with various sizing guides. Buyers would cut them out, hold them up, get the right part the first time, and everyone was happy. These two tools date from that era, roughly 1976-1979.
The two hook-like tools you see in the second photo are both used to aid removal of misplaced or undesired star-fangled nuts in threadless steerers. Some time ago, I detailed a procedure for removing SFNs here:
http://www.thorncycles.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=3800.0 ...and these tools aid the process further, easly tipping the upper star once the rivet has been drilled and the connection with the threaded stud and lower star has been breached. The larger tool was originally intended to release the adjustment springs on automotive headlights, but I modified it by heating and bending it, changed the shape of the hook, retempered and reblued it, then added some thick-walled silicone tubing on the handles for comfort. The smaller one is a repurposed screwdriver that was heated, bent, milled, retempered, and then had a new handle attached after it was coated in toluene-based tool-handle dip. Both work a treat.
More tool oddities in the next installment. Right now, it is a lovely Fall day and I need to put the yard to rights before the winter rains arrive. A lot of our summer growth was delayed until now, and I have tree suckers to cut, bushes to prune, a yard to edge and mow, and a myriad of loose ends to tie-up. The Nomad is calling, and I may be able to squeeze in a hard, fast ride on it if I hurry. The Nomad is the subject of several smaller projects and on the cusp of a Big Project I will soon be able to reveal and solicit your thoughts and opinions on, so keep an eye on the gallery and bike-electronics boards. Fun stuff is in the works!
Best,
Dan.
