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Emily Dickinson's Out Of Hand BMX Toolkit: Part I
by emilydickinson | 04 Mar 2006 12:19 am
[This article is actually a chapter from my forthcoming book, 'The Complete Guide To BMX Repair and Engineering. The book is complete, and I'm having it proofread by a few people in the know to check for accuracy, which is becoming a much longer, more difficult process than I expected. It should hopefully be available through Brick City Bikes before the Summer. Enjoy. EmilyDickinson - Gangster Mechanic at Brick City Bikes
I’m a bike junkie, and I’ve come to terms with that. Whenever I see a bike shop, I feel an unexplainable pull that draws me towards the entrance, regardless of what I was doing a moment before. Wherever I travel, I ritually examine the yellow pages (or the blue pages, or the guy in the Festina jersey depending on what continent I happen to be on at the moment) and find out where all the local shops are so I can line up a visit. Though I haven’t kept a list, just a quick peek at the number of bike shop business cards I have in a shoebox leads me to believe I’ve been to around 200 shops in about 30 countries. Some are huge, impressive ‘dealerships’ with miles of fancy aero barred roads bikes, and others are just a guy with a smile and a sign that says, ‘Bicycle Flats Fixed Here – Cheap!’. Every bike shop is different in character and quirks, but over the last few years I have noticed something disturbing that is common to nearly every shop. They don’t know shit about BMX bikes. It breaks my heart to come to this realization, and as much as I try to deny the facts, I just keep proving myself wrong. Most shops don’t sell any BMX bikes, with the possible exception of a few really low-end models that are made for little kids to rip around on, and they usually don’t carry any BMX parts of reasonable quality. This is fairly annoying. I, like many riders, prefer to actually put my hands on a part, examine it, and get a good close-up look to see how well it’s made. I’ll admit that I actually enjoy fondling a nice piece of CroMo and running my fingers over the grain and machining marks on a chainring or a stem.
You can’t really make an informed decision about the quality of a bicycle component by looking at a 300 DPI picture on a website or a grainy photo in a catalog. Mail order has taken over BMX, which is pretty sad, and there are a million reasons, nearly all economic, why this is so. Many riders don’t mind, and the rest of us are just watching our paddles slowly float away from the canoe. The switch from buying from a local bike shop to mail order has one unforeseen consequence that is beginning to have a huge negative effect on our funny little sport. No one knows how to work on BMX bikes! Your chances are good, that if you bring your beloved BMX into a shop to have something fixed, it’s not going to be done correctly, unless you’re lucky enough to have a place nearby that has a fellow BMX rider who’s also a mechanic. BMX is finally catching up to the rest of the bike world technology wise, so this further compounds the problem. BMX also has a few pieces of gear, like pegs and rotors, that are wholly unique to the little wheel world, and complicated to get working properly. I live in NYC, it’s a huge bike town, and there’s close to a hundred shops. Out of those 100 or so shops, there are only two places you could bring your BMX in for work, and get it back running like a dream (and that’s because those twp shops happen to employ a couple hardcore riders as mechanics).
So what does this mean for BMX riders? It means we need to learn how to fix our own bikes, because bike shops no longer have the financial incentive to learn how to properly service our rides. It’s quickly becoming a necessity, but doing your own repairs is also fun, cheap and let’s you learn the intricacies of dialing in your steed so it’s perfectly suited to your riding style. The first thing you need to absorb on your road to becoming a master BMX mechanic is a thorough understanding of tools and how they work. BMX bikes are quirky little beasts, and if you try to start fixing your bike or swapping parts with the wrong tools, you’ll quickly end up with stripped bolts, knackered threads, bent parts and unrepairable damage done to your bike. It all comes down to this: If you ride a BMX you need the tools to fix it, and the knowledge to use those tools correctly.
I have written several articles about tools in the past, but for various reasons such as saving riders some cash, or weighing the risks of destruction on very difficult repairs, these articles were somewhat incomplete. It’s my hope that contained herein, you’ll find a thorough description and pretty pictures of every tool you’ll need to assemble, disassemble, upgrade, repair and modify any BMX bike from an old school Scrambler with a sidehack right on up to a 4 pound integrated everything teched out ramp bike.
I’ll start by saying one thing: Cheap tools are junk. Really, trust me on this one. If I had every cheap tool, and every part I’ve mangled with a cheap tool, I could melt them down and have enough steel to make a Land Rover. Cheap tools break and hit you in the face or the crotch, mutilate your fancy new cranks, strip your axle nuts and are a guaranteed source of wall punching aggravation for the five minutes they last before imploding in a puff of smoke. Top quality tools don’t come cheap, but relatively speaking they’re a bargain because they last forever. My grandfather still has the same set of Craftsmen box wrenches he bought when he got home from WWII, and they still look and work great. If you plan to ride your BMX for a long time, nice tools will pay for themselves time and again, year after year. Buy the best tools you can afford, or gather up your riding crew and chip in for a community toolkit. Let’s face it. We ride bikes, we break bikes and we need to fix them. Let’s go.
Emily Dickinson's Out Of Hand BMX Toolkit
Part I: Measuring Tools
The most overlooked, and in many ways the most important tools in your box are a good set of measuring implements. This one may seem like a no brainer, but you can save huge amounts of time, and ensure everything fits well by measuring different parts on your bike as you go along. Theoretically, everything on your bike should adhere to an exact standard of measurement, but anyone who’s built up a bike from scratch knows this isn’t so. In a perfect world parts would have their measurements stamped on the part in some unobtrusive place, or at least on the packaging. BMX can’t even decide on a solid bottom bracket size, so I don’t see standardization hitting BMX anytime soon. In the meantime, we’ll need to measure. Good measuring gear will also help you dial in your bike once it’s put together and make informed decisions about what size parts and types of frames are good for your riding. Measuring tools aren’t as glamorous, as say, oh…Cone Wrenches, but they are much more helpful than you can possibly imagine.
1. Ruler
Several companies make rulers specifically designed for bicycles. These function as a standard ruler, great for measuring bars for cutting and cranks, with both Standard and Metric markings. They also have special markings for measuring spoke size, and cutouts in the ruler that allow you to measure spoke gauge and the size of ball bearings. It’s much easier to order replacement spokes and bearings when you can easily determine the correct size, and spokes seem to be mislabeled with disturbing frequency (I actually got a set of spokes that were mislabeled in during the course of writing this article).
2. Vernier Calipers
Quite a few parts on a BMX can only be correctly measured with a Vernier Caliper. A caliper is necessary for finding out the size of many parts like axles, pegs and headtubes, as it measures both the inner and outer diamter of an object, and some calipers are also capable of measuring depth. A caliper will provide a very, very accurate reading of parts, especially odd shaped parts that can’t be measured any other way. Seemingly immeasurable parts like the inner diameter of a Headtube, or the outer diameter of a Downtube are useful to know, and a caliper is the tool necessary to find out these useful bits of information. If you are doing any type of machining to your bike, like modifying your frame in any way or creating a part from scratch a caliper is an absolute necessity because no other measuring tool can match it for accuracy. Calipers are dearly expensive. The cheapest caliper I’ve seen, sells for about $30 (USD), and they just go up from there. Dial calipers are easier to read than standard models, and digital calipers are fantastic but usually priced somewhere in the triple digits. Recently I have discovered that several companies that supply Dollar stores (You know, those ghetto stores where every item in the store is a measly single) are selling plastic caliper sets for $1 (USD). Of course, buying two calipers for $1, amazing accuracy can’t be expected, and they are made of plastic, but believe it or not they are usable, and a good stopgap tool until you can scrape up the cash for a proper model.
3. Measuring Gage
When it comes to measuring value bang for the buck (or pow! For the pound) if such a bizarre concept exists, it’s hard to beat a measuring gage. These little gems are dirt cheap, but are the Swiss army knife of measurement. There are various cutouts that are sized to measure the outer diameter of bolts and screws, and tell you the exact specifications, not just the size. You’ll know the exact standard used by machinists so you can find a replacement by using the identification code on the gage. They also measure the outer diameter of tubing, the thread diameter of bolts, the thickness of cables and the metric and standard sizes. As if all this weren’t enough, they have quite a few conversion charts including metric to standard, standard to metric, nominal size and area conversions. My preferred brand is the ‘Gage-It’, and for the grand price of $1.99 (USD) you can toss one of these in your toolbox and start upon the path of accuracy, while impressing your friends with your mystical measuring skills.
4. Depth Gauge
A depth gauge is a simple tool, it’s basically a vertical graduated ruler with a sliding bar. You place the gauge inside a hollow object, say a headtube and it tells you how deep the object is. A depth gauge is great for figuring out how many spacers you’ll need in your bottom bracket, how long the spacer tube should be, comparing the strength of headsets by measuring the insertion the cups have and countless other deep, deep uses. It’s hard to use a ruler to measure depth with any accuracy, because you usually need to place it on the outside of the object, but since the depth gauge go inside, you get a much more realistic number in the end. Depth gauges are another dirt cheap measuring tool, the one I use was purchased for about $1.50 (USD).
5. Digital Tire Pressure Gauge
Eyeballing your tire pressure won’t bring on the next ice age, but it’s nice to have an accurate rating as to how much air is or isn’t in your tires. The amount of air in your tires has a big effect on how your bike handles, takes off and especially lands, so a digital gauge will let you fine tune you air pressure. The gages built in to pumps are wildly inaccurate, and the plastic mechanical type are really meant for cars, so they just don’t give a reading that’s all that useful for a bike. This digital model reads tire pressure out to three digits, in either P.S.I. or BAR, fits both Presta and Schrader valves and has a built in light for tire pressure emergencies.
6. Pencil and Paper
Emily, c’mon, really? When you get to the store you won’t remember. Was that 8mm or 9mm? Or 8cm? Maybe it was inches… This is especially useful for perpetually stoned riders like myself.
7. Magnifying Glass
Sometimes cracks and dings are hard to see. For the most part a crack you need to see with a magnifying glass isn’t something to really worry about, but it’s helpful to know where a part is breaking early, so maybe you can slow down the damage or at least know what’s going on. In some cases it’s hard to tell if a line is actually a crack, or just damage to the paint, so checking it out like Sherlock Holmes will let you know for sure. These also work great on threads that may have been damaged, especially if you need to tap or chase new ones, then a mag glass becomes indispensable. If you become trapped somewhere with only your bike and toolkit you can use this to start a lifesaving fire.
8.Measuring Tape
Some parts of your bike, like bars and frame tubes, are too long to be measured with a ruler, so a measuring tape is necessary. The flexible kind used by tailors are the best because they can be wrapped around odd shaped objects, like a seatpost or cranks to get a quick measurement, or wrapped around your drivetrain to estimate the correct size your chain needs to be. Clever!
9. Angle Finder (Pic Coming)
An Angle finder is basically a fancy protractor. It allows you to measure the angle of any parts of your bike: Downtube, headtube, brake line etc. This is a good way to feel out the geometry of your own bike so you can make informed decisions about future frames, and also helps during setup. You can adjust various things, like stem height as they relate to the headtube angle for example. This is also handy once you have your bars in the perfect place you can measure and record the angle so you can always get them back to that perfect spot.
Also check Part II of Emily Dickinson's Out Of Hand BMX Toolkit: Bike Specific Tools
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