Years ago, when I was working as a mechanic for professional cycling teams, I was spending hundreds of days on the road each year and I lived and worked in hotel parking lots.  One of the unique challenges of that job was constantly balancing the requirement that you have everything you need when you need it but nothing you don’t.  It’s one thing when you’re with the team truck and size and weight aren’t really an issue, but it’s another thing when you’re flying to some remote town in Argentina for the start of a week-long stage race and you have to carry everything you’re going to need for yourself, 8 professional athletes, and anything else that might go wrong with the bikes, the team car, or god knows what else.  And how do you keep it small enough and light enough that you can move it around without throwing your back out?  Well, the answer is that you’re probably going to have to build your own.  And that’s exactly what I did.  I used off the shelf tool boxes and tools for five years and while everything performed just fine and I was never unhappy with them, I was always a little bummed out about how much everything weighed and how it seemed like there was a lot of wasted space in the box and unused slots in my pallets. 

My philosophy was simple:  I wanted to build a tool box that could handle any bike repair that I’d be likely to encounter on a road bike that didn’t require the use of a vice and had enough tools in it so that I could build a brand new bike with an uncut steerer tube and still be completely self-sufficient.  Also, throughout the course of my time working on the road, it wasn’t uncommon to encounter the odd car repair (which was generally the result of someone running into something) every once and awhile too.

Now, this ain’t no how-to post.  You’re all a lot smarter than I am so I won’t assume any of you need to be educated on the best practice of putting stuff in a box, and there are far too many individual tools to list out here, but my hope is that some of these photos will be a conversation stimulator and maybe inspire some others out there to waste their time in a similar fashion.  For this box I found a suitably sized Pelican case and a large blank sheet of carbon fiber, which I cut to the correct size and then mocked up what the pallets would look like, as seen in the photo below.

Once I had all three pallets that I planned on making mocked up, I built the pallets based on my template and everything was good to go.  Here’s the result of said mocking uping:

And the resulting decrease in size.  The tried and true C.H. Ellis box in all of its portly glory sitting next to the svelte and highly visible new box.  I’m not a doctor, but that looks at least 33.3% smaller.  Also, don't cut large amounts of carbon fiber in flip-flops.  Trust me, it's a bad idea.

Now I ask you, dear readers, what’s your idea of the perfect tool-box?

-Ben

I love to spot Problem Solvers products out in the wild, but it's even cooler when someone snaps a pic and sends it in. Bring 'em on: 

"Recently I put the finishing touches on my fixed-gear gentleman’s roadster. I bought a pristine 80’s-era Univega frame for $20 from a fellow mechanic and neglected it for a little while…until now:

But what to do about those pesky, unattractive shift bosses on the downtube? For just a few bucks I grabbed up a set of Problem Solvers Shift Boss Covers. And voila! A quick and classy solution to a problem that has plagued us since the dawn of the fixed-gear conversion." - Michael

At the office, there's a wonderful, magical area we like to call the Free Table. Some folks drop off stuff they don't want and some folks find stuff they do want, and the circle of life continues. It was on one of my five daily trips to peek at the free stuff that I found this:

And tried desperately to figure out what it was by placing on my hand it in different stages of dissasembly from multiple angles and taking pictures.:

Luckily the piece was stamped with a name that rang a bell: J.A. Stein, maker of kick-ass bike tools. I even asked Problem Solvers bike mechanic therapist and French poetry quotist Ben WTF it was, but he just gave me this look:

Turns out, as Ben later explained, this little doohicky is for removing a cassette lockring in an emergency-type situation. The splines sit in the lockring, the outer plate is secured by the QR nut, and your drive train works like a chainwhip. Sweet free table action!

Here's a better explanation:

"This tool secures the lockring from turning by locking it to the dropout so that when the cranks are turned with the bike in low gear the pedaling force will actually break the lockring free. It is designed primarily for emergency use. The tool can be used in reverse to be able to install the lockring as well."

http://www.jastein.com/PDF/cassette%20lock%20inst.pdf 

About a week and a half ago, I closed on a house. As I see it, I've signed up for a couple summers of intensive landscaping, six or so years of remodeling and a lifetime of debt. One of the projects I'm most excited about is building some great shop space in my basement. I figure some discoveries I make along the way might be worth documenting for the three people who have the RSS feed of this blog, and the one random visitor we get each week. It'll be a long and thrifty road, but here's what I'm starting with:

I pulled out the suspended ceiling tiles to find what must've been some sort of Comcast technician training ground. By taking this ceiling out, I'll gain about 8" of headroom, which is pretty necessary 'cause my thinning hair was rubbing on the ceiling before. 

How much you think this'll get me at the scrapyard?

I've decided that the rest of the internet is far better than I for a report on NAHBS, in terms of both picture taking ability and writing quality...and especially timeliness. Here's my "Best of NAHBS" list, or "The In-Focus Pictures"

Creeeeeepy. More pictures on the facebook.