Motorcycle Repair Tools Worthy of Reminiscing

Artifacts are the starting fluid of memory.

Six feet from the gear closet, just across from my hand-tool bench, stands a Chinese rollaway tool chest, Costco vintage 1997. It replaced the bashed and rusty gray Craftsman box I’d been toting around since opening a Sears & Roebuck account in Oklahoma City, circa 1985. Once a year, I paste wax it.

The big, black beast was a Christmas gift from Dad, same year (and same price) as the big document safe my brother received. Different strokes and all—I had built Dad a workbench and a jenny shed that year. Pete built him a real-estate deal.

I imagine my little brother’s steel box holds a million memories by now. I know mine does, though few of mine bear attorneys’ signatures. Pictures of Daughtergirl are taped up in its permanently opened lid next to carcass saws clinging to rare-earth magnets. There are red crest stickers from the opening salvoes of MLRS artillery, crotchless panties awarded after a Cretins TT, and dinged-up motorcycle license plates from five states. Some days, I wonder whether that chest is mostly a repository for relics, but sliding open its ball-bearing drawers reveals row upon gleaming row of motorcycle repair tools.

Some of those tools are memories too. That whittled wooden stick—a fork-seal tool for an unlamented Guzzi—is as likely to be used again as my row of Whitworth sockets. My Stanley 55—a nearly unusable, Victorian-age contraption that is nonetheless lovely—sits alongside a Fluke 87 from my contracting days.

Although I’m the only guy on earth who knows where everything is in that rollaway, I couldn’t tell you on a bet. At this point it’s a matter of feel, like dead reckoning through a place you’ve been before but don’t entirely recall. My memory blew out through my left ear in 2005. When I get close to my tool chest, I just rely on my sense of how I do things. Reach in and…oh. There it is.

Can’t do that with most bikes now, and honestly I never was a great wrench. When my CAN bus boards the “CAN’T bus,” I roll that big, fast bike onto a trailer bound for the dealer’s diagnostic computer. But I own another bike, one that holds more memories than my rollaway. Proprietary tools for that old girl, carefully wrapped in a vinyl tool roll since I was in kindergarten, occupy their own special drawer. Every 2,000 miles, an old Proto drive with a dedicated socket drops her pan for careful swabbing. The “oil filter” for an R69S consists of paper towels and brake cleaner. Careful hands can get two uses out of a pan gasket if I stick with G-d’s own fossilized lubricant. Synthetic oil falls right out.

Valve adjustments can’t be skipped. Airhead valves tighten over time. The day that reassuring tappet tick goes quiet is the day before disaster. Once zinc-coated factory wrenches ease the valve covers off, I loosen a locknut and reach to slide her little gap gauge out of its fitted pocket.

Not “my” gap gauge. I husband these tools in trust for future riders. Three articulated stacks of gapping shims sleep in my rollaway, but a vintage Motorrad feeler gauge tells you intake and exhaust with your eyes closed, whether or not you can translate the German imperatives etched onto its jackknife blades.

Although order drives this process, it relies not on charts but on rhythm and flow. With a wrench in one hand and the feeler in my other, I just reach in…oh. There it is.

Be prepared to fix a flat or handle a roadside repair—avoid getting stranded with these 5 tools every motorcyclist should carry from MC Garage.

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