IceToolz Y-shaped hex key set

 

Today, while I took delivery of the Garmin speed and cadence sensors from Exad Sports, I also got for myself an IceToolz 3-in-1 hex key set called  70Y2. It's basically a Y shaped tool with each end being a hex key. This makes wrenching easy because you can hold it in your palm and put considerable torque by twisting your wrist. This is useful where there is room to work on the bolt. In certain situations you might need to use a longer wrench. I think the original design was developed by Park Tool. But they are super expensive.

This is the most commonly used combination of wrenches for a modern cycle. All the bosses, the stem, head cover, the carrier etc use 4 mm bolts. The seat post and the seat need 5 and 6. I have one set of metric hex keys from. I have two T-shaped hex keys in size 4 and 5. Both from Taparia. I also have a Crank Brothers multitool that has all the hex wrenches one could need. Now this :-) 

Am I obsessed with tools. Of course yes, I am. Too bad that modern cycling tools are not stocked by any retailer in Calcutta. And right now even Exad has run out of stock with IceToolz.

Various Specialist Shops

There are various specialist shops in Calcutta that deal only with a particular line of products that you don't find anywhere. Of course Amazon is there but sometimes even Amazon can be difficult to deal with. For example, recently I needed a very small lithium ion button cell battery. It was available in Amazon but you had to buy 5 of them for Rs 350. I went to this shop in Chandni and bought it for Rs 40. You don't get such things every where. So here I go with my compilation. It's a work in progress. As and when I find more such shops I will write them down.

I will not write here the commonly found items and well known shops here. For example I will not mention the details of camera shops or engine oil shops here. There are many. And most Calcuttans know them. At least the ones that are worth knowing are known already. I will only write here about the odd items that you don't find commonly. 

If you know of any such shop please let me know.

Only caveat - most Indians don't realise the value of maintaining the same phone number. They change their service provider at the drop of a hat and change the number. So phones may not always work. 

Batteries of Various Types (Dry Cells and Lithium Ion etc) - 

Plastico - 16 Dharamtalla Street; Calcutta 700013 - 9163912254. This is a tiny shop in front of Chandni Market. 

Elgin Road - 9831146695. This is a tiny shop in front of Bhowanipore Education College, next to Titan showroom. Needlessly terribly expensive. Buy only if you cannot go to Chandni. A Panasonic 2032 that costs Rs 40 at Chandni costs Rs 140 here. Daylight robbery.

Chandni Wholesaler of button cell batteries - 8777368424 (largish shop somewhere on Chandni Chowk Street)

Nuts & Bolts

Princep Corner - 17, Prinsep St, Esplanade, Chowringhee North, Bow Barracks, Kolkata, West Bengal 700072

The Prinsep spelling is wrong but the shop stocks a very wide range of industrial grade nuts and bolts of every kind. It is very unlikely that you won't find a bolt or nut here. 

 

Cat Eye Rear Light

Yesterday, Sunday 19th July 2020, I went as far as the Bike Studio in Salt Lake's AH block to fetch this Cat Eye rear light. I think it cost me about Rs 700 plus. I had also bought a Lizard Skins bar tape and the total price came to Rs 3495 or something like that. I will add the bar tape later when I instal it. 

The light came with a clip to attach it to a rear saddle bag as well as a small plastic pipe to add circumference to any pipe (seat stay for example) if it is found too narrow. I kept these two and the manual safely inside the packet and have decided to keep the box in the cupboard, if necessary later. In fact I plan to instal this on the bike only if I go for a night trip or in winter. As of now I have the Crivit gifted by Raja last year and the Omni is sitting in the cupboard.

This light uses two AAA batteries with a claimed run time of 200 hours. It has three modes. Stable, strobe and very fast strobe. The last mode consumes the least battery. 

This is better than USB chargeable because in India there are places and destinations where there is no electricity and I plan to go to those places precisely. A battery operated unit is far more practical therefore than USB chargeable units. 

My Nite Rider headlamp is USB rechargeable though. For those type of areas it may not be practical to carry. I had taken it to Darjeeling and used it in dense fog as a safety device. Not that too many drivers would have noticed its existence but at least I had some peace of mind. I think I charged it from my portable USB power bank.

Cat Eye is a very good brand of Japanese cycling accessories. I had two of their Velo cycling computers. I have sold one. The other is still there. They are excellent products. Let me see how long the Omni lasts me. I had a cheap Nite Rider but it came only with a clip. It slipped off my saddle bag and broke. Though it still works, I do not use it. The shell is broken. 

Taparia Allen Keys

I have two very useful T-handle Taparia hex keys (or Allen keys as some would call them, after the US company that made and popularised them first) of 4 and 5 mm and a complete set of Allen keys from Taparia but that is useless for all practical purposes (for me) because it's as per the British standard. 

There are two types of hex bolts in the market. One follows the British sizing system. The other follows the metric system. My Surly as well as the Merida uses the metric system. So the British system hex keys are useless for the cycles, except size 4 and 8. Because size 4 is practically same in both metric and British systems. So is size 8. 

The size 4 key is most used for all the fixtures like the bottle cages, the carrier (pannier rack) etc. Size 5 is necessary for the rim brake calliper adjustment (which I did yesterday - 16th July, 2020). Going to Chandni for buying the 5 mm wrench (I already had the 4 mm one) was quite an adventure. Ultimately it cost me Rs 80 but the market was so over crowded with mechanics. 

In case you don't know what Chandni Market is - it is a large wholesale type market for various hardware stores in the city. It supplies to the entire Eastern and North Eastern India. Almost all Calcutta mechanics and shops source their tools and hardware items from Chandni. There is hardly any hardware item that you will not find in Chandni. 

I had to walk down the final 100 meters or so to reach the shop from where I had earlier purchased the 4 mm key. This was due to a thick crowd of people buying all sorts of hardware and cheap electronic products (these days Chandni also houses a lot of cheap electronic spares shops selling all sorts of cables and switches etc). 

Reaching the shop with the bike seemed well nigh impossible with a fruit seller blocking the approach to the shop. In fact the entire road in front is full of squatter vendors who have just occupied the public space. I had to go past the shop. Get on the footpath and trace my way back through a 2 feet gap on the footpath left for pedestrians and shoppers. The shopkeeper sitting there wouldn't allow me in with the bike. I was extremely adamant. I told him either you beat me up or call the police but I will go through this space only and with my bike. You have to be very very nasty with me to stop me. Finally he relented quietly and I had my way. He himself is an illegal occupier.

Bosch Angle Grinder

The other day I bought for myself a Bosch angle grinder. Bought it off Amazon through Cloudtail at a cost of Rs 1899. It came without any attachment. Basically there are different attachments that can be used with this grinder. So they gave none. You could want to cut metal, wood, marble, tiles, bricks. You might just want to grind metal. Then there are various polishing abrasives. It is a huge range. However, I feel Bosch should have included an assorted bunch of discs.

The Bosch literature, as usual, was quite useless. I am sure they assume that Indian mechanics who use such machines are illiterate. I had to work it out from poorly made youtube videos. However, once set up it works pretty well. Gets a little hot if you are using it on heavy load - for example, cleaning a cauldron.

I had originally bought it to sharpen knives. Worked perfectly. I sharpened all the knives available at home. The maid servant is extremely happy about it. She was having to deal with dull knives. Blessed me a lot. Bought two attachments to clean rusty iron. Used it to clean an old cauldron. Worked like magic. The cauldron now looks like new. However, while cleaning the cauldron I used the 3M eye protection goggles. This is the first time I used them. Works really well. Very comfortable on the nose, despite my glasses. One has to be careful about centrifugal and centripetal forces, while working on the round cauldron. The cauldron or the grinder can go out of control of the operator. It happened to me a couple of times. If you are novice like me, be very careful about this. 

IceToolz Cable Pliers

I never knew such a tool existed until I saw a video on brake adjustment on youtube. It's a Park Tool video (which have excellent tutorials on the subject of bicycle repair). After the Darjeeling trip my front brake was found to be a little misaligned. So I tweaked with it for a long time until getting it more or less fixed. 

This tool, I realised, makes the work convenient. Of course ParkTool makes it look like that. IceToolz obviously had a cheaper solution. Went for it. It cost me Rs 765 with delivery. 

Tweaked with the brake cable once again almost right away. It's a little tricky at first. You have to get used to using it. Once you get a hang of it, it's not so difficult. 

However, ultimately I realised the problem of my brake was with the barrel adjuster ;-) But I am super happy with this purchase. It's a very specialist bicycle repair tool. You cannot do anything else with it. It will be necessary to adjust brake and derailleur cables (if and when I learn how to tweak it).

As a side note, getting the brake callipers to move the exact same distance on either side seems to be some kind of black magic. Will have to learn it well.

Loctite 242 And The Story Behind Finding It In Calcutta

In Siliguri hotel, after our epic Darjeeling trip on cycles (read about the trip here) I lost one of the nuts of my SKS Bluemels mud guards. Even during the trip I realised a few nuts were coming loose. I had tightened them. But somehow this one nut got lost. I am immensely lucky that it happened in the hotel room after the ride. We searched the hotel room almost upside down but couldn't find it. The bolt was lying on the floor but the nut was gone. 

After some research I decided to go for Loctite on these nuts. I have also decided to use them on some of the nuts and bolts at home - particularly the handle in Mampu's cupboard. 

First I looked up Amazon. There it was available but I wanted to check if Chandni had them. In Chandni the nuts and bolts sellers seemed to have never heard about Loctite. I went to the Prinsep Street area. A small shop there sells various types of hardware chemicals. He had heard the name Loctite but tried to sell me something called Anand claiming it to be the same thing. I decided against buying it because I have no clue how strong it might be. 

When I told him about my doubts he said, these are used for truck parts and tractors etc for heavy duty stuff. He thought I would be impressed. It had just the opposite effect on me. 

My next stop was Bhanubhai Desai- a famous industrial tools shop from where I buy most of my tools. The owner there is a very knowledgeable person. I knew he wouldn't keep it but might know who keeps it. As presumed he told me where to find the distributor. It's some office just in front of AC Mohammad. 

I wasn't sure if I would find the office there. These commercial buildings have innumerable small offices and no one would know who there is the distributor for Loctite :-)

I had a brainwave. Went to AC Mohammad and asked the sleepy old salesman about Loctite. He needed to be explained what it was. I showed him the bottle of WD 40 in his shop and said - like that is used to open tight nuts, this is used to tighten loose nuts.

He immediately understood what I was looking for. He asked me for the model number and then told me to wait. He went out of the shop murmuring 242, 242, 242 .... 

I knew where he was going. He came back in 5 minutes and sold me the 50 ml bottle for Rs 650.

I am waiting for the replacement nut to arrive. Then I will apply it and see how it performs.