“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

I spread the tool weight out along the bike, most of the immediate repair items are stored in a tennis ball can mounted on the frame under the rear shock (tennis ball cans and bike water bottles have roughly the same diameter.)  I used the same can the entire trip, losing the lid just outside of Silver City, NM.  I spent quite a bit of time eliminating all unnecessary redundancy in tooling and did some gambling. 

Repair Item Strategy: 

My repair item strategy was simple, carry the minimum for normal repairs, improvise when necessary, and ship a complement of tools and replacement parts in my bounce boxes (see Logistics.)  On the trail, many improvised repair items can be made with normal items already in the environment.  Anywhere cattle graze (which is 99% of the route) there is wire on the ground, trust me.  Ranchers, contractors, USFS/BLM personnel, and hunters carry tools.  Almost all small towns have hardware stores; gas stations have common repair items on the shelf.  Tire boots can be cut out of any thin plastic bottle found on the roadside.  You can stuff grass in a tire and ride it out with destroying the rim.   Never give up and push without sweeping the area around you first. 

"If you don't have the right equipment for the job, you just have to make it yourself." ~MacGyver

Bike and Rack Repair items

- Combined Ascent Mini-tool and ToPeak Alien. I went end to end on the bike and chucked any multi-tool parts not needed.   I just took apart the mini-tool/Alien and combined into one tool.   I didn’t end up in a situation where I didn’t have the right tool.

-Small combo pliers with flat and Phillips screwdriver handle tool…good chance you need the pliers and the screwdriver fittings to counter torque something else.

- Extra PC99 chain section, three gold links, unattached chainbreaker from Topeak Alien.

- Extra cleat and cleat bolts.

-Various nuts and screws and a 10mm wrench for the OMM racks and Intense lag nuts.

-Added an 8mm end wrench in Whitefish when rear rack mount had to be modified as well as some extra emergency mounting brackets.

- Presta to Schrader adaptor – nice for a service station compressor.

- Extra derailleur cable, extra set of (worn) brake pads.

- Small vial of Dumonde Tech chain lube and even smaller eye dropper of Dumonde Liquid Grease (comes in handy eliminating squeaks in seat tubes…among other things.)  I estimate I used equivalent of 1.5 small Dumonde chain lube containers the entire trip…I topped off on lube from a bigger container in my bounce box.

-  Zip Ties, various sizes.  The smaller and medium ties I kept in the tennis ball can and the big, thick, long ties I stored with four extra DT Swiss spokes all wrapped bubble wrap, rubber banded and stuffed up in the seat tube.  You can never carry too many zip ties.

-  small roll of 100 mph tape (yes, OD green…hmm) and small roll of electrical tape

-  Two small and two medium rubber lined hose clamps to repair a broken frame or lock out a blown shock.  Stored the mediums on the frame seat tube stay and the small ones on the lower chainstay.  Never used the clamps.

Tire/Tube Repair Items

- Blackburn Mammoth hand pump

- Only one extra tube most of the time, I carried an additional slime tube in southern New Mexico.

-  tube patches/glue and Park tool lightweight tire boots.   You can also use the tube patch kit to repair holes in a sleeping pad or other canvas item if you can’t wait to get the supplies somewhere.

-  Park Tool Tire levers  (if you really want to miser the grams, I have used skewer tongues as tire levers before)

**Notes:  Luckily, the tire setup I ran was very low maintenance and rarely needed even a few pumps of air every couple of days.  The one flat I had was changed twice when I found the replacement tube had a hole in it as well.  I patched the original tube and it held air the rest of the trip.  I stored all my tire repair items in a tent pole bag lashed to the back rack.  A cheap way to keep stored tubes from getting “ratted out” is to store the tube in a normal plastic bag but reinforce the plastic bag with clear packing tape.  I did not carry a spare tire, but had an extra Schwalbe tire in my bounce box.

---