Two bikes, a hallway with a radiator in the wrong place, and currently I pay the shop for everything including punctures. I would like to get to the point where routine maintenance happens at home, but I do not want a wall of tools I use once a year. Assume I own a multitool and a mini pump and nothing else.
Numbers, since it decides which tools pay for themselves. Count the jobs you paid a shop for last year — for most people it is a couple of punctures, one gear adjustment, a chain, and a set of brake pads. A shop charge for one of those is roughly what the tool for it costs, so the tools break even in the first year and everything afterward is free. The exception is anything you do once every three years, where the shop is cheaper and you should keep paying them.
Budget for consumables as well as tools, because it is the thing that stops the whole plan. Cables and outers, brake pads, a spare chain, degreaser, a rag pile and a couple of tubes. Nothing kills a home maintenance habit faster than getting halfway into a job on a Sunday and discovering the shop shuts at four.
Order I would spend it in: a proper floor pump with a gauge, a decent set of hex and torx keys that are not the folding multitool, a chain wear checker, cable cutters if you run mechanical shifting, and a chain tool. That lot is well inside your budget and covers the jobs you will actually do this year. The stand is the thing everyone buys first and it is the one I would buy last, because a cheap wobbly stand is worse than leaning the bike against a wall.
It is genuinely useful once you are doing gear adjustment with the wheel turning. For punctures, brakes and bar tape you do not need it at all.
The stand was going to be my first purchase purely because it looks like what a workshop has.
@migration_marek · 3mo ago · 2 replies
Disagreeing on the stand, specifically because you are in a flat. A wall-mounted folding stand takes up nothing when folded, holds the bike at a height where you are not kneeling on a hallway floor, and is the difference between doing a job now and putting it off until the weekend. In a house with a garage I would agree with buying it last. In a hallway, the thing that removes friction is what gets used.
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@bruno_calder · 3mo ago
That is fair for a flat, as long as the wall is right for mounting. Renting complicates it, which is the usual reason people end up with the wobbly tripod.
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