Emergency Repair Kit odd's and ends

Spare bolts and an old film case to put them in.
Click to enlarge.

This page discusses tools and spare parts that I like to carry with me on tour and haven't covered on any of the other pages. I will be adding to this page over time as I work my way through my tool bag.

Spare bolts

It would really suck to get three quarters of the way through a tour only to discover that you've lost a critical bolt. In my case this happened to me during my Round Lake Huron tour when I lost one of the bolts in my rear rack. Luckily I was carrying a film canister with some spare bolts.

While this worked well to fix the problem I encountered another trick that experienced bicycle tourists use is to replace as many bolts as possible on the bike with one common size. An example of this techinique is replacing water bottle cage bolts with longer bolts and washers that can be used elsewhere on the bike should a problem occur.

Ziplock ties can go a long way towards giving you a temporary fix to a critical problem.
Click to enlarge.

Ziplock ties

During my Round Lake Erie tour ziplock ties were successfully used to keep one of my Vaude rear saddlebags attached to the rack when the attachment mechanism failed at a bad time and place. Later on I removed the ziplock ties and fixed the problem with the attachment mechanism. Plastic tie wraps or zip lock ties are inexpensive and very useful for helping to temporarily fix problems that occurr during a tour.

Deraileur hanger

Picture of a derailleur hanger.
Click to enlarge.

This is an item that is most likely to be needed during an offroad tour although having a fully loaded road touring bike fall over in a way that damages the derailleur hanger is possible. When a deraileur hanger is bent it often causes problems with shifting especially for indexed shifting systems. With some types of shifters you can sometimes work around the problem by using friction mode instead.

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