Just take a look at these. Now look at me. Now look back at them. Back at me. Back at them. Back at me. Okay, I'll admit that was pointless, but you'll admit you didn't do that, you just kept reading. Anyway, I trust by now you've looked at that little red bicycle riding hood of beauty to the left of this text? If you haven't seen it by now, go back to Facebook and carry on with your life, thanks for the page views. However, if you are one of the Twitter pure race, you'll probably have noticed that luscious lever of legends currently on your screen, as you're just better people #yero. As a Sainsbury's advert would say, this is not just any tyre lever, this is a Bontrager tyre lever. Now to be honest, I used to associate Bontrager with cheap Trek bikes, I never really rated their gear at all. But that was back in the days, the days before I met my favourite tyre lever in the whole wide world. As unassuming and plain old run of the mill normal tyre lever as this looks, this perfect and precise piece of pleasure is far, far from ordinary.
Dt Swiss rims, Maxxis dual ply tyres? I'm sure most of you have been there. For those fortunate few who haven't, imagine trying to open a tin of beans. Done that before? Seem simple yeh? Ok, think about it again, only this time your hands are strapped into a pair of woman's mitts(because boys should never own mitts), your arms are tied together, you are upside down, and you can only use a banana, and it's not even a good ripe Fyffes banana. Seriously, it'll deep fatty fry your head til the extent you'll have pulled this much hair out.
You stick the lever in, try to grab hold of a bit of the tyre bead, think you've got a little bit, give it a pull in the hope you'll get a bit of tyre off, the lever slips, you loose the tyre and you're back to square one. Repeat this process x10. Really, if you ever wanted a mental strength test, give somebody a Decathlon tyre lever and a Maxxis/DT set up on a cold day and leave them there til they have forcibly buried the wheel over their own head, or are eating the bearings in the hub while hitting themselves in the face with the QR skewer. Hours I have spent, in the garage's very own artic climate, fighting polar bears with desert spoons. No matter how many times you try, it just seems to come to nothing every single last one of those times. By this stage if you were doing something more productive you could probably have made enough money to just buy a bloody new wheel, tube and tyre, and some petrol to set the old one a-light after shouting every expletive in the dictionary, and all those new ones you just made up.
But thankfully, all this fickle frustration is in the past. I was a little apprehensive, when buying these, as as mentioned above, I'd prejudged Bontrager. Such was the extent of my distress though, that I was willing to try anything just to be able to get my tyres on and off easier. Show me a brick and tell me it was good at getting tyres off and I've had snapped it up quicker than you'd have finished talking. Thankfully nobody offered me bricks, and instead I ended up buying some Bontrager tyre levers. Similar in looks to a brick, they are certainly much better in function. They even just feel nice in your hands, or toes, or whatever you use when you're all alone with the bike in the garage. Now I've tried Park Tools, Decathlon, Pedros, Weldtite, SKS... the list goes on(Well, it doesn't really, it just stops there, because I found these Bontrager babies and have never had to buy new ones since) and nothing has ever even felt as solid or well manufactured.
On first appearances, other than being cool 'cause they're red, they don't look like they're up to much. Not the most reinforced nor attractively shaped, and the part that should hook onto the tyre looks much to blunt to ever do more than find itself a one way ticket to the bin. Haha, I forgot the majority of us mountain-bikers don't use bins. I mean that middle shelf that you'll never look at again, that's where it'll sit until the day it falls down the back of the shelf, or just disappears all together. But instead, this tyre lever is as subtly sharp as a sharp thing, and it'll grab right underneath your tyre and with a gentle old yank of the wrist, you'll have the tyre on the side of the rim that it's never been before. Then its all smooth sailing from there. You fumble in the next tyre lever and give it a yank too, and before you know it even more of the tyre is exploring places its never been before. Give one of the levers a bit of a pull around the rim and the next thing you'll know you'll have the whole of one side of the tyre free. Get this right once, and the world IS YOUR OYSTER. You'll buy more tyres, ones for raining today, ones for raining yesterday, ones for raining the day before (it's Northern Ireland, don't even consider a dry tyre), just because you can. You'll then change the tyres before every time you go and ride, because you don't have to go through the emotional trauma that normally ensues changing a tyre. Honestly, your entire quality of life, and quantity of life not spent wondering if arm pump from removing a tyre is possible and not to mention realising how sore breaking your nails really is, and all of that just for your lever to snap just as you think you've hit the jackpot, will leapfrog all of those non Bontrager bearers.
Furthermore, they're not just red so that you can spend more time staring in awe of them without getting bored, although this is a useful aspect. In fact, you'll find that most things on a forest floor, which is where you spend most of your time upon your mountain bicycle, or the majority of the majority of the time, on your ass, are brown or green, not red. This may seem nothing special at first. But after being out on an hour's lap around Tollymore one day mid-spin, I stopped to grab some food from my saddlebag. I came to a controlled stop, I took my hands from the bars, I turned around, everything was going well until this point, but upon turning around, I could see the mouth of the saddlebag wide, wide, wide open. Now I can assure you that it was 100% zipped up before I set off for my ride, maybe I should do my next review on a Topeak Wedge saddlebag.... but anyway, my heart had already just dropped to about ground level, as there was a lot of good stuff I'd collected over the years in that saddlebag, or not in the saddlebag now as the case seemed. I bent over for a closer look, hopelessly wishing that there'd be at least something left in the bag, but unsurprisingly it was empty. No angels, no Jesus, no fancy oils or bedclothes, the stone had been rolled back and the tomb was empty. But here, I'll cut this a bit shorter. Basically everything had fallen out of my saddlebag. I retraced my steps, and bit like your woman who left the breadcrumbs in that story you always hear as a child, nothing else did I find, but before long, I stumbled across a little red ribbon of hope in the ground. Upon closer inspection, dayyym right, it was my tyre lever. Not long after, I found the other one too. The rest of the stuff in the saddlebag is still lying in Tollymore somewhere. Cue all you scroungers catching the next tailwind to Tollymore and pitching your tent, but I can assure you, due to the crappy blacks and greys that most bike tools come in, the other kit has found its final resting place.I found them, unlike everything else, 'cause they're red, so they stood out from everything else on the forest floor. Genius x genius = genius^2 .
So forget about your festive feetwarmers and candy canes next Christmas. Simply donate £3, and a child with a bicycle will recieve two Bontrager tyre levers. No longer will they have to spend hours walking to the water well, as they'll be able to get their tyre off to get a new tube in and now they can skid on down to feed the goat til their little heart is quite content. And not just once, but all year. A Bontrager tyre lever is for life, not just for Christmas.
You can even buy a box of 20. Now I'm not sure why, as two will last you a very long time. Maybe you can frame the other 18 or throw them at heures or something.
Monty's product reviews, out.
Ps suggestions for where my heart rate monitor strap has ran away to are much appreciated. Where would you go if you were a HRM strap and suddenly sprouted legs?
