Skateboarding Reviews - Accessories

As technology moves forward, everything gets smaller - cars, computers, phones - everything. Some products benefit from smaller sizes, while some may seem too small. Designers battle the gray-area between compact and too small.

Compactness in a skate tool sounds good, but if it's too small it won't be useful. A skate tool, after all, is a tool. In your bag, a skate tool should instill confidence that when you need to tweak your setup, that tool will get the job done. At the same time, who wants a lot of extra weight to haul around?
It's a tricky line to walk depending on the product.

The folks at Screwpop Tool have created a nice sized skate tool called the Tricky Wrench. It has a good balance between compactness and utility. It's small size is achieved by designing it with 2 separate (but firmly attachable) parts. It can be assembled into a compact unit for storage and easily configured to offer enough torque to tighten a kingpin or replace a bearing.

Your standard sockets are on the main piece and a phillips-head screw driver and Allen wrench are on the smaller detachable part. They join as a compact unit or you can reverse the screwdriver to create a handle capable of delivering some good torque when needed. Many skate tools achieve this sort of leverage by being larger with a fixed-mounted arm. This works well functionally, but isn't nearly as compact as the Tricky Wrench.

As technology moves forward, everything gets smaller - cars, computers, phones - fucking everything. Some products benefit from smaller sizes, while some may seem too small. Designers battle the gray-area between compact and too small.

Compactness in a skate tool sounds good, but if it's too fucking small it won't be useful. A skate tool, after all, is a tool. In your bag, a skate tool should instill confidence that when you need to tweak your setup, that tool will get the job done. At the same time, who wants a lot of extra shit to haul around?
It's a tricky line to walk depending on the product.

The folks at Screwpop Tool have created a nice sized skate tool called the Tricky Wrench. It has a good balance between compactness and utility. It's small size is achieved by designing it with 2 separate (but firmly attachable) parts. It can be assembled into a compact unit for storage and easily configured to offer enough torque to tighten a kingpin or replace a bearing.

Your standard sockets are on the main piece and a phillips-head screw driver and Allen wrench are on the smaller detachable part. They join as a compact unit or you can reverse the screwdriver to create a handle capable of delivering some good torque when needed. Many skate tools achieve this sort of leverage by being larger with a fixed-mounted arm. This works well functionally, but isn't nearly as compact as the Tricky Wrench.

Pros:

• Compact in size
• Includes both Phillips and Allen
• All metal design
• Easily attaches to a keyring

Cons:

• Bottle opener nub prevented a good fit on axle bolts on which smaller wheels with less concave outer edges were mounted (these wheel-types are fairly rare)