Chain breaker?

Q:

What was the make of the second chain breaker Jim Lindsay used in May’s issue of CMM? And where did he get it? M. Grieves

A:

It was me! I got both tools on ebay. While on ebay I searched for ‘motorcycle chain breaker’ to get a set of results. The situation with these cheap tools is that things have changed and the manufacturer’s name is never disclosed. It will almost certainly be a factory in China which sells its products in wholesale quantities. Instead, the tools offered for retail sale are either unbranded or they have a brand name which has nothing to do with the manufacturer. Sometimes you will find them under wellknown brand names and at other times a name which probably means nothing to you. But really, the name is more-or-less irrelevant as the same tools are sold under a variety of names. So instead, what I do is to get my search results and order them by total price (i.e. price including p&p) to see what comes up. Then you will tend to see the same tool (recognisable from the photo) at a range of low prices, then possibly another tool at a higher range of prices, and some rather different ones mixed in at similar prices and finally some very expensive ones. In my case, the tool in the red box was the cheapest starting at a tenner with the better one in the blue box starting at £15. For the purposes of the article, I bought the cheap one to see if it was any good, though if I had been doing it for myself I would have paid an extra fiver for something that was clearly (from the photos) stronger and more substantial. And unsurprisingly the very cheap one was not really good enough for the job. My aim when researching these cheap tools is to find products which are perfectly okay for occasional amateur use, accepting that they are not suitable for professionals. And this is a magazine intended for amateurs rather than professionals. On that note, please bear in mind that anything which is described simply as ‘professional’ almost certainly is not suitable for someone who makes their living using it!