Originally Posted by
Russ Roth
Of the 4 shops I worked in 3 were CK dealers but only one had the tools and never needed them. I bought the tools after moving for grad school and in the next 7 or 8 years only used them once on a customer's bike and only cause he wanted them completely stripped. Otherwise a pen knife or small pick is used to pull out the seals, spray them with some degreaser, dry, regrease and reinstall the seals. 20 years later I just rebuilt a hub with its 4th rim and will rebuild the front next month and its never needed the special tools. It'll be interesting with disc to see if rims can outlast the hubs without having rim brakes wearing through sidewalls
I bought all the tools the second I opened a direct account with them. I have sold quite a few CK hubs over the years. If you dig hard enough you will find tons of threads on here from WAY back where I did nothing but talk smack about how pretentious CK is/was regarding headsets, etc. ehhh... We grow and learn. I honestly think CK would have been sunk if they had kept on Chris's singular retro grouch mission to destroy the company. I am glad they are now making better and relevant products.
That said I have had to call on the tools more than once. The amount of money that you can charge for a CK service makes them worth buying them if you are a shop and a dealer. If you are a rider who does your own maintenance then .... I can see buying them just because you want them but it's a bit like buying a paint booth for your house so you can re-paint 1 door panel for a car you won't have for much longer.
You can indeed get away with not having all of the tools if you want to do some basic maintenance but that's also like saying you can change spark plugs with an adjustable wrench and a hammer.
My video on how they work was really just meant to create a video that might help more people know about us but has reached 69k views and at one point Chris King was monitoring the comments section.