Digging through a bunch of old MTB stuff the other day I stumbled across something ‘Cool’… literally, except even back when it was new in the early 1990’s it was well… pretty daggy!

You’ve got to cut the Cool Tool some slack though as it was one of the first bicycle specific multi-tools. Once the secret was out it didn’t take other companies – like Ritchey for example – very long at all to sex up the idea of a bicycle multi-tool, leaving early Cool Tool adopters feeling kinda ordinary about their go-go-gadget portable workshop.

Amidst a bunch of old bike paperwork crammed into an old Flite Evolution saddle box I found the receipt for my Cool Tool along with the A4 flyer that came with it. The things you treasure hey?! Check out the bleeding edge technology crammed into that $27 (and that was wholesale!) thingamajig: Cone Wrench, Headset spanner, Bottom bracket spanner…and the list goes on. So sleek, so sexy, sooooo hi-tech!

So OK, that is sort of cool in a nerdy way but if I still had the actual Cool Tool… that would be a BFD!

After hours of searching through old toolboxes… TADAA 🙂

ps. Admittedly later on I did buy a MUCH cooler (original) Ritchey CPR-9 when it was released