Chain Breaker.

I ordered a CT-4.2 Master Chain Tool from Park Tools earlier in the week. It arrived on Thursday and I got all giddy and acted like it was Christmas morning. The construction of this chain tool is super robust, the body is finely constructed using investment cast techniques and the replaceable pin system relies on an additional thread that is totally separate from the pin making it less likely to incur damage. The Pin is allowed to spin freely and the handles are extra beefy enabling added leverage to annihilate even the most stubbornest of chain rivets.

I've always been a massive fan of the CT-3, it's my personal chain tool and I've owned one for many years but it has its limitations. The CT-3 has extremely tight jaws and many modern BMX chains wont fit. If you have a half link chain you can forget about it. The CT-4.2 has an alternate system to the jaw system used by virtually every other chain tool on the market. When extracting a rivet with the CT-4.2 the chain sits in a machined cradle holding the plates in a much firmer way and resulting in a much more positive split. Park have machined a slot in the body of the CT-4.2 so you can easily view the protruding chain rivet when extracting it. Because both the plates are cradled there should be less chance of them becoming misaligned when you marry the chain back together. In the instructions Park inform you that the CT-4.2 will work on most 10 and 11 speed chains but not Whipperman, I don't think I've ever seen a Whipperman chain but I do know that Sean Burns used to ride for them.

It was typical pre-Bank Holiday hysteria at the shop on Thursday and inevitably I didn't get much time to mess with the CT-4.2. I split a couple of stock 8 speed KMC chains with it and it went through them like a frenzied Jedi through a platoon of battle droids. Looking at the cradle I'm not sure wether it's going to handle Shadow Conspiracy chains and the like but time will tell. 

Park make some awesome tools but they come at a price, this chain tool retails around the 60 quid mark and that's a little expensive for the open market. At the shop we destroy between 3 and 5 inexpensive chain tools a month so it'll be interesting to see how this one fares in our hectic workshop environment.

Mysteriously Park claim to have patented the colour 'blue' in a statement on the side of the CT-4.2's box, I found this to be a brave statement and it left me a little confused for the remainder of the day. Do park mean that they own that shade of blue or simply everything that is blue. It was getting a little foggy inside my head. The constant Bank holiday pandemonium continued all day but so long as ElBoosterino kept the black coffee flowing I knew I could power through.

The man,  Elboosterino who's other nicknames include, Alfred E Neuman, Tito Jackson and Lemon Squeezy.