Craig Geater has touched thousands of tools and products across his career. Twenty-plus years as a WorldTour mechanic — currently head mechanic at Team Jayco AlUla — building and rebuilding the bikes of riders whose livelihoods depend on the thing not failing at 70km/h. When a man like that tells you what he swears by and what he despises, you listen, because he's seen every fad in cycling come and go from the one place you can't fake it: the workstand.
So I got him on the podcast to cut through the noise. Not the marketing, not the latest miracle product — what does a pro actually use, and what are the rest of us getting wrong with our own bikes? The answers were refreshingly simple, occasionally humbling (he caught me doing something I shouldn't), and genuinely useful for anyone who turns their own spanners. Let me break it down.
You need fewer tools than you think — but better ones
I asked Craig what he couldn't live without, expecting some exotic bit of kit. His answer was a set of Allen keys and a torque wrench. That's it. With those, he said, you can build three-quarters of a modern bike.
Sit with that, because it cuts against everything the bike-shop wall and the maintenance YouTube rabbit hole tell you. You don't need a garage full of specialist gadgets. You need a good set of hex keys, a torque wrench, and a small number of job-specific tools you'll actually use. The pro who's built more bikes than you'll ever own reaches for the simplest tools in the box.
But here's the catch, and it's the part most amateurs get backwards: quality matters far more than quantity. Craig told a story I think every one of us recognises. He went through a phase of buying cheap tools — the bargain stuff off the discount sites — and his dad kept telling him they'd break. He insisted they wouldn't. Nearly all of them broke. Now he buys quality slowly, accumulating good tools one at a time because they're expensive, but they last, they work better, and they're kinder to delicate parts. A well-made tool is cheaper per use than a bargain one you bin twice. Buy fewer, buy better, and buy them gradually.
The torque wrench is not optional
Of those two essential tools, the one most amateurs skip is the torque wrench, and it's the one you can least afford to. This isn't pro-level fussiness. It's the single thing standing between you and two opposite catastrophes.
Over-tighten a bolt on a modern bike — a stem, a seatpost clamp, a bar — and on carbon you can crack the part, sometimes invisibly, sometimes catastrophically later. Under-tighten it and the component slips under load: the bars rotate on a descent, the saddle drops mid-ride, the cleat moves at the worst moment. The manufacturer prints a torque figure on the part for a reason, and a torque wrench is how you hit it exactly. On an expensive bike it's one of the cheapest insurance policies you can buy, and the fact that a WorldTour mechanic pairs it with his Allen keys as a non-negotiable should tell you it belongs in your kit too.
The diesel confession
Now the part where I got caught out, because I'll be honest with you the way I was honest with Craig. My drivetrain routine has been to strip the chain with diesel, then drop it in a slow cooker with wax once a month. And Craig, very politely, told me what every mechanic eventually learns: diesel cleans aggressively, but it gets right inside the chain pins and strips them of everything — there's nothing left in there afterwards. It works in the sense that it gets the chain spotless. It's just harsher than the job needs, and not what you'd want for the long-term life of the chain.
What do the pros do instead? Something almost boringly simple: a standard biodegradable degreaser, the off-the-shelf stuff any shop sells, and then either a wax chain or a lube chosen for the conditions they're racing in. No magic. No secret pro fluid. Just a sensible degreaser and the right lube, applied consistently.
And that word — consistently — is the actual secret. A clean, well-lubed drivetrain saves you watts through reduced friction and saves you money through reduced wear, and you keep it that way not with occasional deep cleans but with constant small attention: wipe the chain down after wet or dirty rides, re-apply lube before it runs dry, keep the muck off. The rider who wipes and re-lubes every week has a better drivetrain than the one who strips it back to bare metal once a season. If you want the surfaces sorted alongside it, tyre pressure is the other free performance lever most riders ignore.
Simplicity beats the fad
The thread running through everything Craig said is the one I want you to take away most, because it's true far beyond the workstand. The pros, with all their resources, gravitate to simple, proven methods. Standard degreaser. Basic tools. The fundamentals, done well, over and over.
The amateur world, by contrast, is a churn of fads — the wonder lube, the ceramic-this, the must-have gadget that promises free speed for forty quid. Craig has watched these come and go for two decades, and the survivors are almost always the simple things. That's not to say nothing improves; good wax chains are a genuine step forward. It's that the baseline — clean it properly, lube it right, tighten it to spec, keep on top of it — does more than any gimmick. When a man who's seen every product in the sport reaches for an off-the-shelf degreaser and a set of Allen keys, that's the signal. Stop chasing the fad. Master the basics.
Know what to fix, and what to leave
One last thing, because Craig's world has a constraint yours doesn't, and there's a lesson in it. At WorldTour level the UCI rules mean you largely can't alter parts from how they came in the box — gone are the days of chopping and adapting components to make them work. And yet the resourcefulness is still there: he described fixing a snapped computer mount with a small aluminium insert and a bit of epoxy, good as new in a couple of hours.
For you, the takeaway is about judgement. Learn the basics properly — cleaning, lubing, torque, tyres, simple adjustments — because they're easy, satisfying and they keep your bike running well between shop visits. But know where your limit is. A wheel rebuild, a bleed, a press-fit bottom bracket, a creak you can't trace — those are often worth handing to someone who does it every day, the way Craig does. The skill isn't knowing how to do everything. It's knowing what you can do well yourself and what's worth paying for.
The thirty-second check that prevents most problems
If you take one habit from a pro mechanic's world, make it this: the quick pre-ride check. Team mechanics go over the bikes obsessively before they're handed to riders, because a thirty-second look beats a roadside failure every time, and you can do a stripped-down version yourself before every ride.
Run through it in order. Squeeze both tyres — pressure right, no cuts or embedded grit. Spin each wheel and check it's running true and the quick-release or thru-axle is properly done up. Pull both brake levers — firm bite, pads not worn to the backing. Check the bars and stem don't twist in your hands and the saddle's solid. Give the chain a quick look and a wipe if it's filthy. That's it. Thirty seconds, and it catches the overwhelming majority of the things that ruin a ride or cause a crash.
The pros do this every single day without fail, on bikes that are already immaculate. You ride a bike that lives in a shed and gets less attention — so the quick check matters more for you, not less. Build it into clipping in.
The honest version
You don't need a pro's toolbox or a pro's secret products. You need a good set of Allen keys, a torque wrench, a sensible degreaser, the right lube, and the discipline to keep on top of it. That's most of what twenty years on WorldTour bikes comes down to, stripped of the marketing. Buy fewer, better tools. Tighten to spec. Keep the drivetrain clean the easy way, not the harsh way. And ignore the fad of the month in favour of the fundamentals a pro would actually use.
Your bike will run better, last longer, and cost you less. And you'll have learned it from a man who's forgotten more about bikes than most of us will ever know.
Hear the full conversation with Craig Geater on the Roadman podcast. For the other free performance levers, read getting your tyre pressure right, and talk shop with us on Skool.