The Park Tool THH-1 Sliding T-Handle Hex Wrench Set might be pricey but these are excellent, professional quality tools with features to make bike maintenance a little quicker and easier, and to help remove rounded bolt heads.

What you get here are eight hex keys in the most common sizes for bike maintenance – 2mm, 2.5mm, 3mm, 4mm, 5mm, 6mm, 8mm, and 10mm – and a wall-mounted holder to keep them on.

Each hex key is a combination of chrome vanadium and S-2 tool steels and has machined, chamfered tips. The dimensions of the keys vary from 125mm to 305mm in length, with the T-handles measuring from 65mm to 145mm.

The T-handle can slide through the head at the top of the main body of each key, so you can adjust it to give you greater leverage or greater access, depending on what you’re working on.

I used the tip at the end of the main body of the key most of the time, but the T-handle tip comes in handy when there’s less space – if you have a wedge-type seatpost clamp you access from the top of your bike’s top tube, for example, and your saddle height is quite low. The tips are high quality and show no signs of wear after a couple of months’ use. I certainly don’t expect durability to be an issue here.

One useful feature is the blue anodised aluminium Speed Spinner – a loose-fitting sleeve that fits around the body of each key without sliding up and down it. You can hold the Speed Spinner firmly between your thumb and forefinger and the body of the key can rotate inside.

This comes in handy for getting long bolts in and out quickly. You know when you loosen the bolt that holds your headset top cap in place, for example? The first half turn takes a little effort but sometimes you have loads of thread beyond that where there’s very little resistance. The Speed Spinner allows you to hold the tool in place and just give the T-handle a quick whirl. Job done.

The other useful feature is the integrated Strip Gripper, which is the twisted black tip on one end of the T-handle that’s designed to remove oversized and rounded hex heads. You’ve never rounded the head of a hex bolt? Don’t tell fibs, we all have, and it can be a right royal PITA.

The twisted design is an established feature of many extractor sets, and it’s often enough to loosen a bolt that a standard hex key can’t shift. Some heads are rounded beyond its capabilities, but it’s always worth giving it a go before resorting to anything more drastic.

The hex keys come with their own mount so, as long as you put them away, you’ll be able to find the right one quickly when you need it, rather than wasting time rummaging around at the bottom of a toolbox. The mount has a rubbery finish and you can fix it to a wall, bench, or whatever else is convenient.

The size of each key is given on the tool body, and a little plate in the centre of the mount tells you the sizes too. I’d have thought it would be more useful to have the sizes printed next to the relevant holes in the mount, but you’re probably able to pick out at least the most common ones by eye anyway.

You might baulk at paying £110 for a set of eight hex keys, and there’s no doubt that it’s a significant investment, but I’m a big believer in buying the best tools you can and making them last. You could go online and buy an S-2 tool steel hex key set for far less, but bear in mind that features like the sliding handle and the Speed Spinner sleeve are bound to raise the price, and you’re getting an integrated rounded bolt extractor set too.

For comparison, the Silca HX-Three Travel Essentials Kit we reviewed is £35. They’re high quality but don’t have the features of these Park Tool keys.

The Silca HX-One Home and Essential Travel Essential Kit is £125. The eight hex keys come in a beechwood box with an adaptor for using six Torx heads and four screw heads.

As well as being available as a complete set, you can buy the Park Tool hex keys individually at prices from £13.99 to £17.99 each, depending on the size. This means you can just get the sizes you need or, if you do go for the complete set, replace any that you lose or damage.

All in all, the Park Tool THH-1 Sliding T-Handle Hex Wrench Set is a top-quality offering. If you’re just an occasional bike tinkerer, perhaps tools like this are overkill, but if you’re into your bike maintenance and you like to have excellent equipment that’s built to last, that’s exactly what you get here.

If you’re thinking of buying this product using a cashback deal why not use the road.cc Top Cashback page and get some top cashback while helping to support your favourite independent cycling website

Tell us what the product is for and who it’s aimed at. What do the manufacturers say about it? How does that compare to your own feelings about it?

Park Tool says, “Designed and built specifically for a wide variety of bicycle hex work, the THH-1 is a set of eight common sizes of professional quality T-handle hex wrenches made for speed, efficiency, leverage and a perfect fit. Soon to become your favourite hex set, the THH-1 includes a handy tool holder that mounts to any vertical surface, including pegboard and solid surfaces (fasteners not included).”

– Unique anodised aluminium Speed Spinner makes running long bolts in and out quick and effortless

– Integrated ‘Strip-Gripper’ twisted hex that makes removal of most bolts with stripped or oversized hexes fast and easy

– Tool holder is included with the set and mounts to any wall, bench or tool box, perfectly positioning each wrench for easy access and storage

You might call the Speed Spinner a ‘comfort’ feature in that it saves you a bit of wrist wrenching. It’s a loose sleeve on the body of each key. You can hold on to it and spin a bolt tighter until you reach the bite point, or spin bolts out once you’ve loosened them enough.

This is a lot to spend on a hex key set, of course, but the quality is first class. Even if you do some real damage, you can replace the individual key (from £13.99, depending on the size).

Superbly well. The length of the key body and adjustability of the T-handle means you can access even the most awkward bolts.

The overall quality, the Speed Spinner loose sleeve and the Strip-Gripper for removing bolts with stripped heads.

How does the price compare to that of similar products in the market, including ones recently tested on road.cc?

For comparison, the Silca HX-Three Travel Essentials Kit we reviewed is £35. They’re high quality but don’t have the features of these Park Tool keys.

The Silca HX-One Home and Essential Travel Essential Kit is £125. The eight hex keys come in a beechwood box with an adaptor for using six Torx heads and four screw heads.

This is the best hex key set I’ve ever used so, although it costs over £100, I still think it warrants an overall rating of ‘exceptional’, and that’s a 9.

I regularly do the following types of riding: commuting, club rides, sportives, general fitness riding,

Mat has been in cycling media since 1996, on titles including BikeRadar, Total Bike, Total Mountain Bike, What Mountain Bike and Mountain Biking UK, and he has been editor of 220 Triathlon and Cycling Plus. Mat has been road.cc technical editor for over a decade, testing bikes, fettling the latest kit, and trying out the most up-to-the-minute clothing. We send him off around the world to get all the news from launches and shows too. He has won his category in Ironman UK 70.3 and finished on the podium in both marathons he has run. Mat is a Cambridge graduate who did a post-grad in magazine journalism, and he is a winner of the Cycling Media Award for Specialist Online Writer. Now pushing 50, he’s riding road and gravel bikes most days for fun and fitness rather than training for competitions.

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An excellent buy – a solid, inexpensive torque wrench that offers quick and easy bolt tightening

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