I ride a scooter around my city for fun and often find people having car struggles. I'm skilled with automotive work, so I figured I'd fill a "go bag" with stuff to bring anytime I'm riding for pleasure and have extra space. My goal is to cover as many common issues as possible while fitting everything inside a 30 liter top box.
My current list is:
- Jumper cables or small jump back (interesting edit at bottom)
- Common wrenches (10, 12, 14, 17mm)
- Common screw drivers
- Maybe common fluids (5w-30 oil, distilled water or coolant, etc.)
- Tire plug kit
- zipties
- duct tape
Suggestions from this thread I will add:
- OBD-II Diag tool
- Telescoping magnet
- cig lighter charged air compressor
- Pliers
- wire stripper/crimper combo tool
- crimp terminals/splices
- multimeter
- fuses
- SNACKS!!!!!!!!
- gloves
- air-freshener/momento type of thing :)
Are there other super useful things I might have left out, or niche stuff small enough that it'd cost nothing to bring on the off chance it helps? Common spec bolts/o-ring sizes, or something like that?
I want to make sure when I stop to help someone I can actually help, and not narrowly miss an opportunity because of an oversight.
Thanks for the help with this :)
Edits:
- formatting list
- adding "?" to title
- added zipties and duct tape to list, added o-ring example
- added suggestions from thread list
Interesting edit at bottom: TL;DR is supercapacitors. Main story: My concern was the longevity and cost associated with jump packs; lithium batteries don't like to be stored at high charge and also don't do great in varying temperatures. Enter the TIL: supercapacitor jump packs, which seems absolutely perfect for my use-case. They're designed to be stored with no charge, and are super happy with offloading all their charge at once. The intended use is to be charged off of the dead battery just enough to breath life into the starter long enough to get it running, but they can usually be charged quickly by other methods like an outlet (plentiful in the city) or a working vehicle.
I asked because in Southern California the occurrence of breakdown seems quite low in comparison. Maybe because the weather isn’t as hard on cars?
I have a few guesses as to why, primarily cost of living, road design, and inspection enforcement; I've never been to CA, but if they enforce vehicle inspection like the memes suggest, that probably plays a large role in general maintenance. These aren't based on statistics or anything, just a fat ass guess from having lived in a variety of issues, one of which was a place like Houston or, as I like to call them, a city of highways.
For cost of living, there's poor people everywhere yeah, but a clunker generally costs the same regardless of where you live, plus or minus a few hundred bucks: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4839-W-Engle-Rd-APT-1A-Alsip-IL-60803/58372023_zpid/. These people still "need" cars as much as anyone else. When you're scraping buy in CA, you probably still have more overall between paychecks than you would spending a similar percentage of your income on recurring expenses elsewhere. I imagine in CA the used car market is generally better because of weather like you mentioned, but also because for "middle" class people buying new cars, the cost of the car and the related maintenance make up a smaller percentage of their overall earnings compared to other places. I believe this would lead to a larger availability of used cars and an improvement in their all around mechanical soundness. That's nothing a few years of irresponsible ownership couldn't change, though, so my weightier guess is:
Road design. In the cities I named, from any part of city proper I can get to any other part without ever having gone above 15mph and causing issues. My understanding of SoCal is that most of it is designed primarily for car travel, so most residential/retail zones are connected by large multi-lane roads with speeds limits >=35. The roadworthiness required to do 35 is several orders of magnitude higher than that required to do than 15, so a car can be much closer to death in these cities and still find themselves out on grocery runs. Basically, duct tape and WD-40 both work better at lower speeds where less precision is required :)
Another one I just though of is: fewer parking lots. I probably just see a higher percentage of the breakdowns that occur by nature of no alternative to street parking, whereas it's hard to tell the difference between a parked and broken down car if they're out of the way.
I'm sure these these all play a role, and I'm sure there's a litany of other reasons, too. I can totally see how it'd be weird to imagine such a high rate of breakdowns if you've never lived in an area like this. You helped me realize how desensitized I've become to it; it's definitely not normal for most of the country to see a broken down car almost every day.
I'm happy to chat more about it if you'd like; my communication skills are rock bottom right now after a long day so I'm sure this is much wordier than it needs to be, sorry if that's the case D: