Famo Adventure Motorcycling Guide

Hey there! Here’s a quick guide to making yourself a tool roll and filling it with tools, using my experience with the markets and upholsterers of Bangkok. We were laid up in Bangkok for a couple of weeks waiting for the shipping company to process and clear all of our documentation before we could fly to Nepal. The dude I was riding with had a really wicked toolkit he’d made, which inspired me to make one of my own.

Buy some serious canvas from:

Pratunam Market – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratunam_Market

This is the biggest textile and clothing market in Bangkok. Check out the wikipedia entry or your guidebook for directions, or catch a taxi (car, not a tuk tuk) and ask them to take you there. I shopped around for maybe an hour before I came across the canvas sellers, there weren’t many options but I eventually found a guy who sold be a length of very heavy duty canvas. It may pay to get your hotel/hostel clerk or someone to write down the word for canvas in Thai before you go looking.

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Once you have your canvas, you need a plan… I copied my measurements from a tool roll made by Billy Gibson, a legendary Aussie dude who was travelling around the world with his lovely partner Trish at the same time I was.

I ended up making it 68cm x 48cm with 14 compartments for tools… This size does the job really well.

For that you will need 3 pieces of canvas, one 70cm x 50cm, and two 54cm x 16cm

The large piece is the body of the roll and the two smaller pieces make up the compartment. Imagine that the large piece will have a 1cm border around the outside sewn down, and the two shorter pieces will have a 1cm border on the longer edges. The smaller pieces are longer than the width of the large piece, allowing the compartments to open up and accept ye tools…

Here are some plans:

The pic above is a rough plan for the main body of the roll

The pic above shows the two compartment sections that will be sewn onto the main body of the roll.

Putting it together: Sew the compartments onto the main body of the roll, ensure the compartments go under the border on the main body for neatness. You should get seven compartments from each compartment piece, which is made a bit longer to allow openings and space for the tools. Explain to the person sewing it that the space should be distributed evenly across the compartments. Which brings us on to the next bit..

Getting it sewn up…

I looked around for ages for a tailor with an industrial strength sewing machine.. The canvas is too heavy for your average machine, and it would be wise to steer clear of the shops around the tailoring areas of Bangkok. I’d suggest finding an area that has a strong automotive presence, where you might find an upholsterer.

The map below is an approximate pinpoint of the place I took mine to be constructed. The place is very close to Khaosan Road, so if you’re staying in that area it should be easy enough to find on foot. We were staying at a hotel on Thanon Sam Sen called Suksawadee Hotel, between Soi Sam Sen 4 and Soi Sam Sen 8… The place had a courtyard where they let us wash our bikes and do some maintenance before shipping to Nepal. Highly recommended. So, I just scooted around the backstreets in the area and eventually came across a shop that would do it.

Just make sure you chat to them about what you want, and ensure the bottom of the compartments are sewn down and the openings aren’t. When I came to pick mine up, all of the compartments were open at the bottom, so I just asked him to run it through the machine and it was all sewn up in minutes.. Cost of construction? Coupla bucks.

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Then go shopping for TOOOLS!!!

Here…

Or here….

Lots to choose from

To get to these tools, head to Klong Tom markets, here:

and that’s it, kitting yourself out with a tool roll in Bangkok. Here’s a final few pics of how it turned out. Please excuse how dirty it is, I rode from Bangkok to Barcelona with it in my pannier where it got really really battered… Still works though!

Open

Rolled

Cheers and thanks for reading!
Damien