Park Tool TL-5 Heavy-Duty Steel Tyre Levers

The Park Tool TL-5 Heavy-Duty Steel Tyre Levers are the mack daddy of wheel removal tools, providing huge amounts of leverage to shift even the tightest tyres.

These are the levers to reach for when you encounter a tyre that just doesn't want to come off a rim. The tightest combination in my stable is a pair of SRAM S60 aero wheels and Giant P-SL2 tyres – both are over a decade old, and therefore from the era when tyre/rim compatibility was the Wild West. The rims don't have a very deep well, and the tyres are more than a little undersized.

Just getting them on the rim in the first place requires levers and very careful deployment of brute force. In fact, it's a set-up I've never actually ridden, because I wasn't at all confident of being able to refit the tyre out on the road if I got a puncture.

Considerable swearing

So I dug the tyres out of the box where they're been lurking for a decade or so and, with a bit of sweating, considerable swearing and very cautious use of my favourite plastic Lezyne Power Lever XLs, I got a tyre on the rim.

The TL-5 levers certainly provided the necessary oomph to make the job of getting it back off relatively easy, though getting the spacing between them exactly right takes a bit of trial and error. Too close together and they don't lift the tyre far enough off the rim that you can start to slide one along to fully remove it; too far apart and they don't move the section of bead between them enough.

Compared to the Lezyne Power Lever XLs, the TL-5s require a bit of care to grab just the one bead and not both. It's 15mm from the tip of the TL-5 to the curve where the rim sits. With an old-school narrow rim, that makes it easy to grab both beads and make life very hard for yourself.

Lends itself to hooking

That's also why I didn't use the TL-5s to fit the tyres. The Lezyne levers have a shorter tip, with a tighter curve that better lends itself to hooking tyres on to a rim.

In fact, that's my single major criticism of the TL-5s. A tighter, shorter hook at the tip would make them more versatile, and by moving the fulcrum when you lift a bead would increase the leverage you can exert.

Nevertheless, even with tyres that aren't unreasonably tight, the TL-5s have become my go-to workshop tyre levers over the past few months because they're so easy to use. As well as their length, their big advantage is their rigidity. I'm not especially strong, but I can flex a Power Lever XL by a couple of millimetres with my bare hands; I can't achieve any visible flex in the TL-5s at all.

Notoriously tight

It shouldn't need saying, but these aren't really tyre levers for your seat pack. If the tyre and rim combination on your daily ride needs these, then you should consider changing tyres. Of course that may not be an option if you're running a notoriously tight combination like Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres on a Brompton, in which case fill your boots; when you need them, their heft isn't going to matter to you at all.

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Mooch around retail sites a bit and you do find criticisms of the TL-5s, but most of them seem to come from people missing the point. No, most people don't need this beefy a tyre lever, but if you do they're absolutely vital. Yes, they can damage rims, tyres and tubes – what do you expect, they're 8in-long steel levers. With great leverage comes great responsibility, and a bit of finesse is required to use them.

Much as I like using the TL-5 levers, I probably don't need them. Tyre and rim standards have become more consistent in the last few years. None of the tyres I've bought recently need this much leverage to get off a rim, and the deeper well of a tubeless-ready wheel provides more slack to make tyre removal easier.

Even excellent plastic levers like the Lezyne Power Lever XLs are hugely cheaper at £4.99.

But if for whatever reason you have to handle very tight tyre/rim combinations, get a set of Park Tool TL-5 levers into your armoury.

Verdict

Excellent, super-beefy levers to shift the most stubborn tyres