What should I include in a mobile repair bag?

[eniacmike]

I'm putting together a mobile repair bag to keep in my gig bag.. it will be a small tool bag about 10"x4x4

so far this is what I have:
triplett pocket autoraning dmm
9v batteries
9v battery snap (most of my repairs have always involved broken 9v snaps)
bag with scraps of wire
2 4" pieces of heat shrink
dispenser tube of solder
desoldering braid
wire cutters
grab bag of electrolytic caps 10-220uf for blown power caps
a few leds
4 1n914 diodes
2 1n4001 diodes
1 switchcraft mono
1 switchcraft stereo
3pdt stomp switch
1 spdt toggle
25w soldering iron
little iron stand
jeweler screwdriver
phillips screwdriver
adjustable wrench

I have no idea what kind of resistors I should bring, or nF/pF caps. I can always pick stuff like that up at radio shack. no idea if I should bring pots too? I figure if I bring a 1M and 100k I can always lower the value with resistors. I did think I should bring some 24mm 500k's for guitars.

I am also debating bringing a wire stripper.. which I probably should do, I just don't have an extra one and I was trying to put this together with scraps.

I should probably bring some 1/4" jacks too to repair cables.

[jkokura]

IMHO it doesn't seem worth it to bring lots of parts to a gig. What kind of gig would you have where a resistor or cap will fail, and you'll be able to find the problem between sets and fix it. The only times resistors or caps fail is if they're used in extreme temps where you could play your guitar.

So to sum up, fixing battery snaps and such is worth doing, but if you blow a cap or ic or if a switch fails, you won't be able to diagnose the problem and fix it properly at a gig or on the road. MUCH more efficient to bring spare pedals and cables in case you get a failure. Buy a PTNano and use the gig bag to carry 4-6 pedals easily.

Now if you're building a mobile rig to fix other peoples pedals, I'd use a a fishing tackle box so you can separate parts into the little bins. I have a setup like that.

For gigs, it's not worth to have a repair kit, more like an emergency kit. And an emergency kit is a well documented phenomenon in guitar gigging.

Jacob

[eniacmike]

IMHO it doesn't seem worth it to bring lots of parts to a gig. What kind of gig would you have where a resistor or cap will fail, and you'll be able to find the problem between sets and fix it. The only times resistors or caps fail is if they're used in extreme temps where you could play your guitar.

So to sum up, fixing battery snaps and such is worth doing, but if you blow a cap or ic or if a switch fails, you won't be able to diagnose the problem and fix it properly at a gig or on the road. MUCH more efficient to bring spare pedals and cables in case you get a failure. Buy a PTNano and use the gig bag to carry 4-6 pedals easily.

Now if you're building a mobile rig to fix other peoples pedals, I'd use a a fishing tackle box so you can separate parts into the little bins. I have a setup like that.

For gigs, it's not worth to have a repair kit, more like an emergency kit. And an emergency kit is a well documented phenomenon in guitar gigging.

Jacob

I should mention that I'm leaving for tour for a month in two weeks. I would just hate to have something I could fix on the road but not be able to because I didn't have the tools or parts. a few tours back the other guitar players cab fell over and his head dropped on the sidewalk. We ended up having to go buy another amp to finish the tour out and when I got home it was pretty simple stuff like broken wires and a few pots that pushed through the back wafer.

funnily enough not having time to fix stuff on the road is quiet the opposite. There is ALOT of downtime on tour and sitting around in empty clubs for hours with nothing to do.

In the past most of the problems that come up are battery/power related or loose wire related type stuff.
common problems are like xlr jacks getting pulled out of mics and stuff like that.

Other times it might be something like a blown power tube or popping fuses.