When I trundled up to the Hans Flat Ranger Station in Canyonlands National Park’s Maze district in my 1992 Land Rover Defender, I fully admit to feeling nervous. I was, as Edward Abbey puts it in Desert Solitaire, going “under the rim” for the first time—and alone. In a 30-year-old Land Rover.
The Maze district is especially out-of-the-way, even by Utah standards. Barely accessible by vehicle except from the south or the west by a 60-mile drive over heavily washboarded ranch roads, you must be committed just to reach it. And prepared. This is extremely remote country, and there are no facilities except the small gift shop and pit toilet at the ranger station. Forgot your hat? It’s two hours back to the hamlet of Hanksville, the last outpost of anything close to resembling civilization. Never mind cell service.
My Land Rover, somewhere deep in the Maze District, Canyonlands National Park
So undeveloped is the Maze that the National Park Service asks you to sign what is essentially a waiver and listen to a long, formal speech by the ranger detailing the many dangers you will encounter before descending from the main road into the heart of the Maze. My Defender is arthritic, osteoporotic, and just genuinely tired, even if still mostly reliable. When the ranger at Hans Flat looked her over with a skeptical eye, I said, “You’ve got to be an optimist to drive an old Land Rover, or you wouldn’t go anywhere.”
I may be an optimist, but I’m no fool. Choosing an adventure vehicle like mine means making even more provisions than normal for breakdowns, spare parts, and, perhaps most importantly, tools. A significant portion of my limited storage space in the Defender is given over to my tools, both general and specialized.
However, the organization of my toolset has been a hodgepodge at best and haphazard at worst. The comprehensive socket and wrench set that came with the Land Rover when we bought it is a high-quality unit from Germany, but it’s housed in a huge, rigid plastic case and includes many tools with zero application on an ancient Land Rover (like reverse Torx sockets). The rest of my odds and ends are crammed into a jumble in a cheap tool bag, where the one I need is inevitably the last one I pull from its maw.
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- Old tool kit
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- New tool kit
As you might imagine, when the Decked x BoxoUSA tool bag showed up at my door last fall, I was looking forward to righting my ship of tools with this well-executed kit built specifically for off-roaders.
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Decked’s drawer-based storage systems are highly modular, which makes them perfect for developing a wide range of accessories and add-ons. They’ve partnered with several brands to design gear explicitly made to fit in their drawers and toolboxes, including companies like Uncharted and Pathfinder. Such is the case also with the BoxoUSA tool bag and tool roll. The overall dimensions of the toolset are 19.68 inches long x 13.58 inches wide x 6.77 inches high, perfect for slipping into a Decked drawer, and the entire package weighs in at a manageable 31.5 pounds.
BoxoUSA is known for its creative tool storage solutions, and it shows in this Decked-branded bag and roll. The heart of the unit is the bag itself. Constructed of heavy-duty Cordura and stitched with MOLLE webbing on the outside and hook-and-loop material on the inside, you can rearrange the contents in various ways to suit your storage demands. Within are six components: the main tool roll and five other Cordura pouches containing the bulkier and oddly shaped tools. These pouches are removable and affix to the bag’s interior with the aforementioned hook-and-loop closures. They also feature transparent panels that allow you to identify items at a glance.
BoxoUSA has tailored this bag with extra room for expanding your toolset, and one of the smaller pouches even ships empty, save for a few pairs of nitrile gloves. There is plenty of space left over for my Land Rover-specific tools, including a 52-millimeter wheel hub socket, 32/36-millimeter fan clutch combination wrench, 1/2-inch-drive torque wrench, propshaft tool, a 1/4-inch ratchet and a handful of sockets, multimeter, extra wrenches, and other odds and ends. Everything zips together with beefy pulls that are easily grasped with gloved hands.
The tools themselves are the second half of the equation (see the full spec-sheet below). With 80 in total, this kit will cover most remote repairs without worry. Including sockets and combination wrenches ranging from 8- millimeter to 35-millimeter sizes and plenty of standard tools like hex and Torx wrenches, hammers, drivers, and pliers, the usual gang is all here, but Boxo includes some thoughtful additions for the vehicle-based adventurer as well. The 12- and 42-volt compatible circuit tester is a welcome addition, along with the other electrical system-specific gadgets like the wire cutter/crimper pliers. You’ll also find groove joint water pump pliers, three sizes of insulated wheel impact sockets, a tire gauge and tire valve core tool, and an all-metal tire puncture repair kit, complete with plugs and epoxy.
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If the quantity of tools is outstanding, then so too is the quality. I generally judge any particular tool brand by the impressiveness of its 3/8-inch ratchet. The workhorse of any toolset, the 3/8-inch ratchet always sees the most use and endures the most abuse. BoxoUSA’s ratchet is a polished metal-handled version with 90 teeth and a solid, well-balanced feel. The ratcheting action is smooth, and the teeth click easily through the arc of the swing, even in tight spaces. I appreciate the slim, unadorned handle, making slipping a length of pipe over it for added leverage a simple operation. After six months of use, the head still grabs sockets tightly with no play, and the direction switch still engages positively with one finger and stays put.
Speaking of use, I’ve put this Decked x BoxoUSA tool kit through its paces in many different contexts over the last half-year, from the comfort of my home garage to near Arctic conditions in a parking lot of a motel in Dillon, Montana, in February. The bag and roll have held up well to being dumped on the ground and dragged across concrete and through gravel patches. I love the clear labeling of the slots for each tool in the roll (these help the non-mechanically inclined to be better seconds during trail-side repairs, too), and the detachable pouches allow you to keep your work area organized and clear of clutter. You’re more likely to have the right tool fall to hand easily with a system like this rather than the melange of random stuff in a bottomless bag like I’ve endured over the years with my old setup. It has facilitated minor repairs like swapping out air and fuel filters and more involved maintenance like changing out an alternator on my Volvo wagon (in that icy parking lot) and an end-to-end rebuild of my Defender’s rear axle.
Quibbles? Hardly any—the set only comes in metric sizes, so drivers of older Jeeps and other explorers piloting vehicles laden with SAE fasteners may not find it terribly helpful. I know BoxoUSA also makes a high-quality set of ratcheting box-end wrenches that would be a fantastic upgrade to the traditional ones in the kit. However, the slim heads on the included wrenches are a boon for tight spots where a ratcheting wrench won’t squeeze. I’ve simply thrown some additional ratcheting wrenches in common sizes for my Land Rover into the roll with the others to round out the set (10, 13, and 17-millimeter sizes). A small 1/4-inch socket set would be helpful, but complaints about exclusion aren’t, so I’ve added my own.
Facing remote vehicle repairs can be a frustrating and stressful experience. If you’re struggling to find the right tool or pawing through piles of irrelevant ones, it only adds to the exasperation and drags your adventures further behind schedule. Investing in a comprehensive toolset like the Decked x BoxoUSA version tested here—at $595, it’s not exactly inexpensive—helps reduce those frustrations and will likely last a lifetime. The next time you roll up to a ranger station in the Utah backcountry on the cusp of an epic adventure—even in an old Land Rover—you’ll know you can do so with confidence.
$595 | decked.com
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Decked x BoxoUSA Tool Bag with Tool Roll
Wrenches, Ratchets, and Sockets:
- (10) 12-point combination wrenches, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 millimeter sizes
- Adjustable wrench
- (12) 3/8-inch 12-point, standard sockets, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 millimeter sizes
- (2) 1/2-inch drive 6-point standard impact sockets, 16 and 18 millimeter
- (3) 1/2-inch drive 6-point wheel impact sockets, 17, 19, 21 millimeter
- (2) 1/2-inch drive 6-point standard impact sockets, 33 and 35 millimeter
- 3/8-inch ratchet
- 1/2-inch ratchet
- 9-piece metric hex wrench set
- 9-piece Torx key wrench set
- 1/2-inch breaker bar
- 6” medium extension for 3/8”-drive
- 5” impact extension for 1/2”-drive
Hammers and Bars
- Ball-peen hammer
- Dead-blow hammer
- Extendable pry bar
Pliers:
- Flush-cut pliers
- Groove-joint water pump pliers
- Long-nose pliers
- Combination pliers
- Curved-jaw locking pliers
- Wire cutter, wire stripper, and crimper tool
Phillips, Flat, and Other Drivers:
- Flat screwdriver, 100 millimeter
- Phillips screwdriver #2
- 1/4-inch drive spinner handle
- 1/4-inch spinner handle drive with 1/4-inch drive, 5/16 socket
Additional Tools and Accessories
- Heavy-duty diagonal side cutter
- 8-millimeter pin punch
- 12- and 42-volt compatible circuit tester
- Electrical tape
- Nitrile gloves
- Tire gauge
- Tire valve core tool
- All-metal tire puncture repair kit
