Park Tool HBT-1- Hydraulic Barb Tool, One Size

There are all manner of cheap Chinese hydraulic hose cutters and joiners for the bike market. Some of them are actually excellent and priced a third of this Park Tool HBT-1.So why own this baby?It's simple, ... when you do hydraulic hose cutting and barbs all day long as part of your job, you want to reach for something that you don't have to fidget with to get to work. The HBT-1 fits the bill. It has a manly handle for professional bike mechanics to cut quickly and another large knob to hold the hose in place. When you push the handle down, ... the barb gets pushed in cleanly and with no wonkiness.The only downside, ... like so many Park Tools after COVID, this baby is now $90. That said, it is a five star tool which does its intended job exactly and correctly every time.

Good tool. Works very well. Pricey.

I’m not sure how you could push in a barbed hose inserts without this tool. Sure if you’re only doing one or two bikes you figure it out, but this tool is the go to tool. I only gave four stars because I believe it could do a better job at holding the hydraulic line. It’s hard for me to find a fault in any Park Tool, so if it were a scale of 100 stars, I’d give it a 99.

I recently built a Ritchey hardtail with XT brakes. One brake came assembled and bled, the other came with the hose on the caliper and fluid in with a cap/plug on the other end of the hose. I ride with front brake on right hand side, so I needed to switch sides for the pre-assembled unit plus cut both hoses to length. The Park Tool HBT-1 cut the cable cleanly. I suggest using a small pick or punch to make sure the hose is perfectly round after the cutting, not ovalized. I started the barbed fitting by hand then clamped the hose into the HBT-1 and pressed the barb fitting the rest of the way in. Zero drama, easy assembly. The tool comes with extra hose-cutting blades. Seems like an expensive tool for the two simple functions ... you might be able to get by without it, but the tool definitely made the cutting and assembly easy and tidy.

As in hydraulic brake lines, it doesn’t cut them. The problem is that there’s space in the handle where it should push the line onto the blade, but instead it bends around it and doesn’t cleanly cut. Not worth the cost.

Being a high end shop grade bike tool manufacturer, I am astonished that Park Tool created this tool with so little practical design.The barb insert tool is just fine, nothing special, but functional.The hose cutting tool is completely unusable. Both the design and the tolerances of the tool make this thing impossible to cut cleanly and properly. It made me waste length of hydraulic hose due to the tool not able to produce a complete cut while deforming the hose.I'm an extremely disappointed at this product and will advise against getting this for anyone.

It's Park so it's well made. I used it with a new set of Hopes, not sure I needed it to be honest, but it does what it's supposed to do.

I returned it, because the cutter didn’t work well. I have a bunch of park tools and have never had to return one before. This one cut the brake line great the first time, but on the next few it cut terrible. Not sure what happened. Gave it 3 stars because the other end to insert the barb worked perfect, I almost kept it because the barb part worked so well.