This is a good point. When I opened my shop, there was no question in my mind that we would need the English thread tools, and we've had them since day one. They're expensive, somewhere between $350-400 I believe (dealer cost). I've debated about investing in the Italian thread tool, but the truth is that in three years in business, you could count on one hand the number of Italian threaded bottom brackets we've seen. And one of them is on one of my own bikes. We will probably go ahead and get the Italian thread tool soon, the trend for us is that we are working on more high end bikes than ever, and we will need the tool.

I've seen a few posts on BF recently where posters say some bike shops don't have even the English thread bb chasing/facing tools, with the reasoning being that the tool is too expensive and that most bb's are already chased/faced. I completely disagree with this, we use ours very often, and would not consider ourselves a quality service shop if we couldn't chase/face an English threaded bb. With the popularity of external bearing bb's, it's essential to be able to face the shell if the the faces aren't parallel; I can't imagine not offering this service. In the big picture, the cost of the bb tools in a full service shop are not that big of a deal.