It’s not the most thrilling of technical topics, but because bicycle cleaning is such an inevitably recurrent activity, perhaps contributors to this forum may be able to share cleaning tools, methods and materials and thus improve common knowledge and practice.
I do not clean my RST as often as I ought to, despite daily use for commuting, shopping and occasional touring. This is how it usually goes:
Tip the bike upside down
Spray citrus degreaser (Finish Line or similar) along the chain, the sprocket, the chain wheel, the hubs, the brake mechanisms
Scrub everything with an assortment of (old) toothbrushes, nailbrushes, household sponges, « Muck Off », brushes.
Clean the chain (I am using a « White Lightning Clean Streak » aerosol and cleaner system which is very effective but, I fear, horrendously polluting to the water table), then with a « Grunge Brush ». I would prefer to remove the chain and soak it in Citrus degreaser but Rohloff chains do not seem to approve of Spring-Clip Master-Links and I can’t be bothered to de-rivet it each time.
Continue rubbing everything and everywhere with an assortment of rags, using a new rag for the cleanest parts and progressively descending the grime scale to finish the rag off on the transmission system.
Clean the spokes and wheel rims using rags.
Turn the bike the right way up and immobilise it using a prop, guy ropes, or hanging it from an obliging apple tree.
Spray citrus degreaser on all the grimy parts (particularly brakes) and continue scrubbing with brushes.
Using a smallish « Muck Off » brush dipped in « Magura Power Cleaner », scrub all the non-mechanical parts (frame, mud guards etc). I find this product rather ineffective, but you do not find the same range of cleaning products in Parisian bike shops as in provincial English ones.
Then, when all is slippery, streaky and generally nauseating, comes what may be the only original part of the process.
Fill a simple hand-held garden sprayer up with cold water, pump it up to maximum possible pressure and, varying the spray jet according to the target, rinse everything copiously (trying to avoid getting water into the bearings.
I do all this on the bumpy patch of weeds that we optimistically call a lawn. The process leaves a few oily slicks on the blades of grass, but they do not seem to inhibit photosynthesis and disappear after a week or so of rain and growth.
Dry everything roughly with new rags, then leave the bike to dry before tackling all the repair and maintenance jobs that you had been loath to do because of all the encasing grime.
Unlike freshly bathed dogs, most bicycles do not usually go and roll in something foul in order to recover their own comfortable aroma.
How do other forum contributors go about this exciting task?
