Cleaning A Muddy Bike Without a Hose
Posted by Charles Wed, 04 Jan 2006 05:56:00 GMT
Hosing your bike off washes grease out of places that are hard to get lube back into, like cable housings, suspension pivots, QR skewers and headsets. It can also wash fine dirt particulate into places it might not normally get, like chain and derailer pivots and pedal spindles. Pretty soon your bike starts talking to you, a little squeak here, a creek there, and it starts taking progressively more effort to shift it, close the QR skewers, get into your pedals, and so on. I sell a lot of drive train parts to hosers. This isn’t what you have to do everytime, but it is what I do when I want to do a really nice job, and I have done it so many times it doesn’t take very long, or very much effort. Any cleaning at all, if done properly, will improve your bikes appearance and performance, and help reduce long term maintenance costs.
Let the mud dry, and set up a place to clean it that you can get really dusty, like outside. Put your bike up in the stand, and wipe the wheels down with a clean, dry cloth. Hit the tires with a stiff bristled brush to knock most of the dirt out of the knobs. If you have disc brakes, spray your rims lightly with bike polish or furniture polish and wipe them down again. Take the time to wipe down your hubs and spokes with the same rag. It will make a big difference in how the bike looks when you are done, and how you feel about your efforts. If you have rim brakes, wipe them down with a dry cloth. You don’t want to get polish on the braking surface.
Remove the wheels, check the bearing adjustments, and set the front wheel aside. It is done. Trap the rear wheel between your belt buckle and the edge of your workbench, with the wheel laying down horizontally, freewheel side up. Use a thin brush if necessary like this one to scrape gunk out from between the cogs:
Park GSC-1C Gear Cleaning Brush
then, with the wheel still trapped on its side, use the edge of your rag, held taught, to polish the spaces between the cassette cogs. Set the rear wheel aside. Its done.
Shift your bike into the small chainring and rear sprocket. Disconnect your shift cables from the housing stops by pulling on the housings, not by disconnecting the cable anchors, and if you want to do really nice job, remove the right crank arm. Put a garbage can under your bottom bracket and use one of your brushes to knock most of the dried mud off the rest of your bike. Then spray the chainstays and seatstays with bike polish, and wipe that part of the bike down. Repeat if necessary. Then spray the bottom bracket area, and top and down tubes, and wipe. Last, wipe down the bars and stem, and controls and cable housings without spraying. No need to get polish on your grips or in your shifters. Pull the garbage can back to rest under your rear derailer and scrape funk out of there and wipe it down too.
Use the little Park brush again to clean off your crank, and chase after it with a dirty rag. That rag then goes into the dirty pile. Reinstall the crank if you removed it with a fresh and very light coating of bearing grease on the crank spindle.
While you have your cables disconnected, wipe them down, and slide the housings up to expose parts of the cable normally hidden. Coat the cable lightly with Slick Honey or Shimano Special Grease, nothing else, never Tri Flow or regular bearing grease, and slide the housings back down. If the housings don’t feel really smooth, repeat or replace the cables and housings. Reconnect the cables, and drop a little Tri Flow on the derailer pivots.
Smear a small amount of Slick Honey on your fork stanchions, and also on your rear shock piston. Slide the zip ties back down, and drop your shock pressure if they weren’t all the way up to begin with.
Reinstall the wheels, check your brake adjustments, and shift into the chain cleaning gear. The chain cleaning gear is the large sprocket in the front, and third from the smallest cog in the rear. This gear allows you to pedal fast forward or backward without derailing the chain. Drop a little Tri Flow on your chain while pedalling and pour yourself a refreshing beverage. After enjoying the first part of the beverage, or at least drinking past the thickest of the foam, start to wipe your chain down. Do this by scrubbing your chain where it is on the large ring, using your index and thumb and thumbnail, wrapped in a rag, slowly rotating the crank as you go. Skip the area that your crank obscures: it will come back around. After two and a half crank revolutions, the two obscured areas will be accessible, so scrub those and you’re done. Finish your beverage, and plan your next ride.
