Excitement comes easy these days. Even from cleaning my bike! :-)
Well, it was in need for some quality cleaning time. I have been cleaning it quite well and quite regular ever since I got it, but still cleaning the gears and chain is quite hard. If you wanne do it good that is. Usually I used some old piece of cloth to do it, which works quite fine, but of course always leaves some dirt. So today was a day from some more drastic cleaning.

I got off to quite a good start and quite fast started thinking about dismantling the whole bike! Strip everything off, only leaving the bare tubes (thank you Peter ;-) so I could clean all parts perfectly and assemble the bike again afterwards. Well, I took a side track from that idea even quicker then I came up with it. I wasn’t 100% convinced I possess the essential knowledge to put it all together again. I think I can, as it ain’t rocket science, but as the weather will most likely be quite nice the coming days, I prefer making sure I can actually use the bike (in a proper way) over trying to be the bike mechanic I am not and screwing up the tuning of my gears, breaks and saddle position. So I took the easy way out, only dismantling the parts that could do no direct harm.

By far the most challenging was cleaning my bike chain. I dislocated one of the little chains so I could remove it from the bike and but it in a little bowl filled with “refined petrol” (or in Dutch: wasbenzine, in Swedish: tvättbensin and Danish: rensebenzin) and used my old toothbrush to clean it… Almost nothing but a great success, the chain got perfectly clean after I was done! But please kids, don’t try this at home!!! Because I had been with my left hand in the petrol almost non-stop for about the long half an hour it took to brush my chain, the skin on my hand got kinda irritated for the next about 4 hours… Some weird non-stop burning sensation… Well… sensation… I thought it would go away instantly when I would wash my hands… but no… I was seriously wrong! :-) Even holding my hands under the running cold water for 5 minutes, brought me nothing… Next time I will choose the wear gloves! ;-)

Well, a struggling 3 hours (including long tea break) later it’s almost showroom shiny again! :-) I just need to put the parts I took off back on again and come to think of it… I actually also still need to clean both wheels… oops… forgot about that… Well, I guess I have something to do again tomorrow morning! ;-)

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 18:59 and is filed under Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.