Chain cleaning and pet peeves.

I'm a pretty laid back kind of guy but one thing that cheeses me off rather a lot is over priced chain cleaning solutions and degreasing fluids. Sure, 500ml of citrus degreaser lovingly distilled by beautiful young virgins from Californian oranges for a tenner smells nice and is eco-friendly but I don't think you can beat good honest hydro-carbons for dissolving oil off a chain. White spirit is basically an industrial metal degreaser and at 2L for about £4 is pretty good value for money.

To clean my chain thoroughly, I just pop the quick link, put the chain in a cheap plastic container, submerge it in white spirit, put the top back on and shake vigorously for a few minutes and drain the dirty fluid into an empty white spirit bottle. This gets the road dirt and most of the old oil off. I then repeat the process but leave it to soak for a while after shaking. When finished, I just put the chain on the radiator to dry for an hour and it's ready to re-lube and put back on the bike.

 

When the empty bottle of white spirit is full of dirty white spirit, I just seal it up and take it my local Veolia recycling centre where it goes into the old paint section for recycling.

I'm sure many people will disagree with this process but let's be honest, chain cleaning regimes have been argued about for cyclists for donkey's years and probably always will be!