Day 8: Clean your bike
After yesterday’s ride through the rain, my bike (Aero) was in urgent need of a thorough clean.
Of course, if I was a real pro, someone else would do this work for me ;-)
I actually like taking care of my bike and doing everything myself.
When you live in an apartment complex without a garden or terras, cleaning your bike is actually not so easy: Where do you wash the bike? Where do you get water from? I mean, I am not really willing to let my bike be in the bike stand while I get something I missed from upstairs, only to return five minutes later to no-more-bike. Let me know how you do it if you are in a similar situation!
Clean-your-bike-as-a-service seems like a lucrative business idea for people living in flats in big cities. Does it exist?
So cleaning has to be a pretty well-organized activity. I first took the bike stand down and all the tools I would need, including two buckets of hot water (grinning at the thought that that leaves them susceptible to being stolen, too). Then came the bike. I did this in the yard of our apartment to be a bit sheltered from peasants on the street. People looked a bit funny at me, but no one said a word, so I guess it is fine. I would not know how else to do it, anyway.
I also tried to take off my chain – unfortunately, the tool to open the quick link is with my parent’s and I was not able to get it open with one of the many methods suggested by the Internet. So that sucked a bit. But then I thought that with chain cleaning, you probably get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort and just used my chain cleaning tool. A lot of dirt came off, as you could see by pitch-black degreasing fluid. If you do this efficiently, it is a ten-minute thing and can really be done independently of the rest of the bike clean. And actually cleaning the chain is where it sortof matters most.
The bike is now ready for whatever there is to come – stay tuned for the planned Easter trip!
Tot zo,
