I have been trying to clean my bike for the last couple of days and it has been quite the disaster. The amount of grease that has accumulated is unbelievable and I can't seem to get it off. The first thing I did was take a nylon brush to the whole bike, although as soon as I started scrubbing the drive train it got caked in grease and was pretty disgusting.
I had degreaser, so I spent some time spraying that on my chain as I rolled it through an old t-shirt. I did this for a while, removing loads of grease each time. I got fed up with how much grease there was and started just spraying it all over my drive train, mostly the chainrings and derailleurs. I went through almost an entire thing of degreaser, grease dripping off the whole time. The rear crankset was pretty clean, but there was still generally a lot of grease.
The next day I bought a chain cleaner (white lightning clean streak, which is a POS) to see how that would work. Once I finally got it working I did about 7-8 run throughs, each time the degreaser turning deep black. It was also slowly splashing my crankset in more grease... I feel like I need to just dump my bike in a pool of degreaser to get this thing clean. Is there anything I can do? Are there some good guides out there for bike cleaning? How clean can it realistically get? I have had the bike for less about 2.5 years (bought it new) and taken it for about 3 tune-ups, where they cleaned it each time, so I don't know how it accumulated so much? Thanks for the help!
I had degreaser, so I spent some time spraying that on my chain as I rolled it through an old t-shirt. I did this for a while, removing loads of grease each time. I got fed up with how much grease there was and started just spraying it all over my drive train, mostly the chainrings and derailleurs. I went through almost an entire thing of degreaser, grease dripping off the whole time. The rear crankset was pretty clean, but there was still generally a lot of grease.
The next day I bought a chain cleaner (white lightning clean streak, which is a POS) to see how that would work. Once I finally got it working I did about 7-8 run throughs, each time the degreaser turning deep black. It was also slowly splashing my crankset in more grease... I feel like I need to just dump my bike in a pool of degreaser to get this thing clean. Is there anything I can do? Are there some good guides out there for bike cleaning? How clean can it realistically get? I have had the bike for less about 2.5 years (bought it new) and taken it for about 3 tune-ups, where they cleaned it each time, so I don't know how it accumulated so much? Thanks for the help!