On Cleaning Erin

I spent December 25 cleaning my road bike, Erin.

Now in truth there is some vanity involved in cleaning a bike, after all a clean bike will not ride faster or steer truer than a dirty bike, but, cleaning a bike forces a person to go over every part of the bike very carefully, so if there are any hairline fractures you can see them and, well in my case foolishly do nothing about them. But cleaning certain parts of a bike are critical, in particular the drive train.

If the drive train is left to build up dirt what happens is, besides rust, the parts wear, and as they wear they begin to lose their fitting. For example, the bits and pieces of a chain become more and more loose and the chain itself begins to "stretch" - it is not that the chain is elastic, but the parts of the chain are looser so the chain does not fit together so well anymore. Enough chain stretch can wear down the cassette to the point where a replacement chain won't even fit the old cassette. Even more stretch can have the same effect on the chain rings. Eventually the chain will just break wide open, at which point not only do you need to buy new chain rings, cassette and chain (all in, can cost between about one hundred fifty and one thousand dollars) but you will either have to buy new shoes, or pay a fortune to a taxi driver to get you home. By contrast, I have never seen a high end chain for more than ninety dollars, and by keeping your drive train clean, you can probably almost double the life of your chain.

Sorry the slide show is rather annoyingly fast, but if you are interested in cleaning your own bike it might be best to read the captions. Next time I do this I should get a photographer to take pictures. The problem is I spent the entire time handling some pretty nasty stuff, varsol, a citrus cleaner with petro chemicals, rags saturated with dirt picked up from the side of the road, and so on, as a result it was a big pain to stop, scrub my hands and take a picture.



While washing Erin outside I noticed there was a dull roar like the sound of an expressway. I thought nothing of it, until I realised the nearest expressway is about 2km away, then I looked to the south to the beach and saw monster white caps, so after I brought Erin back into the house I went for a walk to the beach and took some pictures. This has nothing to do with bike repair, but it was an awesome sight all the same.