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Sunday, December 1, 2013

Cleaning Solution

As Sam knows, I'm building the vintage Nishiki (born-on date 1975 or so) into a single-speed cross bike.  More on that forthcoming!

Having removed the outer ring I needed to clean the old cheapskate FSA chainset from the original Cervelo tri bike.  I'm fresh out of my favorite Finish Line Citrus degreaser so I turned to what I had lying around: Five-Hour Energy.

A disturbing yet amusing lesson:  Five-Hour Energy on a toothbrush does about as good a job as one needs degreasing a 6-year-old chainset.

(Caveat:  I did not compare Five-Hour Energy with anything else.  It could well be that water on a toothbrush would have done the same thing.)

2 comments:

sam said...

Disturbing, yes. Surprising, probably not.

That finish line stuff looks pretty pricey. I've had good luck with 'Simple Green', from Home Depot. Also usually available at Costco. I think it's around $6/gallon, maybe a little more.

I usually just put it in a shallow bowl, and drop everything I need to clean into the bowl. Let it stew for a few minutes, then wipe off the dirt with a rag. A toothbrush would probably work better for that last step.. I reuse that until there's too much crap in the bowl.

Unknown said...

Outstanding. Should I read anything of significance into the fact that you're building a cross bike during the last week of cross season?