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Never Clean Your Bike with a Pressure Washer

April 12th, 2006 by Mike

Guitar Ted has posted a horror story from the shop he works at.

bottom bracket

Todays picture, which is a bit fuzzy, sorry! Well, it’s a Trek 5200 bottom bracket shell. The grease was so contaminated with water and dirt that it had turned into an awful, gooey spooge. This picture shows you what I saw after the removal of the cartridge, Octalink bottom bracket, which itself was rusty and completely shot. The crankset banged around and was so loose that I advised this customer to replace the bottom bracket, which is why I was in there in the first place.

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3 Responses to “Never Clean Your Bike with a Pressure Washer”

  1. 1 Fritz 

    Doesn’t have to be pressure washer. I can’t imagine riding a 5200 in that much rain, but on my old steel fixie my BB looks just like Ted’s photo, with the grease all nasty and spoogey after extended periods of rain riding.

  2. 2 Guitar Ted 

    After discussing it with the customer, I found out he was washing the bike upside down. He was using a garden hose to rinse it with, but claims he didn’t use any sort of pressure. He said he just “let it run over the bike”. If that’s true, then we need to say, “Never wash your bike upside down”!

  3. 3 ChillyV 

    So if your bottom bracket gets water in there what are you supposed to do? Repack the grease? Maybe Guitar Ted could give us a quick lesson on how to repack the BB and hubs?

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