Never Clean Your Bike with a Pressure Washer
April 12th, 2006 by MikeGuitar Ted has posted a horror story from the shop he works at.
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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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.
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”!
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?