Cleaning your bicycle chain is a vital part of any regular maintenance that you carry out on your bike. Your chain is a pivotal component of your bike, and if you don’t look after it properly, your riding will suffer. By keeping your bicycle chain clean, you’ll ensure that your pedaling and gear changing remains smooth. Here we look at bicycle chain tools and chain cleaners that will help you keep your chain clean and in tiptop shape.

The Allsop chain cleaner is a molded plastic tool that fits to an aerosol can of your favorite chain lubricant, making cleaning and lubing your bike chain an easy one step process. The Allsop chain cleaner has a rotating cam on the top of the lever that snaps the cleaner onto your aerosol can. And then there’s a a small needle that fits the aerosol’s nozzle to guide the lubricant into the cleaning assembly’s three brushes.
You then clean and lube your chain using this chain cleaner tool as you move the chain by pedaling.

Another bike chain cleaning tool is the Park Chain Mate from renowned bike tool maker, Park Tool. The Chain Mate by Park Tool is a molded piece of plastic in two halves. The lower half of the molded plastic includes a reservoir and two chain brushes. One brush cleans the bottom of the chain while the other has a brush and roller to clean the top of the bicycle chain.

A spring clasp locks these two halves of the cleaner in place around the chain and then you just back pedal the chain through the closed cleaning assembly.

Park Tools also market a bicycle chain cleaner called Park Chain Brite. If you are using the Park Chain Mate to clean your chain, then this is the cleaner that they recommend you use. The cleaner is derived from petroleum distillates to clean the chain and to also dissolve grease. It also includes a silicone additive with a moisture repellant to lube your clean chain.

Vetta Chain Cleaner is an easy to use efficient chain cleaning tool that you can use to clean your bike chain without having to remove the bike chain from your bike.

The clear plastic chain cleaner includes the cleaning fluid in a tank on the the cleaner while several molded plastic brushes conform to the shape of the chain that wipe both the inside and the outside of the chain. To clean, you just rotate the cranks counter-clockwise and the Vetta Chain Cleaner does it job of cleaning your chain.

Once you’ve cleaned your chain with the Vetta Chain Cleaner, you could try their own lubricant and cleaning agent called Vetta Chain Conditioner. This conditioner is biodegradable formula based on Isopropyl alcohol for cleaning and silicone fluids to lubricate the clean chain.

There are many other chain cleaning tools available on the market to make cleaning and lubing your bike chain much less of a chore, as well as a wide variety of cleaning agents and lubricants. So, you have no excuse for not looking after that chain!

Tags: bicycle chain cleaner, bicycle chain tools, chain cleaners

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 10:33 am and is filed under Bike Chains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.