Speaker: Cassettes and chains can get really dirty. Then everyone loves riding a clean
bike. They look nicer, they're faster, and the drivetrain is more efficient, and regular
cleaning will make your components last longer. But cleaning takes time and effort, and it
can be really difficult to get every last bit of dirt out from intricate components
like chains and cassettes, but not with one of these. This is an ultrasonic bath and in
this video, I'm going to show you how you can use one of these, what they can do and
also where you can get one. They're not especially expensive.
[music] Ultrasonic baths, also known as sonicators,
create tiny little bubbles induced by high-frequency sound waves to agitate or vibrate the liquid
that's inside the bath. These agitations or vibrations in the liquid, create huge pressure
on any dirt or contaminants that are on the object that you put inside the bath. Whether
that’s your cassette, your chain or any other component you want to clean. The cleaning
action also penetrates blind holes and is excellent at getting into tiny recesses and
cracks, making it ideal for cleaning something as complicated as a chain.
They're also often used to clean jewelry, and as an organic chemist, I used to use them
to sometimes clean lab apparatus, but also you could use them to actually dissolve stubborn
solids into various solvents, which was important for various chemical reactions. You didn't
need to know that but [unintelligible 00:01:42] nerdy fact for you. Anyhow, we're going to
clean this filthy chain and cassette. Now, if you want to pick one of these up yourself,
you can do on websites like Amazon for around £50 or $60 or so and they go up in price
generally depending on the size. I think this one was about £80.
You'll then want to put some kind of cleaning solution inside the liquid, something aqueous-based
is going to be best and ideally, we'd always say use something a bit more environmentally
friendly that's not going to destroy the environment. So something like this Bio Degreaser from
Muc-Off would be great. You can also use solvents like white spirit and they're very powerful
and potent at cleaning things, but they're not quite as good for the environment and
also factor in that there is a health and safety thing here, you don't want to get this
kind of stuff in your eyes, and also, they can be highly flammable. So just be careful
with that. White spirit isn't too bad though because
the-- well the autoignition temperature of white spirit is about 240 degrees, so it's
quite hard to set it on fire without a naked flame, but still, it's well worth being careful
with these things. I've stress, I would recommend you use something that's a bit more environmentally
friendly. I mean if you are a total chemistry nerd, then you can actually recycle white
spirit using a distillation still, that does fall within my weird skillset, but most people
are just going to probably chuck it down the sink, which isn't very good [unintelligible
00:03:15]. Also, remember anything that you do put in
the bath is going to be more potent at cleaning than it would be normally. That's because
the bath is able to warm it up, which helps clean, but also the vibrations improve the
potency of the cleaning as well. You can actually use water and just a drop of washing up liquid
and that will work pretty well in most cases. Put on some nitrile gloves just to stop any
nasty dirty stuff getting on my hands. It looks like I'm going to fry some chips, don’t
I? [laughs] It's not a deep fat fryer. I'm going to put my dirty chain in here. There
we go, look at that. Also going to put the cassette in there as
well. In fact, I'm going to put the cassette in half and half because that way I might
get like a nice half clean, half dirty thing going on, which would be pretty cool. I'm
going to turn the bath on. Vibrates in a way and drop it in. That's working its magic.
Now, this is cleaning, I've set a timer on the unit for five minutes, we will see how
it turns out after that. I don't know if you can hear it on the camera but there's a real
high frequency vibrations sort of sonic waves. I guess if you were a dog, you’d probably
find it really annoying. It’s quite loud. Now in theory, you could use this to clean
all manner of bicycle components, so brakes and derailleurs and things like that, but
this kind of system is going to be excellent at stripping grease out of bearings. For example,
if you were going to be putting in something like a rear derailleur, it might be worth
removing the jockey wheels and just cleaning them separately, because the grease inside
the little bearings on the jockey wheels will probably get stripped out and you don't necessarily
want that. You could use it to clean bearings but just bear in mind you'll have to take
out the seals and regrease them again. If you've got a really dirty chain like the
one I've got, then you'll probably want to do a couple of immersions like this where
you change your cleaning solution, put a fresh batch in and do the chain again. One of the
things that's useful as well is to use brushes to help loosen the dirt, and I'd actually
suggest that you clean all the surface dirt off as best as you can first with it on the
bike and using a hose pipe and some degreaser. Then immerse it in the bath because the bath
is best at penetrating in between the rollers and the links of the chains and getting the
dirt that you can't normally reach and loosening that.
The water had a kind greenish tint from the Muc-Off in there, but it's completely changed.
It's like brown and grey black now. It really is stripping that dirt off the components.
Right, that's all done. I'm quite excited to see how clean this comes out because my
chains never normally get that dirty. This is one of [unintelligible 00:06:23] chains,
obviously. Now it's done, I'm going to take the chain
and cassette out and I'm just going to rise them with some water under a tap just to wash
off any residual dirt that's just left on the surface, but the sonicator or well, the
ultrasonic bath should have loosened any of that dirt, so it should just come off nice
and easily. Right, I've just rinsed these off and you can see the cassette. That's incredible
where it's been half in and half out of the cleaning solution.
This cassette truth be told wasn't the filthiest dirtiest cassette in the world, but you can
see there on this half where this SRAM logo is, how it's much much cleaner after just--
well that one's just been into it 10 minutes compared to that side which has still got
all the dirt on it. That's cool, but this chain, check this out. That's just much, much,
much cleaner now. You could eat dinner off it. Right, I hope you found this video useful,
and if you have, then consider following us on social media, and also, why not check out
some more of our videos. You've got a load of other ones with other useful cleaning tips.