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My race bike gets a full strip and rebuild after every ride. That has to be done my way, and to perfection, takes me 8-9hrs usually,
Are you de-lacing the wheels and rebuilding them after every ride? Actually that wouldn't take me more than about 4 hrs and I'm a very slow wheel builder. What are you doing in all that time?
There's a reasonable market for this with the minted London / Surrey roadies, but there's already folks serving it. Very much a minimal hassle service, pick up the bike, return it later all perfectly clean, lubed ready for the next weekend run.
I wouldn't for MTBs, although I do like to do a full strip down and clean at some point over the winter, I'd consider it as an add-on to a full service / bearings swap sort of work.
There was a guy on BBC News this morning who seemed to be very busy cleaning peoples' trainers for them, so there's a market for everything I guess 🤷♂️😂
Probably 7-8 hours of work, 8-10 if really filthy. I do it because my philosophy on ‘things’ is that you either buy very cheap and treat it as disposable, or buy the best and look after it. Bikes are the latter!
Surely
a) you spend a fortune on cleaning products / degreaser / fresh grease / oils
b) can actually cause more issues by constant stripping down and replacing things such as jockey wheel and cage
c) have a hobby of cleaning bikes, not riding them? Dull Mens Club for you...
I don't clean my bikes unless they're covered in properly wet mud or they're going into my LBS for bits of servicing that I won't want to do. I hate the idea of putting more water onto a bike - dry mud doesn't matter as long as it's not abrasively rubbing anything. But water washes away grease and oil and corrodes.
Only takes me 10-15 minutes to make the bike spotlessly *clean* after a 100k marathon event. Or a CX race. Or our clubs midwinter XC race, (regular axle deep dippings into a mixture of mud, rain, ice and random bits of forest).
It's all about the process. Hose, buckets, degreaser, sponges, brushes, soap... I even still do the exes bike as it's so quick for me to do it while she's getting the kids sorted out to go to hers. And it saves her a fortune in parts (as i can spot the bits she's wearing out/breaking before she has to spend 100 quid an hour at a shop for labour).
Then the *service* to fix the damage and/or wear after a long event is another hour or so (if i have all the parts) probably including a couple of mugs of tea.
Only way i'd spend 8-10 hours is if it included basic fork, shock, dropper, hub, headset and pedal servicing. Plus cables, brake bleed etc.
No. I clean all the family bikes, I find it therapeutic. I also like ironing
I'd pay Henry Quinney not to clean (/work on) my bike 😀
Video: A Mid-Winter Downhill Rebuild - Pinkbike
As I said above, I only get to ride about once a week. In the summer when it’s dry, unless the bikes have got really filthy then it’ll get a wipe down with a microfibre and a cassette/chain degrease/regrease and brake/ stanchion clean.
Answering your points:
A. No. Washing up liquid, car shampoo, Aldi silicone lube and lithium grease from Toolstation. I’ve tried all the expensive stuff, this works better. 30g of SRAM butter lasts a couple of years.
B. Maybe, but I’d argue people’s lack of maintenance causes more issues. My cassettes and chains go on forever, because they’re checked with a measuring tool after every ride and never covered in a gritty paste. Similarly I’m lucky to have a couple of bikes, so it isn’t being done weekly.
C. Bit harsh. I just do what works for me. Again (touch wood) I’ve never had a ride spoiled by a mechanical. I’ve twice had a badly indexed drivetrain, and that was my fault for taking shortcuts.
I’d never judge anyone for not having a clean and tidy bike, and I also run parts that are strong, overbuilt, simple to rebuild and easily maintained for the home mechanic.
I’d pay Henry Quinney notto clean (/work on) my bike 😀
Haha, I had to stop watching that after about 30 secs.
And I'm no princess when it comes to bike cleaning.
Would I, nope.
Would "people", yep. Plenty of people get all their maintenance done at an LBS, my local always seems to have the same few bikes in the queue every time I go in there, just there for a service and brake blead. It's just adding a wash on top of that.
Trouble would be finding the local market. You need an affluent enough area that you're not driving hours, a local riding scene that's busy enough to generate the work all year round. The market is people who are time poor / cash rich enough that spending £50/week , £2600/year on the service, and you need to find 40+ people like that (i.e 40 bikes a week). They definitively exist, it's the ones that justify the extra cost and expense of a van to avoid having to take the front wheel on and off when they go riding, it's probably a lot cheaper than T6 ownership!
I hate cleaning my bike (especially in Winter) but I wouldn't pay someone else to do it.
Partly because on some weird level I'd be a bit embarrassed about having someone else do it and also because the cleaning process is quite useful for spotting future maintenance jobs and other things that may need looking at, e.g. flint slowly working its way into the tyre tread or loose spokes or whatever.
If I was on a riding holiday or event of some kind then yeah, absolutely I would pay then.
I'm not sure if this is fully related but I have read a few times somewhere that there are various people trying to make bike leases a thing- i.e- you "buy" your bike the same way people buy cars now, on a hire-lease basis. I wonder if that took off, whether there'd be opportunities there for washing/basic servicing as part of those types of hire-lease package.
I run an angle grinder over mine after every ride…. Comes up a treat after.
Yeah, I’ve had mixed results from
letting other peopledoing my own work on my bikes.
This is also true. Nothing like ****ing something up to make a lesson memorable.
I take the view that I'd rather pay someone to do DIY than spend my own time on it and I'm sure there are people out there who'd have the same attitude to bike cleaning. Technically it's no longer DIY I guess, but you know what I mean.
Whether there are enough of those people in your envisaged catchment area is the question. How you work that out is the obvious next bit.
Personally I'd always rather clean my own bikes. It tends to be the time when you spot stuff that's broken, wearing out or on the point of breaking before it ruins your next ride / front teeth / bank balance. I don't think I'd trust anyone else to do it.
And besides, next door's Westie would miss the excitement of trying to drink hose-water through cracks in the fence and I don't think I could bear to deprive him of that experience. The rest of his time is spent rolling around on plastic grass and trying to reach the cat which taunts him be nonchalantly sitting on top of a wall while the dog runs around barking pointlessly at it.
So not me, but I'm sure there are people, whether there are enough of them is hard to know. My gut feeling is not, but then I don't live in the Home Counties and work in the city.
As a potential yes but heres the thing.
Im lazy.
So if you've got to pickup, arrange a time to come to me or require anything like that im not interested.
So i can only see it working (for me) if i was to travel somewhere. (like a bike park) and after i had finished i could drop my bike off with someone while i went and got changed. it would need to be secure for me to leave it and then pick it up some short time later completely spotless.
id pay for that but it would be a max of something like a tenner.
What happens if someone gives you a bike covered in mud and you wash it off to find a crack. they didnt do it obviously!
would-you-pay-someone-to-clean-your-dirty-bike
No
would-you like someone to come round right now and-clean-your-dirty-bike
Yep. Gravel bike is caked at the moment, was frozen stiff after I got in, thought I'd do it after a shower, didn't. Pick the bones out of that.
on some weird level I’d be a bit embarrassed about having someone else do it
also this, coupled to being embarrassed to turning up to rides with bike looking as it is. Apart from when I was a dedicated SSer, when turning up with filthy bike and ostentatiously knocking a bit of mud off in the car park before running the chain through an oily rag was part of the identity. Gears - pah! Maintenance - pah! At times I think it was only the mud that held bits of it together.
Lots of people pay someone to clean their car. Either a big machine that you drive through, a service whilst you are in doing the shopping or a "mobile valet" who comes to your house/workplace whilst the car sits outside anyway. BUT those are almost zero hassle. There are other options which are more hassle, as well as DIY or ignore - but I think they give a good idea what people prioritise.
The one way I could see this working is in a city with lots of small houses/flats and limited storage if it was tied to a secure storage service it might work. If you could open a locker, put your bike in it and pay a fee for either "store" or "clean and store" it could be attractive.
Never.
I'd not trust them to not **** up something or jet water into places where it'll cause damage that only manifests itself in 6 months time, at geat cost to me.
Lots of people pay someone to clean their car.
The thing with cleaning a bike though is it's an opportunity to identify bits that are worn, about to wear, in need of maintenance etc. So I want to do that myself because when I'm cleaning it I'll have a look at the brake pads, the tyres, the drivetrain etc.
Cleaning and maintenance are the same thing in a bike whereas they're not for a car. So paying someone to jetwash the bike and hand it back sparkling clean doesn't actually get to the nub of the problem that there may be parts on their last legs but which have not been made known to me.
I've had to charge customers before for cleaning because their bike was so covered in dog poo we couldn't work on it. Doesn't usually go down well.
Cheers all - some valid points. The ‘idea’ is dead in the water now BTW
I’ve had to charge customers before for cleaning because their bike was so covered in dog poo we couldn’t work on it. Doesn’t usually go down well.
A couple of shops i've worked at have a fee attached to cleaning. Which is stated up front, on the quote.
Basically "We will charge you a minimum of an hours labour to clean your bike if we decide it's too dirty for the workshop, make sure it's clean".
Can't recall anyone ever getting charged twice.
There was a guy on BBC News this morning who seemed to be very busy cleaning peoples’ trainers for them, so there’s a market for everything I guess 🤷♂️😂
Has anyone predicted the return of shoe shine boys in the Brexit benefits thread?
I don’t clean my bikes. That mud has too often turned out to be structural.
In real life I don’t typically trust others to do the jobs that I know how to and have the tools to do myself.
Cleaning and drying a bike properly makes them look new for ages. Well worth the time.
I do mine properly - takes a good 30mins. And that is cleaning, degreasing and drying. Drying makes it right to me.
Paint clean, polish and tidy up on top. Another 30mins.
Good call OP but MTBers know the price of everything and value of nothing. (See discussions about the nervousness of paying more than £10 for a bike rack that is hanging up £5Ks worth of bike. Steadyrack - just in case you ask.)
I guess some folk just aren't that fussy. Furry nuff. They will sleep better ...
Probably 7-8 hours of work, 8-10 if really filthy. I do it because my philosophy on ‘things’ is that you either buy very cheap and treat it as disposable, or buy the best and look after it. Bikes are the latter!
You obviously don't place much value on your free time if you think 8 hours of admin per ride results in a net saving!
20 minutes to give the bike a good clean.
Rapha Travel used to do this. Rapha Travel was Rapha's road bike accompanied touring holidays - and was as expensive and luxurious as you would expect. Whilst the participants got a massage and some fancy food in the evening and rested their heads on luxury feather pillows in an upmarket gite or downmarket chateaux, their bikes got a proper scrub up and lube and a tinker if needed so they got a minty fresh bike again the next morning. Kind of a ride like the pros experience for the middle aged and well heeled. Probably the only scenario bike cleaning is going to make sense - a captive audience of comfortably off bike obsessives and a whole evening to do the job.
I spend a fair bit of time cleaning my bike(S) after each ride. Maybe an hour for the properly muddy MTB and 30 minutes on the road/gravel bike.
I'm a bit anal about my "toys" including my car which gets a wash each week.
I think if you give your bikes a once over after each ride you can spot issues quickly.
After all, I've spent a chunk of my wages on stuff, so why not look after it?
I hate cleaning my bike, in fact I don't think mountain bikes should look too clean (it just looks like you've either just bought it or are using it like a fashion accessory).
However as others have said it gives you an early call if anything is worn out, needing replaced etc. I don't clean my bike every ride but it gets a good inspection when I do clean it, so for that reason - no, I wouldn't pay someone to clean my bike, even if it was reasonably priced
As a Service Manager this is often an issue. In shops I've worked in, a wipe down tends to be covered as part of the service (i.e. 5 mins). Customers have the choice of paying for a full clean but I can't remember anyone ever taking this up (or wasn't offered by the Service Writer....). The mechanic ends up cleaning the bike anyway because "that's what customers want", so the shop pishes away 30 minutes free labour and impacts our turnaround time.
No, it’s not a difficult job and I need to save money rather than pay for something that takes less than 10 minutes to do.
Not a fan of washing bikes, they get put away dirty, especially the daily commuter. So I would be happy to pay someone to clean it every so often if convenient and reasonably priced, but most important if, I earnt more money.
OOooooh and I challenge anyone to clean my bike in under five minutes!
I can’t believe how much spare time some people have.
After almost every ride it’s wheels off, derailleur lower cage off, jockey wheels disassembled, brake pads out, chain off, saddle off, dropper out then a full degrease, clean, polish, regrease and re-lube then reassemble, all bolts checked, indexing of gears if needed. When finished the bike will look and ride like new. Probably 7-8 hours of work, 8-10 if really filthy.
Private Pyle?
NO
I don't even wash my own very often. Brush off the mud when dried, wipe down with a damp cloth. Its tricky washing bikes in an attic flat.
Edit:
Cleaning and maintenance are the same thing in a bike whereas they’re not for a car
Not for me. I can check the bike without cleaning it and do every ride. Front brake on and bounce the fork checks head bearings and fork damping etc etc. My bikes are also set up to be low maintenance ie IGH, putolined chain, sintered brake pads
No. I would however fine people who get their bikes filthy then cart it elsewhere to drop any nasties.
Haven't yet worked out the final details to cover people taking it home to clean. But some of the bikes I see drive past me on their way back from glentress and inners are mockit and there is no way they are all getting cleaned.
I’m lazy with cleaning, but I don’t want to hire anyone to wash my muddy bike. I think of dirt as battle scars, and I would only clean it if my wife wouldn't stop nagging about it.
Nope. More likely to be the one paid to clean it for others.
There was a mention of what people would do in the event of a lottery win.
I'd still clean my own bikes but it would be indoors in a purpose built wet room with powerful extractor and dehumidifier to ensure optimum drying.