Hi Everybody,

I’m moving to Perth Western Australia on Monday and wondered if anybody has any tips for cleaning bikes for customs?

I’ve spent 3 hours on the road bike and am still worried about the sand grains in the brake hoods and have yet to tackle the mountain bike!!!! I’m not sure I’ve ever used a cotton wool bud on a bike before.

they open the box and check the tyres and give it a quick glance. if it’s clean, they dont take it out.

i don’t deep clean, just give everything a good scrub.

have your shoes ready in there, soles up too.

What bigrich said. I had a box marked bike tyres and that,the bikes and Christmas decorations were all that got opened.

Nothing on my air freight got opened at all – 7 bikes in total.
Nothing got checked in the airport – including coming through with the ashes of the dog.

Previously Sea Freight took a hammering and got stung on that.

Commercial sea freight/movers they opened about 3 boxes. Make sure the stuff at the top is very clean 😉

None of this is that consistent though, if they find something they don’t like then they will go through the lot.

As for cleaning, get some fresh rubber was, dry, was, dry repeat.

If your moving a lot with sea freight consider sending some essentials air it was about £200-250 for a bike box up to 30kg and arrives in 10 days. We ended up doing bikes, some kitchen stuff, clothing, bedding etc. that we didn’t want to have to spend on day 1 to replace what would arrive in 3 months. We were only part container so it took a lot longer as not many were moving out then.

Thanks for the responses Guys, that’s reassuring that the three hours of scrubbing hasn’t gone to waste!

The tyres are spotless and so are our shoes so fingers crossed

As I’m only going to have the road bike initially can you guys recommend any good rides?

Cheers

Tyres seem to be the main issue. New ones are best, or give them a good scrub.
Just be clued up when they ask you questions and be friendly – if flying with them that is.

locals will tell you more but I used to do some good circuits of the river and used to take the train up to the top station and ride back to Freo. There are plenty of groups going out and lots of WA guys on here

I binned my tyres before I came over, then bought new ones from CRC when I arrived. There are plenty of cycle paths and getting out to the Perth hills is easy enough.

I’m in Perth but I don’t ride road much as I usually prefer to ride off road.

From my limited experience though in the Northern beach suburbs lots of shops host early morning rides roundabout 6.30 on the weekends. When I go I do so with Bikeforce Joondalup which attracts up to about 90 riders split into 5 groups according to average speed doing different routes either along the coast or the near interior.

We’re pretty blessed with ocean view rides in the sun, it doesn’t rain here that much, the landscape often has a fair amount of rolling lumps, and there’s some half decent climbing in the hills.

Personally I’ve never been an early riser, I belong to the colloquial “club doona”, so the shop rides aren’t great for me, plus they don’t usually go further than about 50km because the shop needs to open. I’m sure there are plenty of clubs though, you see loads of roadies at the cafes, and there always seems to be talk about the races people are doing so I imagine that’s pretty healthy too.

I hope somebody has told you about how windy Perth is, you’ll hear about the “Fremantle Doctor” which comes in most afternoons, but less wind and traffic are two reasons why so many roadies ride early.

On the mtb side, check out the Perth Mountain Bike Club website for trails, races, and forums. There’s a fair number now of what are effectively trail centres. The trails are mostly purpose built, signed, and mostly in the hills in a spread from near Midland through to Pemberton. WAMBA are doing amazing things securing funding so the trail building has taken off, particularly in Kalamunda where I think they’re really trying to build a centre for all tastes and abilities with half a dozen additional trails under construction including black downhill runs. I think the riding quality is excellent, although you’ll have to get used to pea gravel. That shouldn’t be so hard these days since the current fashion is for wide tyres, but when I arrived I had 1.8″ for British summer racing conditions.

It would probably be an idea to mention which suburb you’re moving to so someone local can offer better guidance.

It’s a lovely 21c here in Perth today. Been out today down to Rockingham town and back along the coast path to Little England (Port Kennedy) and back to Warnbro. Sat on the busy beach (there was one other person miles down the beach).

Don’t worry too much about cleaning the bikes. I did 2 to forensic levels and they never even unpacked them.

Some good shops around, Lakes Bikes, KD Cycles and if you can’t find anything then CRC deliver in about 4 days. Hope you enjoy your stay. There’s a reason there’s so many of us out here!

Forgot to address the cleaning question!

While bikes do need to be clean, I believe they concentrate on tyres and shoes since these are the contact areas that might spread a disease or pest. Despite my best cleaning efforts they cleaned my tyres and shoes anyway, both flying and by sea container – the latter cost me several hundred dollars. I would imagine they would check if you’re flying because almost everyone goes through the red something to declare channel just in case. They’re probably not too concerned about road bikes though.

Mine got taken away by customs, cleaned and brought back to me within 5 minutes. They were very good about it, wasn’t a problem at all. Depends who you get on the day I would have thought

We had a minor problem when entering NZ – tyres were scrubbed clean but they had a bit of sawdust from diy debris on the garage floor. They were convinced they could be seeds so had to clean them again (but wasn’t a big issue).

when i went they cleaned my bike for me, and my football boots.

They were very nice and gave my shoes a clean for me one. And in NZ too!

A mate of mine was stressing about this before going to NZ – he put his tyres through the washing machine….

Oh, just remembered. Bloke who shipped out house contents told me to wipe Jeyes fluid on the tyres once cleaned. More for the effect if they happened to open one of the boxes than anything else. They did open the kids bikes but none of mine. As mentioned they also opened the box of tyres and the xmas decorations [all 10 boxes of]

Thanks for the suggestions guys, so we arrived on Tuesday night and the only question I got asked was “road or mountain bike”. They didn’t even want to see inside the box. Result!

Thanks for the tips on the rides, we’re currently in Mandurah with friends and are looking at moving to the northern suburbs at some point. We’re probably not going to be on the bikes for a while whilst we sort out all the various bits of paper work we need to live over here. Oh and I need to find a job!

I’ll drop you a message at some point and perhaps we can sort out a STW Expat Ride.

Cheers

You’re just down the road from me. Watch out for the weather this arvo as from Mandurah down to Margaret River there’s a storm warning for later today. Some amazing swell if you can get down the the beaches though.

Out of curiosity, why do you want to be in the northern suburbs? House prices and rentals much better south of the river.

I was going to say I got all of my bike boxes opened up when they were shipped here – the powerful aroma of Jeyes fluid clearly convinced them all was good and they got through no problems.

I rode home last night in the wind down the kwinana PSP, most entertaining – strange how you don’t mind getting rained on, waves breaking over you etc when it doesn’t happen every time you sit on the bike!

Agree with Aphex on the ‘burbs – there’s also not many trees up there, which makes it feel a bit odd….

Did you bring this bloody pommy weather with you? Welcome!

An expat STW ride isn’t a bad idea, not too early mind, but you may find the STW world turned on its head. I doubt you’ll see that many Fives or steel SS rigids, but you may well see loads of 29ers, especially if you go to a race.

BTW SS means a Holden Commodore V8 to most here, Australia’s equivalent in desirability to a BMW 3 series, except they’re mostly utes driven by tradies, and I secretly want one.

dual cab v8 ute ftw! cashed up bogan. 🙂