How To Clean & Lube Your Motorcycle Chain at RevZilla.com

howdy this is Lemmy RevZilla here to talk to you today about how to clean and lubricate your motorcycle chain you should be interested in cleaning and lubricating your motorcycle chain if you have a chain final Drive in your bike and you're interested in keeping your motorcycles chain lasting for a really long time in keeping it from becoming a safety hazard you're going to find these on all sorts of motorcycles primarily older Harley's sport bikes and just about every dirt bike ever produced while there are some bikes that use different methods of final drive transmission the chain is what we're going to concentrate on today and that should cover a lot of you guys out there on bikes now as far as the difficulty of this task I'm going to call it a one beer doron hour bsd or beard scale of difficulty most of you should be able to attack this job very very easily you should not only know how to do this but you should be doing it frequently because of the frequent surf is interval for most motorcycles typically around 3 to 500 miles it's really important that you know how to do this so you don't get stuck bringing it to a shop it can be really inconvenient to have to go into a shop for such a minor thing if you've got some basic common sense and a few special D tools you can get the job done all by yourself okay before we start tackling this task let's get a little bit of Education in you need to identify what kind of chain is on the motorcycle upon which you're working different style chains have different care and feeding techniques so to speak there's two major types of chains there's plain chains and then there's sealed chains you'll hear sealed chains talked about as oring chains or x-raying chains or perhaps even a ziering chain and long after this they'll probably be all sorts of other letters but if you have any letter + ring on your chain it's sealed and that was get treated a little bit differently let me explain the difference to you really briefly and the old days all they had were plain chains and plain chains like all motorcycle chains are made up of two types of Link's inners and outers on this chain you can see here this grey link is an inner link and this brass-colored link out here is an outer link and they made chains for a long time simply connecting the two with a rivet or a stake in between them like you can see here at some point somebody got the bright idea to help keep the grease inside of the pin and bushing cavity and keep moisture and dirt and gunk out of the chain and they did that by using an o-ring or an X ring one of these seals you see right here again this is why they're called sealed chains the only real difference there is those are applied to the pin and they sit between the plates on these basically they sit right here sealing up that cavity again keeping factory applied grease inside the chain and keeping all sorts of mud and muck roadway outside your chain it helps those especially who are bad about maintaining their chain get a little bit longer life out of things so once you've identified what type of chain it is that you have you can figure out how to clean it the reason that matters is because these seals are probably the most delicate part on the motorcycle chain itself now before I get started on cleaning the first thing I like to do is inspect the chain and the sprocket it's a good way for you to kind of examine some of the things around your motorcycle on the lower side places where most of us don't hang out all that often you'll notice to we have this bike up on a lift you don't need a lift to do this job we're just presenting this to you that way so our cameraman doesn't break his back I'm actually got this bike up on its center stand which you can see here if you've got a center stand on your bike it can be a real help you can also either take your chain off to clean and lubricate it or the other thing you can do is kind of chase it around the driveway a little bit move it forward a section and do just a section of a time at on the chain any way you do it is valid this is just going to be the simplest way for us to show this to you now when I'm examining things I'm going to pay special attention to the chain and sprockets Spurgeon's chain is looking like it's in pretty good shape here one of the things I want to check just with basic condition of the chain is physically how much plater is what kind of shape it's actually in let me show you off the bike a couple of better examples here's a nice chunk of brandy spankin new chain this is in pretty good shape if I apply any side-to-side pressure this or any compression attention this looks pretty good there's not really much slop or play now this particular chain this is seen a lot of miles look at the wear in this side to side you can see this wiggling back and forth and even if we apply compression and tension you can actually see this kind of moving back and forth and that's because as this chain was neglected over the years the round pins and rollers began to get misshapen they became ovoid egg-shaped and what that allows is again all that compression and tension you see here now if you multiply that by the entire chain there's all sorts of driveline lash that's going to make your throttle feel twitchy regardless of how much effort you put into fueling so this is something it can also make your bike ride a little bit better if you're going from a really poorly neglect chained to something that's much much better and you start taking on a little better care of things stuff like this doesn't happen it makes your bike a joy to ride so the next thing I like to examine after I'm done kind of taking a peek at the chain is also look at the master link now this bike has what's called an endless chain it's pretty common set up to come from many of the factory bikes if you look at this all of the links look the same however on some bikes there's a link known as the master link that might look a little bit something like this the exterior of these links tends to look a little bit different it'll either be a clip on the outside of the link that you know get visually looks a little bit different or you may see you might see something like some screw style snapped off pieces or you may also see rivets rivet heads that have been kind of pinned over they typically stand out because the link looks just a little bit different than the links surrounding it you want to make sure that that link is in good shape whether that's a clip style master link and you're making sure the clip is in place or it's a rivet style and you are making sure again the heads are mushroomed over correctly and they look decent you just want to give a quick double check to make sure your master link is still in place and doing its job now moving on from there I'm also going to examine this sprocket area this can be kind of important as well chains and sprockets work together as a system and while sometimes you can get away with putting a fresh chain on the older sprockets if you have to replace sprockets it's usually going to happen with a chain terrible sprockets and a new chain typically is a bad recipe so when I'm examining the sprocket there's a few things that I'm going to look for in particular the first is what I like to call shark teeth you'll notice that the teeth on the sprocket here look fairly similar from front to back on a bike that's accelerated hard maybe not decelerated very often or just a very old chain on a bike that's ridden fairly gently the leading edge right here in the teeth can start to wear as that wears but the backside of the tooth does not it gives a weird kind of a shark fin appearance you'll get shark teeth effectively now compound this situation and sometimes for those you who are heavy decelerators or perhaps you like to downshift often you may notice not only the leading edge of the tooth wearing but also the trailing edge as well when that starts to happen you'll get teeth that look kind of pointy and the reason I say they look pointees if you examine the teeth here up top there's actually a pretty decent sized flat the top of the teeth as both the front and the back side of the tooth cavity where's where the roller lays in it it sort of makes those cavities just a little bit bigger they expand more and more until the point where this flat up here disappears and the teeth actually start to look pointy and sometimes it can actually get so sharp they can cut you if you have sharp teeth on your sprocket it's time for a sprocket and chain replacement there's not really much point in trying to maintain a chain and sprocket system that's kind of already shot so inspection should be one of your initial steps as far as taking a peek at your bike and making sure everything is in good shape before you get started now we're going to get cracking on the cleaning process so I want to remind you before it was important that we identified the chain and the reason we do that is again because different chains have different sort of processes for cleaning them if you've got a plain chain the whole thing is made of a metal they're pretty tough cookies I've cleaned those before and something as harsh as gasoline however if you have a sealed chain it's most modern motorcycles do you don't want to use something like that you want to check out whatever it is that the manufacturer of your chain tells you to use on it and I think one of the things that you're going to find is that you can either use a commercial chain cleaner like we sell at RevZilla or you can also use kerosene a lot of the major chain manufacturers just recommend plain old kerosene it's gentle on the o-rings and again it'll help give your chain nice long life which is really the point of this whole exercise anyway so to get started what I'm going to do is start soaking down Spurgeon's chain and sprockets in some kerosene to get them clean this does get a little bit messy so again if you have just cleaned your bike and it's looking great you may want to remove the chain if possible then again you may not want to do that either way get the chain soaked down in kerosene so I'm going to start spraying and moving that chain and sprocket to soak this puppy down I'm not going to be shy with this stuff it's a dimes worth of kerosene I want to get this thing good and gooey the whole reason we're loading this up with kerosene is to help dissolve some of the existing lubricant and then we're also going to get the dirt particles kind of floated up so they get up to the surface and get out we're basically trying to flush those things out detergent style so you'll notice here this chain is already starting to look a little bit better and the reason it's doing that is because we're knocking some dirt off and as you do this you're going to see dirt gathering all over the place that's good thing now some of you who have exceptionally clean motorcycles can probably stop at this point you may be able to simply take a rag give it a lickin promise wipe most of the dirt and gunk off there however for those of you again who tend to use thick or heavy lubricant that can cake up or those of you who really do get out in the dirt or the dust you're probably going to need to do a little further cleaning you need to scrub this chain off there's a couple different ways you can do that again if you're rocking a plain chain you don't have to be quite so careful you can attack that baby with a brass brush and clean up every little bit on there sometimes a brass brush can even knock off a little bit of rust if it's formed on there not too bad but any surface rust shouldn't be a big deal but again if you have a modern sealed chain like this you don't want to use something nearly as aggressive as a brush with brass bristles instead something like a soft nylon brush is probably the way to go something like this for those of you who like making your life a little bit easier too you might want to investigate something like a grunge brush I have to say this is a product I really do like you can see the brush itself has three faces here so it quickly allows you to clean three of the four sides of your chain check out how easy it is to fit this puppy on here and start spinning this wheel and as I do that I'm quickly able to start scrubbing this chain clean I'm knocking the dirt in the snot right off of here and this chain is cleaning up very easily I'm gonna whip this round a couple more times just make sure I got everything on here and from there I'm going to take my nylon brush and get in this puppy and start doing the same thing on the top the face of the chain that I couldn't get to you with the grunge brush you can always flip the grunge brush over I'm actually not doing it here just so you can see you can use a regular brush if you like to and I'm trying to give our camera guy a clear view in to see what I'm doing here so I'm scrubbing this puppy down we're looking pretty good as you can see a lot of the dirt and muck is coming off this I don't mind getting the scrub brush too on that sprocket and knock off as much dirt as I can we're looking pretty good here so what I'm going to do next you can you can see here before I get to that point you can see all this muck starting to come off of this that's a great sign that's exactly what we're trying to do is get the dirt flushed out of the chain so what I'm going to do next is give us another spray with some kerosene and start drying this off again trying to float that grease out of there so to do the exact same thing and if you look below the sprocket you'll notice the big black pool of gross Ness that is coming off of this motorcycle that's great again this dirt that muck in there that's the stuff that kills chains especially those o-rings so we're doing here is we're keeping those o-rings soft and supple and removing any grit that can act as an abrasive to them look how that thing is so at this stage of the game I want to say this is a reasonably clean motorcycle chain the next thing I want to do is start drying this off you have to get all the kerosene off for your lubricant to be effective so I'm gonna get this thing dry I'm going to just use a rag you'd be SuperDuper careful here watching your fingers the whole time and that actually sort of brings up another mention I have seen some knuckleheads who have attempted to do chain maintenance on a motorcycle that is turned on sometimes look at throw a bike in gear terrible idea never ever touch your chain while your bike is on the risk is just too great change the sprockets are pretty good at injuring people make sure your bike is off regardless of how difficult this job may seem you're not gonna save any time doing it that way so as you can see here I'm drying this chain up a little bit and it's starting to look good I'm gonna give it a few more passes real quickly and then we'll be ready to start lubricating already we've gotten lots and lots of muck off of this I've cleaned up Spurgeon's wheel a little bit here I definitely cleaned up some of the gunk and muck that had accumulated on the lift and I also got the chain clean and completely dry now you can see I can actually touch this chain if you look at my hand it's completely clean that's usually a pretty good indicator that you're getting the point where you've knocked most of the snot and gunk off of the chain now we're ready to lubricate now before we get you know really cracking on lubricant I'm going to again go back to that chain ID section the video we're talking about figuring out whether you've got a sealed chain or whether you have a plain chain and the reason I'm bringing that up again is because the lubrication techniques for both are a little bit different so let's kind of talk a little bit about the old days back in the days when everybody had plain chains everybody knew that the best way to keep a plain chain living in a long and happy life was to keep a constant stream of lubricant on it the more lubricant you had in there the better off you were doing so plain chains really love a lot of grease slop a bunch of that stuff in there however for those of you with modern bikes who are rocking a sealed chain like this the lubricant serves a much different purpose in of having to load everything up with grease you're not really required to do that you're really just using a little bit of lubricant on the outside to keep rust off of things now those techniques are also going to sort of apply to what type of lubricant you may actually wind up using so there's all sorts of chain loops on the market and there's all sorts of home-brewed stuff you can use as well and everybody's got their own opinion in that respect I guess it's a lot like motor oil I like to use an item called chain wax maximum makes this stuff I discovered this when I was about 17 it worked so well I've been using it ever since now just so you know I'm not standing up here trying to pedal you stuff there's other things you can use - some of them are cheap and some of them we don't even sell one of my favorites for plain chain is chainsaw bar oil any of you folks who run a chainsaw knows that stuff pretty sticky it hangs onto a chain pretty well the reason I like to use the chain wax as opposed to something like chainsaw bar oil is that the wax is much less likely to fling so as this chain is whipping around here rather than it tossing off chunks of lubricant getting your gear dirty and possibly getting your motorcycle dirty the chain wax kind of goes on like a liquid in an aerosol form and then it tends to get waxy it's got a paraffin base in here so it's much much harder for the chain to fling off little pieces of the lubricant so let's get right into the lubing itself again when we were cleaning we cleaned four surfaces of the chain we're gonna do the same thing with the lubricant again because this is a sealed chain I don't really need to flood this thing with lubricant but there probably is going to be a little bit extra hanging out because I am gonna try and be thorough so one of the things I think makes it easy is if you take your straw and just sort of direct it onto the onto the sprocket that'll help get that top surface of the chain pretty easily we're going to get some lubricant in there kind of run this thing through until I see chain coming in that's already been hit with lube now we talked about heat earlier it's not super necessary especially with a with a sealed chain like this but some folks do like to actually bring their bike out for a quick ride to actually heat the chain up to help draw this in on a plain chain that's a valid way of doing things so I'm starting to see some lubricated areas show up there I know I've got the inside surface of this done now I'm going to work on the outside surface and this is going to get just a little bit Messier but you can see this stuff going on it's got that brown color so it's pretty easy to identify when it's actually gotten on to a couple of links and if you look in just a moment you'll see some of that brown lubricant showing back up which means we've got that side of things done as well I'm going to repeat the process to on the top of the links the outer portion of the chain and then I'm gonna give them one quick blast here on the inside as well it gets a little bit goopy you will have to probably do some cleaning when you're all done so this chain is now well lubricated in fact I would even say it's over lubricated the fact that we see lubricant pooling down below here not so bad for a plane chain but this isn't a plane chain this is a sealed chain so we're clean this stuff up and then what I'm going to do is take a separate rag here I'm just going to wipe a little bit of the excess off of here anywhere it's SuperDuper drippy so we're looking pretty good there I've got most the excess knocked off but you can still see there's a fair amount of residue on here now the last thing I have to do because I used a paraffin based lubricant is just wait a little bit for this stuff to tack up some so I can take it for a ride if you used a strictly liquid based lubricant though this bikes ready to rock and roll now if you're looking to learn a little bit more about chains check out some of our comment read articles on final drive we've got a couple there that break out what methods of final driver used on motorcycles if you want to learn a little bit more about final drive on your bike and of course if you're looking for another project to tackle jump into our playlist check out all of our great how-to videos if you need immediate help because you're waiting to take your bike out on a ride for a nice sunshiny weekend day give a holler to one of our gear geeks see us at revzilla.com or you can always jingle us on the telephone two eight seven seven seven nine two nine four five five I'm let me I'm out of here you

Channel: RevZilla

Views: 2,509,618

Rating: 4.8998718 out of 5

Keywords: How To Clean a Motorcycle Chain, How To Lube a Motorcycle Chain, How to Clean and Lube a Motorcycle Chain, review, revzilla, motorcycle, Best Way to Clean a Motorcycle Chain, Best Way to Lube a Motorcycle Chain, Motorcycle Chain Tips, Motorcycle Chain Maintenance, Motorcycle Chain Cleaning Tips, Motorcycle Chain Maintenance Tips, Motorcycle Chain Lube Tips, How To Maintane A Motorcycle Chain, Best Motorcycle Chain Cleaning Tips, Best Motorcycle Chain Maintenance, revzillatv, Lemmy

Id: XgPpLKCUlbA

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2016