How To Use WD40 On Your Bike (And How Not To!)

foreign [Music] from bike tips in this video we're going to be telling you how to use WD-40 on your bike chain and also how you shouldn't so before we speak about how you can use WD-40 on your bike chain it's important to understand what WD-40 is and where it came from so WD-40 stands for water displacement 40. the number 40 is the amount of times it took to perfect the recipe it was originally created by either Norman Lawson in 1953 for the rocket Chemical Company in the United States of America it was a trade secret for many years and very few people knew about it and it didn't even have a patent on for a very long time but in 1961 the company called themselves WD-40 and released it to the general public where it became the household item for everyone whether you were trying to make a squeaky hinge quiet or just generally wanted to loosen some rusty bolts it was the perfect solution so there's quite a few ways that you can actually use WD-40 on your bike chain and there's also quite a few ways you shouldn't use WD-40 on your bike chain so let's speak about them now [Music] so the first way you can use WD-40 on your bike chain is for cleaning so w40 not only is great for water displacement but also getting rid of dirt and grime and degreasing to a certain extent so many people assume the best way to clean a chain with WD-40 is to spray on as much as you can all over it and then literally wash it off with water when that is definitely not the way to do it the best way to actually do it is to literally spray some WD-40 on a cloth like so and literally run the chain through it itself this is going to pick up all the dirt and grease and it's going to put it onto a cloth you can see how much comes off from what looks like a fairly clean chain in general you're going to have to keep repeating this process for quite a long time but eventually you'll notice very little dirt and grime coming off that chain and that's when you know it's nice and clean with the use of WD-40 [Music] so the next way you can use WD-40 on your bike is to remove rust so just say you've been out for a bike ride the weather conditions weren't ideal your bike got absolutely soaked you rush home you Chuck the bike in the garage and then you go and get yourself sorted and forget about it you come back to it a few days later and that chain is covered in surface rust well don't worry WD-40 can get rid of that the best way to do this is to actually remove the chain itself you're going to want to put it in a small tub soak it in WD-40 and then literally leave that for about 10-15 minutes to settle in then you're going to want to scrub that chain with either maybe a little bit of tin foil or a wire brush and that rust is going to come off really easily once you've done the best job you can you're going to want to wash that chain down with soapy water get it back on the bike and get some proper bicluber oil on foreign you can use WD-40 on your bike chain is to improve the efficiency of the components around the chain so typically most bikes have a front and a rear derailleur this is what controls the chain around the cassette and the chainrings so these derailleurs when you typically wash your bike you don't really pay a vast amount of attention to you wipe the front down to make sure it looks shiny and that's normally about where most people are at but these derailleurs over time do get caked with mud they take a lot of use and they do start to become less and less efficient every so often what I like to do with WD-40 is to literally spray my derailius down get it all inside the spring remove the jockey Wheels literally get all the dirt and grime out of them with WD-40 before washing them down with water and some soap literally to get them back on the bike the difference is incredible you wouldn't believe how much more efficient my shifting is purely just from giving it a very deep clean with WD-40 it works best on mechanical you're going to want to be a little bit cautious if you're using electronic group set but try it and you will notice the difference so the next thing we need to talk about is how not to use WD40 on your bike so the first thing and I see it all the time is people using WD-40 to clean their brakes yes I know it makes them really shiny but it is the worst idea ever so brakes on bikes whether they be disc or Rim rely on friction so the pads grip a surface such as the rotor or the rim and it uses that friction to slow down quickly and effectively w40 firstly eliminates that friction so your braking time is much longer than it originally would be if you didn't have we40 on the system the next thing it does to those brakes is it contaminates the whole system so the minute you get WD-40 on your discs or your pads you're gonna have a bit of a job getting that off you're gonna have to use a lot of disc brake cleaner and you're probably going to have to replace the pads in general it's a really good idea guys when using only 40 on your bike to keep it as far away from the brakes as possible and if you are close just be really cautious so the next thing you're going to want to really avoid doing with WD-40 is using it as chain lubricant so a lot of people do they think oh that's okay WD-40 stops my door hinge just squeaking so it's going to make my chain Line run efficiently when it doesn't you put it on it's going to be fine for probably the first few miles the first 10 minutes of a ride but it dries up extremely quickly so then it leaves your chain unprotected and unlubricated what's also worse about WD-40 is it removes all the original oil you might have had on there as well so it's kind of a lose-lose situation so a lot of people do but we don't recommend using WD-40 as chain lubricant foreign is WD-40 not we40 so w40 actually don't just make the spray they actually make a very wide range of products and some of those are designed just for bicycles so when people say I use WD-40 on my chain it doesn't necessarily mean they're using the spray it could be one of the other products the products they make are they have a wide range of lubricants from dry lubricant wet lubricant and even a spray on lubricant which is excellent but you do have to be careful not to get it on those disc brake rotors the next thing you'll find is they do a foam cleaner which a lot of people that read the blog and watch these videos seem to highly rate and finally they even do a bike Degreaser which is excellent foreign Ty on your bike chain properly thank you so much for watching the video today guys make sure to subscribe for more bike tips videos stay cool

Channel: BikeTips

Views: 168,479

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Id: SEb5uGMFvuA

Length: 7min 45sec (465 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023