Essential winter bike checks
Winter is the most demanding season on your bike. The weather brings all manner of dirt and grime with it, and the pervading wetness that characterises the UK in autumn and winter means stuff sticks to your ride until you wash it off.
That means if you want to keep your bike working as well as it can during the darker months, you're going to need to put a little effort in. It's nothing major, but bad habits like throwing a wet bike straight into the garage will begin to take their toll as the weeks pass. We've put together a short guide with a few things you need to think about if you want to keep your bike working as well as it can through to spring.
Clean it
If there’s only one thing you do to look after your bike during the autumn and winter, then that should be cleaning it regularly. When the weather is bad – and especially when the surface is wet – all sorts of stuff gets caked onto your bike when you ride. If that isn’t cleaned off then it starts to grind when the moving parts - chain, chainrings, cassette and jockey wheels – are in motion.
Even if you don’t fancy giving your bike a full clean after every ride (although that wouldn’t hurt) rinsing down and re-lubricating the drivetrain is important for keeping everything working smoothly and will make all your components last longer. But don’t use a pressure washer, as keeping your drivetrain clean is great, but if you force water through the seals of all the bearings while you do it, you’ve solved one problem and caused a more labour-intensive new one.
One way cleaning can be made easier is using something like Finish Line’s Super Bike Wash. This stuff you just spray onto the grime, leave it to work for a few minutes, then wash off. It does a very good job of shifting dirt, and means that washing a bike is nice and easy – perfect even for those who are really adverse to washing their bikes.
But do remember – if you’re running disc brakes – that anything on the rotor’s braking surface can cause a rather annoying squeal when you brake hard, so it’s best to stick to a proper disc brake cleaner (like this one from Finish Line, for example) for your rotors and pads.
Lubricate it
Once it’s clean and dry, lube that chain. You don’t have to go crazy, but make sure that the chain is well coated and that it’s running smoothly across the cassette. The more your chain needs lubricating, the louder it’ll be.
Oh, and don’t be that guy who covers their cassette in lube. That’s a waste. Just stick to the chain.
Check your tyres regularly
You’ll probably want some hardier tyres to ride through Winter – and we’ve compiled a list of our favourites here – but checking those tyres regularly will help them last longer.
Just because a tyre hasn’t punctured doesn’t mean it’s okay, and riding though the wet and grimy weather just increase the amount of rubbish on the road that can attach itself to your tyres. You don’t necessarily have to do it after (or before) every ride, but it’s worth checking the tyres over every now and then for cuts or small stones/pieces of glass/whatever that’s embedded into the tyre. Anything that’s stuck in the tyre is a puncture risk – all it takes is for you to roll over something that pushes it through the tyre – so you’ll want to remove anything you find as soon as you can.
You can also adopt the old superglue trick, which is sealing back up small cuts in the tyre by filling them with superglue. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but filling those cuts isn’t going to hurt.
Check your brake pads, too
For the same reasons as your tyres, brake pads pick up all sorts of stuff when you’re riding in or after bad weather. With disc brakes this can mean grinding noises and wearing away your rotors quicker, which isn’t ideal, but with rim brakes you’re wearing away the rim which will end up being significantly more expensive.
Again, you don’t have to do it after every ride, but periodically checking your brake pads for anything that’s lodged in them is a smart idea. Grinding noises when you brake is a good indication that there’s something in a brake pad that shouldn’t be there.
Remember to keep an eye on chain wear
Components wear quicker during the bad weather because, well, weather. But if you keep an eye on your chain wear you can make sure that you maximise the lifespan of your drivetrain.
The good news is that figuring out chain wear is literally a five minute job if you use a chain checker. If you don’t have one, it looks like this, and we already have a blog with the experts at Park Tool showing you how to use one.
Because chains stretch over time, as they wear they don’t move around the chainrings and cogs as accurately as when they’re new. That causes the teeth on those parts to wear, and that’s how not changing your chain can become expensive if you ignore it long enough, as you wont just need a new chain, you’ll need a new cassette and chainrings too.