Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 7/1/84; site Cascade.ARPA
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!hplabs!hpda!fortune!amd!decwrl!CSL-Vax!Cascade!reid
From: reid@Cascade.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.bicycle
Subject: Re: Re: Freewheel Maintenance
Message-ID: <121@Cascade.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 10-Sep-84 16:27:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: Cascade.121
Posted: Mon Sep 10 16:27:54 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Sep-84 01:47:44 EDT
References: <423@astrovax.UUCP>, <105@Cascade.ARPA> <235@varian.UUCP>
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 60

> The previous author on freewheel maintenence makes several 
> statements that beg for comment:
> 
>(1) Kerosene, gasoline and carburator cleaner are not the best materials
>    for de-greasing bike parts....Look instead for degreasing solvents.

I've been a serious amateur bike mechanic for 16 of my 34 years, and I've
tried everything, and carburetor cleaner works the best for cleaning a
freewheel that you are not going to disassemble. Its chemicals are caustic
to skin, but not to metal or plastic. As a matter of fact, it comes in a
metal can with a plastic lid. If anybody wants to get into a disagreement
about this I will happily go dig out my organic chemistry reference works
and post descriptions of the solvents used in these various cleaners and let
people judge for themselves. I have done a lot of research on the issue of
solvents, and spent many hours studying the chemistry of them, and I have
come to the conclusion that carburetor cleaner works the best of any
commercially-available preformulated solvent.

>(2) I too have seen the grease injector from Phil Wood
>    and really question its utility.  ...  I've been training hard
>    and racing bikes for 12 years so my freewheels take alot of torture. I've
>    had a couple of the freewheel bodies for 10 years and have always used 
>    light oil only, but frequently. (Tri-Flow is my current lubricant)

Ah, we are back to what I think of as The Classic Problem with bicycling
information, namely that bicycle racers dominate the information available
in the literature. There is so much more to bicycle enjoyment than bicycle
racing; bicycle racing is not for everyone.

I will grant that bicycle racing places heavy demands on bicycles, and that
the technological advances in bicycle engineering have been motivated almost
exclusively by demands from the racing (or loaded touring) community. But
there are millions of people out there who don't get their jollies out of
racing bicycles (as you do) or out of fixing bicycles (as I do), but out of
riding them around.

If I were maintaining a racing bicycle I would lubricate its freewheel with
Tri-flow (teflon in aromatic solvents). I would also not clean the freewheel
of a racing bicycle in carburetor cleaner, I would take it apart, clean the
pieces in my ultrasonic cleaner, wash them in acetone, dry them, spray them
with Tri-flow, reassemble them, and wipe the excess tri-flow off the
freewheel with a cloth dipped in acetone. I would do this once every few
weeks.

But I want the bicycle that I ride to work, that I bomb around town in, that
I go for bagels and Chinese food on, to be as maintenance-free as possible.
I want to lubricate the freewheel and then forget it for a year.  In my
first article on this topic I made the assumption that anybody who needed to
ask how to clean a freewheel was not a bike racer but a bike user, so I
didn't tell him how to prepare a racing freewheel, I told him how to do a
low-maintenance easy-effort cleaning job on a commuting freewheel. I've had
my Phil Wood grease injector for about a year now; I've probably injected
100 freewheels with it. Most of them belong to friends, to Stanford people
who bring their bikes to my periodic bike clinics, etc. I haven't heard a
single complaint so far. I was glad to hear from the respondent who lived in
Oregon who told me that Phil Wood grease gets unacceptably viscous in the
winter, because we don't have any winter around here and I've never
discovered that.

	Brian Reid, Stanford