Combing my hair….

Gloop. It gets on your chain and onto everything the chain touches and then grinds away at all the surfaces. Before you know where you are, it gets expensive – new chain, new cassette….

In the bad old days I would regularly break a chain, stick it in a tin with a load of Gunk, shake it about, rinse it and then bake it in the oven. Once it was dry and still warm I’d put the new oil on and it would flow into the bearing surfaces. Join it back up, a quick wipe and you were good to go.

Now with Campag chains it is not so easy. First of all there is the cost of the chain tool, then there is the risk that a chain which has been slimmed right down you will weaken it and then suffer the consequences Bad enough if you are in the final kilometres of a Tour stage, pretty diabolical if you are 25 miles from home.

Now you can get snap on chain bath thingies which do a pretty good job of stripping the gloop off the chain. There are two problems with them I think. Firstly, you are left with solvent inside the links of the chain and run the risk of ending up with an oil/solvent mix on the chain. Secondly, I have never been able to use a chain bath without getting spots of disolved gloop over other bits of the bike and the floor.

So my approach now is use oil to chase out the gloop. Firstly with an old cotton T-shirt I get as much of the bad stuff off the chain run.

Then I apply a liberal drop of oil to the top of each link. Then I leave it overnight. The next day I use a clean bit of the T-shirt to wipe off the excess. This is because I want oil in the links not on the surface where it will attract new dirt.

I’m not sure if this the best way to do it, but it seems to work.

A photo from the streets of New York City from my friend Nick. Typically for a large city the owner has wisely chosen to invest nearly as much in the hefty securing chain as the bike. So far, so commonplace.

However a closer look reveals that there are two chains, a second one encased in inner-tube secures the saddle.

As Nick wryly observed, ‘the advantages of a quick release saddle are not owner specific.’