How often should you clean your chain

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By cleaning I mean wiping off all the crud picked up in the last few
days, lubing liberally, leaving to soak for five minutes, then wiping
off all the excess. Takes about ten minutes.

That's not cleaning. That's decoration. Wiping off the crud isn't a
bad idea, but you're missing the stuff that's deep in the links, and
that's the stuff that does damage.

Taking chain off, soaking in paraffin etc; well I've yet to do that. My
chain feels pretty silky smooth so I'm not too worried.

On my commuter (mainly dry weather, because I don't have enough faith
in Sydney drivers to like riding in the wet, but the odd wet day) I
seem to get somewhere between 500 and 1000km before I need to do much.
There might be the odd relube in that, but I'm fairly sure the last
clean I did only washed off the initial lube, and that was at least
1000km. It was pretty grotty though.

On my MTBs I've had to clean the chain after 10km before. That was a
*very* silly ride. Normally it's about every 100-200km, depending on
what I'm riding through.

If you have 2 chains in rotation you can pull one off, chuck it in a
kero bath, then hang it on the wall to dry. Meanwhile put chain #2 on
and lube it up. Because both chains are wearing evenly they'll match
the sprockets longer, meaning you can get more than twice the normal
life of a single chain (since the sprockets will probably be pretty
worn out by the time two chains are getting dead). Of course, my
commuter gets the hand me downs from the good bikes, so the sprockets
and chains are already pretty cactus. Hence the lack of care in
cleaning...

Dave - who could point out the chain cleaning guide on 26", but that's
too much effort.

--
Dave Hughes | |
Like most computer techie people, I'll happily spend 6 hours trying to
figure out how to do a 3 hour job in 10 minutes. --Rev. James Cort