Cleaning Equipment

Motorbike Cleaning Equipment – Everything You Need to Wash Your Bike

You invested a lot of money, time, and energy into your motocross bike. To protect your investment, you need to maintain it as well as possible. If you ignore washing your bike after a ride or don’t clean the chain, you invite corrosion and rust to do many bad things to your bike, causing it to prematurely age and not operate optimally. That’s why it’s very important to clean your bike after every ride and maintain it properly. 24MX carries many motorbike cleaning products specifically for your dirt bike.

There are many different ways to wash your dirt bike, from the very superficial to the very thorough where you take your engine off to get to the nitty-gritty. You can get away with a superficial clean, but if you want to maintain your bike supremely well, you should do a thorough clean either once or twice a year. Regardless, one thing is clear. If you want to protect your investment, you need to wash your bike after every ride and do it within 24 hours after riding. Even though it may be the last thing you feel like doing after a ride, do it as soon as you can – perhaps take a break and get to it a couple of hours later.

What Motorbike Cleaning Products Do I Need?

• Exhaust plug or duct tape

• Airbox wash cover or duct tape

• Bike cleaning brushes

• Sponges

• Bucket

• Motorbike polish like SC1

• Dishwashing soap or degreaser like Simple Green

• Chain brush

• Chain cleaner

• Chain lube

How to Wash a Dirt Bike without Damaging It (7 Steps)

There are 7 steps to doing a thorough job of washing your bike without damaging it. The basic steps are:

Step 1: Cover and/or remove parts

You are going to need to cover the muffler, the airbox, and remove the seat. You can use an exhaust plug to easily plug up the muffler, or you can use duct tape if you’re in a pinch. Also, you should remove the air filter and use an air box wash cover to make sure that no water gets inside the engine. In addition, remove the seat. If your seat gets soaked with water, it will deteriorate very fast and you’ll ruin it. Clean your seat with Simple Green if it’s really dirty or use just a little soapy water and a sponge.

Step 2: Rinse to remove large debris

At this point, you could use a pressure washer but you must be careful to not use it too close to sensitive parts like your pivot points, your bearings and also your electrical components. A pressure washer will cut the time in half to wash your bike, but the safest way is to use a garden hose. The point of this step is to knock off large debris that is on your bike.

Step 3: Scrub with the proper equipment

Now, scrub with proper equipment such as bike brushes and the mud scraper for tough, caked-on mud. To remove the tough mud, grit, and grime off your dirt bike’s chain, sprockets, swingarm and wheels, use bike brushes. Remember to clean the underneath of your dirt bike as well. Before continuing to wash your dirt bike, it's crucial to make sure that the majority or all of the mud, dirt, and grime has been removed. Because of this, rinse your dirt bike when you're done cleaning it but before the next step. You don't want any of that debris accumulation to hang around and wait to damage your dirt bike in the following step.

Step 4: Clean with soapy water

You can use a good diluted degreasing dishwashing soap in a bucket of water for this step or any type of degreasing soap that you would wash your car or truck with. After washing away the muck, dirt, and grime from the prior step, soap up using a sponge, gentle brush or wash mitten. Use this soap on the larger parts. After soaping your dirt bike, leave it for two minutes to let the degreaser do its job, then rinse. Just be careful once again to not let any water get to where it shouldn’t be. You can also use Simple Green or some equivalent bike cleaning spray to get your bike extra clean after using soapy water.

Step 5: Clean and lube the chain

Don’t forget to clean your chain using chain cleaner which you can also find at 24MX. Prop your bike up so you can spin the rear wheel and spray the chain cleaner on it. Next, lube your chain.

Step 6: Towel dry

Towel dry off your whole bike and but be careful to stay away from the chain.

Step 7: Replace parts

Finally, remove the exhaust plug, and the airbox wash cover, replace the air filter and replace any other parts like the seat and/or the plastics if you removed them.

That’s it!

If you really want to clean your bike well, once or twice a year you could remove your engine to get to all the nooks and cranny areas.