Clean sweep

I went and washed both of my bikes today.  They certainly both needed it; neither had been washed well over the winter.

The hybrid was just a god-awful mess, covered in salt and dirt.  And I hadn't cleaned it at all.

I washed it pretty well, but now need to put the road tires back on, fix the front brakes (they somehow ended up misadjusted after cleaning), and replace the chain (getting rusty, and I put it off until I was sure the snow was finished).

The road bike I hadn't done a whole-body cleaning in quite a while, but I had washed the drive train recently.  So I expected it to be... not great.  But it was just horrible.  The brakes were really bad, which wasn't a surprise.  But the cassette was also terrible, which was.  And there was crud around various parts of the body, none of which was horrible, but none of which was a surprise, either.

Anyway, doing a really thorough cleaning (basically, the only things I would have liked to have done, but didn't, involved disassembling the brakes and derailleurs) took quite a while, but things look really nice now.

My only regrets are that I didn't do it sooner, and that no one but me will be able to tell how good a job I did.  Still, it felt good to get it done.

I made a lot of use of Gear Floss to clean the brakes, derailleurs, and cassette (didn't want pull that one again).  I've used it before, but I made much better use of it this time.  So much so that I think the pieces I used might not be terribly useful again (generally speaking, they can be cleaned and re-used, but these were both filthy and somewhat shredded).  Oh well; if so, they will have gone in use, rather than in disuse, so it's hard to really complain about that.