Bike 7 Care Pack

Like many, I've dragged the winter bike out of the shed and started the ride, clean, ride, clean routine, and thankfully the Bike7 Carepack has made it an easy cycle to follow. It contains a simple range of cleaners to make your dirty bike shiny again, you just have to provide the brushes.

I'm not renowned for my bike cleaning skills – it's too fiddly and if I've just spent four hours riding around in the cold and wet the last thing I want to be doing is messing around with a hosepipe when I get home.

Find your nearest dealer here

Buy this online here

The Bike7 Carepack kit does make it a pretty quick job, though, and thanks to the high-powered triggers and spray cans you can do a decent job without having to be too thorough.

So, what do you get in your little goody box?

You get two bottles of degreaser, and thankfully more imagination has gone into the ingredients than the name. First up, you cover the drivetrain in DEGREASE, a silicone-based aerosol which is no different to that used in many engineering and mechanical cleaning applications. It's impressive, though, and will clean the dirtiest of chains with little effort.

Keep the nozzle close to the chain and fire short blasts otherwise you'll end up spraying it everywhere. Wipe the worst of it off with a cloth and job done. It's not as thorough as a chain cleaning tool for getting into the plates and pins, but for a quick clean up it's pretty good.

Next up is the CLEAN. This is water based and with its lemony smell it's obviously a citrus-based cleaner. The mild formula is suitable for every type of bike-related material so it can be sprayed liberally over the whole bike from the trigger-equipped 1l bottle.

It's strong enough to remove the majority of road dirt, though the really dried on stuff does need a bit of agitation from a brush or sponge. It won't remove oil or grease either, so you'll have to use DEGREASE for that.

After a quick rinse and a dry, the SHINE & PROTECT silicone-based spray can be applied to the frame and components. It displaces any water left in hard to reach parts and coats everything it covers in a thin, water-repellent film. Once you've let it dry and given it a quick buff up with a cloth the shine looks very much like a polish and it gives a depth of colour to any paintjob.

The best thing, though, is that film makes cleaning dirt and everything off the next time you wash the bike so much easier as the dirt can't stick to the frame. The coating lasts for a good week, or less if it's raining hard, so it's something you need to apply regularly.

The final application is the chain lubricant, of which you get two very self-explanatory 500ml spray cans: LUBRICATE WET and LUBRICATE DRY.

They're both PTFE-based lubricants, with the WET being a weightier version, but saying that they are both very thin liquids, much lighter than an oil-based version.

The spray nozzle and straw applicator make the job straightforward as you can direct the liquid to the edge of the pins and chain plates. Both lubes need to be left for 10 minutes after application to allow everything to settle in.

Through the summer months the DRY version worked well in keeping the chain smooth and squeak free. I have a couple of bikes that never see any rain whatsoever, so I was only adding a drop of the Bike7 once every couple of weeks, and was certainly impressed with how little dust and stuff was sticking to the chain. The PTFE leaves a sort of waxy finish which isn't tacky at all.

Now that the rain has turned up, a switch to the WET version has shown equally impressive results with, again, very little in the way of crap and crud sticking to it. The finish means the chain cleans easily and only on the wettest of rides have I had to reapply it as soon as I've got home.

So, Bike7 scrubs your bike up pretty well indeed, but it uses a lot of chemicals to do it. The amount of skin irritation and environmental contamination warnings you find on the back of each tin might not be ideal if you value your own wellbeing or that of the land around you. That's not to say I had any health concerns from using it, but if you're sensitively skinned I'd say gloves are a must.

The price of £34.99 seems pretty decent value for the kit. You could make one up from various brands and no doubt save a couple of quid here and there, but the Carepack has everything you need all in one kit. Some at this price point offer a sponge, brushes or a bucket, and while it's not a deal breaker a receptacle to keep all of the products in would certainly have kept things tidier.

Overall, the Carepack offers a good selection of products and a sensible price to make cleaning and maintaining your bike pretty straightforward. I would have liked a bucket and a sponge chucked in for the price, but on the whole I'd be happy to splash the cash.

Verdict

Effective bike cleaning kit at a sensible price, but could be costly to the environment