Cleaning the chain - best practices?

[lemonade]

Just wondering what the best practice is in cleaning the chain, as I think I may be over doing mine and damaging the chain in the process as my chain cleaner is picking up a lot of metal bits on the magnet.

The way I do it is as follows:

1) spray bit of degreaser on chain and gears, then wipe with cloth the excessive oil and dirt, I crank the chain back as I do this.

2) Fill up the chain cleaner tool with degreaser + water, then I spin the chain back so it filters through it, pretty fast dozens of times. I do this twice, second time putting fresh water + fluid in, then running the chain through water only twice, to get all degreaser off. Then lastly I get rid of all the water by spinning the chain through a cloth pretty fast until its dryish, again no oil here.

Now the above is stripping the oil off, this means the chain is being spun without lubrication so getting metal on metal contact, which won't be very good for the chain or the gears. Am I doing this wrong?

How do you clean yours?

 

[lemonade]

Interesting. Few different ways of cleaning, I think I may be going OTT with my cleaning then, I like the idea of using GT85 to clean the chain, this might be useful for interim cleaning or after wet ride, as it can be a bit of a faff giving the chain a proper clean so often.

 

[lemonade]

Changing the chain etc is fairly inexpensive. The thing that I worry more about is the chain snapping whilst riding, it can be really dangerous if your cycling on the road and you end up coming off your bike with a HGV behind you.

Also can effect gear changes, and wear out the gear cogs.

 

[lemonade]

Some great advice, I feel I'm over doing the cleaning, it's also a chore, so I am going to buy a can of GT85 and use that method next time and see how I fair. I've done over 1000miles on my KMC chain and touchwood it still is good and want to keep it that way.

Will note down the KMC chain for future use.

Cheers guys.