Originally Posted by
spare_wheel
Wow...those winter tips were extremely OCD.
After reading sheldon brown many years ago I became a convert and religiously cleaned my derailleurs, casette, chain, and chain rings. Surprisingly I found that I still had to replace my chain after about 10 months and my casette after ~24 months. Now I clean very infrequently and spend a few minutes a month looking for cheap parts online. YMMV.
This is good to know. I used to not cleaning my bike much and it got rediculously dirty and I worried about parts breaking so I became a cleaning nutt. Perhaps I can now back off a little.