Originally Posted by
MagicHour
For a moderate level of grime it does work ok - about the same as a twisted strip from an old T shirt. For dirtier jobs though, best to remove the cassette.
Yeah it does snag, t-shirt strip less so
Having lost a bunch of weight riding, I have a big bucket of old t-shirts that used to fit me and are now just fodder for cassette cleaning these days.
I tend to pull the wheel, soak the cassette down from my giant spray bottle of simple green (or generic orange) cleaner, then run a big plastic bristled brush (intended for use with a matching dustpan) through the cassette until I'm confident it's mostly scrubbed every bit of it. Finally, laboriously pull t-shirt through each cog-space up the cassette then down again, occasionally blowing out any residual cleaner on the spokes and so on. Once I'm done with the cassette, the rest of the wheel gets a thorough wipe-down as well.
It's an ugly chore I tend to only do once every couple of months.
It is definitely nice to have the shiny-cassette feeling again, though.