Originally Posted by
cyccommute
On-bike chain cleaning tools are one of those things that sound good in theory but aren’t so great in practice. I would bet that nearly everyone who worked on bikes has one of them…in the bottom of a drawer…on the top shelf…behind the kids toys that they can’t throw out even though the “kids” are now 40 years old. They probably used it once and spent the next 30 minutes mopping up the mess.
Oh man, the on-bike Park cleaner was a revelation to me. I just wasn't going to spend $40 for one. But $5, hellyeah. Just WAY quicker for me than pulling off the chain, bottle cleaning it, then threading it back on and connecting. The only thing I need to watch with the Park is keeping it level, fore/aft, otherwise it can leak solvent out, and have a dropcloth under the chain in case any drips. But on-bike chain cleaning does not desludge the cogs, RD pulleys, or chainrings; That's why I'm going back to wax, which requires zero chain cleaning, though pulling off to dump into melted wax, but it should be a lot easier to pull it off and put back on with the chain a lot cleaner.