I was being facetious. I understand that iron is a major component of steel.

However, water is a major component of tequila, and they are not the same thing by any stretch.

An iron chain would have to weigh pounds to achieve the equivalent strength of steel.

its all still ferrous

Except in water the sodium ion is off playing footsy with all those cute water molecules - swappin' electrons back and forth and completely ignoring the carbon chain that brung it to the dance;)

Ah but tequila is just water with tasty bits in it ;) And it has far more tasty bits than iron does to make it steel;)

so what your saying is, in order to snag some fine sodium ion, and swap some electrons I just need to be H20, hmmmm... wheres an outside the box plastic surgeon when you need one

But sodium ions are really bad boys. They take your OH and leave you to go play with other waters. They'll just break your heart;)

The stuff to watch out for is dihydrogen monoxide - it's almost everywhere. Lots of details at http://www.dhmo.org/

The number of deaths caused each year by dihydrogen monoxide every year is staggering. When will the government act to save us from this menace within our midst? Fortunately, my masters' in chemistry has equipped me well to deal with the wily monster.

I think washing a bike in water and detergent or any product that turns grease into soap is a bad idea.

Ask your wife of girl friend why she doesn’t wash her hair right after she gets a perm.

Why would you remove all the protective oil and lubrication from your drive train and take it down to bare unprotected metal when all you really want to do is get the dirt and grit out?

If you have a non-plated chain then it is going to form a thin coat of rust in just the time it takes to dry once all the oil is removed. That rust is very abrasive and will mix with the new lubricant that you add.

The solution to all this is a product that is perfect for us, WD40. It comes out of the can under pressure and can be directed in a small focused stream that will dissolve and flow away the grit. It is formulated to displace any water that is trapped inside the links of your chain and is designed to inhibit rust.


As to the recent turn of this thread…. Steel is not iron with bits in it to make it stronger. There is no iron in steel. Steel is made from iron ore in a blast furnace that blows oxygen into molten iron to add carbon atoms to its chemical structure and change it into steel.
Other metals in small amounts are added to steel to make all the different types used in manufacturing, this is called alloying. All the various types of stainless steels are a class of steel alloys, so they are all ferris metals, but most are not magnetic.

The reason that hair isn't washed after a perm is that the sulfur compounds used during the process need time to complete reaction. Washing the hair after application removes the sulfur compounds and leads to incomplete curling - and angry women:eek:

While I agree with you that rust is abrasive, removing the oil and lubrication from the metal by water soluble detergents isn't going to happen in your backyard. Water based detergents just aren't that efficient without mechanical means. Also there is nothing magical about the lubrication added during manufacture of the chain. It must be refreshed often anyway. Complete removal, using solvents, would only require application of more lubricant. If water is used, the water should be displaced to avoid rusting. But the process of air oxidation of iron isn't so rapid that you need to do it immediately. A few minutes won't hurt.

WD40 is a solvent that will remove all of protective oils that you want to keep. True it will leave behind another protective oil but it is one that isn't that good and will only serve to dilute the lubrication you should add after cleaning anyway.

An alloy is a homogeneous mixture of elements where some elements can be metal or nonmetal depending on the alloy. It is made when the metals are liquid and, as with any homogeneous mixture (also known as a solution), the components of the mixture can be separated by physical means because no chemical reaction occurs during mixing.

Iron ore is commonly iron oxide with an oxidation state of either II or III (more commonly know as rust;) ). During refining, the iron in the iron ore is reduced from an oxidized state to the ground state where it becomes elemental iron; a ductile, maleable, conductive metal. When in the molten state, other elements - both metal and nonmetal- can be added (alloyed) with the iron to form a metal with different properties. During this process, however, the iron does not chemically combine with the other constituents. There is no, for example, iron carbide formed. The iron exists as elemental iron and the carbon exists as elemental carbon. The way that we know that the iron is present as elemental iron is that chemical compounds, where the oxidation state of the metal is changed, result in compounds that are crystalline, brittle and, for the most part, nonconductive. This is also why steels (unless they are stainless) rust. The iron present is in the ground state and can be oxidized.

Stainless steels are magnetic unless they have a high nickel content. However, these are rather exotic and not commonly used on bicycles. If you were to use a magnetic on a bicycle, anything that the magnet will stick too will probably rust in the presence of water.

uh.. dude, I don't even know where to begin.

What you are saying is basically true but the way you are stating it is misleading and probably means nothing to a layperson. My degrees are not in chemistry but I do have one in metallurgy, and a more understandable way to express the way an alloy structure exists at STP is that its expanded metal matrix allows molecules of other elements to enter and then as they cool traps them in place and by this mechanism the whole takes on different properties. The only way to remove them is by melting down the alloy. You can’t just pick them out with tweezers as your ‘by mechanical means’ implies.

Referring to carbon steel products as Iron is just wrong in all of modern industry, perhaps it is the norm among those that eat at the periodic table, I just don’t know.

There are many types of stainless steel, and almost none of them are used in bikes. The gun industry uses many types, most food handling machines make extensive use of it, and it is used where atheistic is valued over strength. The fairly new development of Maraging steel as an available product is of course the contradiction as it is classed as a stainless.

Non of this is relevant at all to how you should clean your bike. Telling people a bunch of crap to distract or derail the thread away from it’s original point is as ludicrous as calling water by some obscure technical nomenclature, unless your only purpose is to confuse the poor nobs that don’t know any better.

Don’t worry man, It's ok to be confused.



It's not that hard… Water is the enemy you displace it with a product that is designed to do that, WD40.


Once you introduce carbon into the latis structure of metallic iron it becomes steel and is no longer iron. Even though it is comprised of elemental iron molecules and carbon on the molecular level.

If you are focusing on the molecules you can’t see the big picture.

you guys and your molecular chains :D

i am going to one up all of you and start taking my chain off and lay it in bed beside me at night

:rolleyes:

WD40 is also awesome to have around the garage along w/ a lighter. You know, to kill those pesky black widows...

Anyway, I usually use whatever commercial degreaser is available at the bike shop. It's much more convenient than running inside for the dishsoap. After a shake down I use WD40 for the that water displacement trick. Then comes the Tri-Flow

God, I LOVE Tri-Flow

All these beautiful women in your avatar and you're still lonely at nights.....*shakes head* what a shame.

those would be fantasies...

shall i send you a ticket to kirksville, missouri?

I have 64 stainless steel items on my bikes

And you miss the little picture. The iron in steel has not undergone any change that makes it not act like iron. It still oxidizes. It still atracts a magnet. It is still Fe. I'm so glad I switched from engineering to chemistry in college, so now I'm not completely clueless.

That's like saying a pinch of salt in water make the water no longer water! The carbon exist as descrete carbon atoms which has only limited solubility in the iron itself. At 723C, the maximum solubility is reached at 0.02% in alpha ferrite and it is 2.08% at 1148 C in austenite. But in both cases the carbon is dissolved in the iron as a solution. You can go look at the phase diagram here. You will notice that throughout the diagram and text they refer to the carbon in the iron as a solution.

As for the blast furnace, carbon is added to reduce the iron ore to iron metal. The carbon conbines with the oxygen present in the ore to form carbon monoxide which will be outgassed from the ore, leaving you with a reduced iron with zero charge. The iron (with small amount of carbon contaminant) is then used for alloying with other metals to make steel. Even then, the 'steel' produced is iron with other stuff dissolved in it. It's physical properties have changed but the physical properties of all solution change from the solvent when a solute is added. If you look at a chart of iron alloys, you will find that the level of added materials add up to a very small percentage of the total mass.

I made a joke about using water based solvents and components containing iron. Steel contains iron and is, for all intents and purposes, iron itself. It rusts, is magnetic, has similar properties and is almost pure elemental iron. Someone with a degree in metallurgy should know this. To say that there isn't iron in steel is far from misleading, it is in fact untrue. Just because something is dissolved in the iron and that some of the physical properties have changed doesn't mean doesn't mean that the iron went away. It is still there. Even if you were to form new compounds between iron and say oxygen (rust) the iron is still there. The form has changed but the element is still present.

The steel is a solution, a solid solution, but a solution nevertheless. It happens to be a solid but there is nothing that says a solution can't be any of the physical forms of matter. You can have liquid solutions, gaseous solutions, solid solutions and plasma solutions. The physical properties of the solutions change with the addition of solute but the components still retain their identity because they are not chemically bound together.

You also need to work on your reading comprehension. I did not say that the components could be removed by 'mechanical' means. I said they could be removed by physical means. Chemical bonds do not need to be broken. The alloying components can be remove by melting the steel. That is a physical process not a chemical one. For a simple analogy, think of milk. If you were to work hard enough at it you could remove all of the components of milk and end up with water and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you mixed them back together you would still end up with milk. Now look at an egg. Fry the egg. You have now done chemistry on the components. No physical means exists to reconstitute the egg. You can't get it back to yolk and albumin.

Steel is like milk. You can take the stuff out and put it back forever and you will still have an iron solution of components called steel. But if you do chemistry on it - say oxidize it - you don't have steel or iron (base metal anyway) anymore. You must do chemistry to get it back.


If I were to order 'iron' for an experiment and someone sent me a material that is 98%+ iron with some contaminants in it, I would still call it iron because, for all intents and purposes, it is iron. It will react like iron. It will conduct electricity like iron. It ductile like iron. It is maleable like iron. Steel is just a name that people use for dirty iron:D In fact, for the most part, there are fewer contanimants in steel then there are in common mineral water and we still call that water.

As a metallurgist, I would think that you would be very familiar with the periodic table since all but a handful of elements are metals. Sure we chemists use the periodic table a lot but we use just the upper right hand corner. The rest belongs to you guys.

If you will go back and reread what I wrote, I said that if you use water based solvents or detergents that you need to get the water away for components that can rust. Those components contain iron and will corrode, will they not? I did not derail this thread into a discussion about whether steel contains iron or not, did I?

When you put salt into water you no longer have fresh water.

We in the real world make a distinction between fresh water, brackish water and salt, or seawater. They are all water but are different enough to the creatures that live in them to be distinguished. You cannot for example put a cichlid in a marine tank and expect it to survive even though the salt is only in suspension in the water. A fish that breads in the brackish water at the mouth of a tributary can no longer propagate if the flow of runoff to the sea becomes restricted and the water becomes too salty. Their are exceptions to this, like the Salmon but that is not the norm. And even though the human body needs both water and salt to survive, one can not drink salt water.

In today’s world we make distinctions between materials and products with naming conventions. If you take a pound of iron to the recycler you will get a different price than if you take a pound of high carbon steel. We give them different names because they have different properties and are used for different things.

To a new age black smith who, through his art is keeping an ancient tradition and skill alive there is a world of difference between steel and an iron blades.

Beyond the transformation from pig iron to steel there are other processes that change the very nature of steel without changing it more than very slightly on the elemental level. Carbon steel can be case hardened (surface hardened) and with the addition of traces of manganese and silicon can be further hardened by heat treatment.
Steel can be hardened by quenching from high temps in a variety of different bathes, brine, oil etc. It can be aged at very low temperatures to impart different qualities to it like better machining characteristics etc. All these steps change the steel and with every change the nomenclature of the steel changes also.

When we order a tube set for a bike we ask for 4130, Tange, Prestige etc. we don’t ask the supplier for some iron tubes. Even angle iron isn’t really iron, it is low carbon steel.

If you call a steel supplier and say I want steel, they will ask if you want cold rolled or hot rolled steel. If you ask for iron, they will most likely say we don’t carry iron pipe try a pluming supply. If it is a very large supplier and they do carry iron product, the question then becomes do you want cast gray (graphite flakes added for machinability) or cast ductile iron (nodular iron, or SG iron for strength). Cast iron is the nomenclature for Fe that has been alloyed with carbon and silicon and has graphite added. It is supplied as cast.

We can get into the minutiae all you want but in the end, steel is a solution of iron and other metals and nonmetals. To say that steel contains no iron (a statement you have made) is wrong. Plain and simple. No chemical reaction nor atomic tranmogrification has taken place to make the iron something else. It is still iron. It may not have the same properties as pig iron (which, by the way is the iron from the blast furnace which already has carbon in it) but it is still iron.


And as for water with salt in it, it is still water. It has something which has modified its properties but it is still mostly water. Simple physical methods will make it water again, just like relatively simple methods will make steel iron again.

I did change your wording “physical means” to the more physics text correct “Mechanical means” and didn’t feel it was necessary to point it out to every one, but since you mention it.

Just to be sure I’m not misleading any one I am not a metallurgist by trade it was just one of the rungs on the academic ladder oh so many years ago.

For all of the rest of you that are reading along, I hope you are having as much fun as we are.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am arguing on the side of proper naming conventions and wanting to refer to things as to how they are used, and he is arguing on the side of the nature of things and wants to call a jack a jack, regardless of how many eyes are showing, and no mater whether it is in a bridge deck or a poker deck.

So here you have two guys that both love to play devils advocate and are probably both laughing while standing and sprinting for the line, I know I am.

Every discipline has it quirks and preferences and magnets do mostly stick to stuff made from ferrous metals except for, ta-dah Stainless steel.

The elite forces use survival knives that by specification are to be non magnetic so their options are stainless steel a poor choice and magnesium a really poor choice. I think mostly they chose mag because its so much lighter and they don’t care that it wont hold an edge because they never have to cut any thing with it.

After reading all of this I have made a decision. I am going back to work, I need to rest my brain a little. :D

So, will tide hurt the bike or not?

In changing the wording you have shown that you don't understand what I meant. Mechanical means can mean physical means during separation of materials to obtain the components. For example, using forceps to remove pepper from a salt and pepper mixture. But in a chemical sense, physical means are any methods that don't require the breaking of chemical bonds. In the salt and pepper example above, that would mean adding water to remove the salt and leaving the pepper behind. The salt could then be recovered by evaporating the water. For steel, this could mean resmelting it to remove the added materials. Not being in the business of regularly recovering stuff from molten metals, I'm not sure how to do it but it could be done with physical methods alone.

You are thinking physics and I was talking about the physical world - not physics.

The naming conventions for iron alloys are not universally applied to all alloys. Steel is just a short hand word applied to iron solutions. You could just as easily call 316 stainless steel, 316 stainless iron. Iron alloys are the only metal alloys that I can think of where you don't use the name of the base metal. Aluminum, titanium, gold, silver, zinc, copper, etc are all refered to as the base metal and usually a number for the grade. You certainly wouldn't say that 7075 aluminum isn't aluminum would you? A Specialized M4 frame is said to be an aluminum frame eventhough it would more properly be called a ceramic reinforced aluminum matrix. It's not even a solution but an heterogeneous mixture of metal and boron fiber. But we still call it aluminum. 14 carat gold isn't called anything other than gold even though it has been alloyed with other metals to improve its strength. It's still called gold.

Magnets stick to some grades of stainless steel. Grades with more nickel in them (as mentioned previously) are not magnetic. Others are. Try sticking a magnet to any appliance that has a stainless steel cover and you find them all magnetic. They all have low nickel contents.

And what, exactly, does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

We are really veering off course now;)

Bottom line: Yes, you can wash your bike with detergent (if the original poster is even still hanging around). Dry the bike and relube the chain and any other bits that have iron in them (aka steel bits). Don't let water sit on these bits too long or they will rust, just like any other iron bits (aka steel bits) would.

the fact is you said "there is no iron in steel"

that is completely dead wrong, and just about every 6th grader knows this.

No. Most household detergents are mild enough not to cause any damage to the paint or components. Just dry and relube the chain (where most of the steel :D bits reside). If I were washing my bike - something I don't do very often :rolleyes: - I'd probably take the chain off and clean it in a solvent bath anyway, reinstall and then relube it. Thank you Sram for the masterlink which make this all soooo much easier;)