The internet is overflowing with advice on whether you should or shouldn’t clean your motorcycle tyres.
It’s not really a simple Yes or No answer. The best answer is slightly more nuanced than that.
Common sense
In an ideal world, you’ll clean them with warm water and good old fashioned elbow grease. However when you clean your bike or your rims, you’re going to get whatever shampoo or soap you’re using for the job onto your tyres anyway. There are products out there that claim to be pH neutral and safe to use on tyres, like this one from The Chemical Guys which would probably be a sensible option for notoriously difficult to keep white, whitewall tyres.
The important thing when cleaning your tyres is to use common sense. Clean off any soap with plenty of water, visually inspect the tyre to ensure it’s good to go and take it easy for the first few miles if you have actively cleaned your tyres.
Sidewall cleaning
Don’t use things like Back to Black, Polishes and Dressings (or we’ve even heard of boot polish being used?!) on the sidewall. These will likely run onto the edge of your tyre and that’s one place you really don’t want to be slippery.
The Eastern European car wash
Most petrol station car washes don’t touch bikes but even if yours does, you need to be careful about the sort of products they use and the way they clean a bike, because they tend to clean a bike the way they clean cars.
We’ve seen bikes come in fresh from the hand car wash with tyre dressing on the tyres, which they would usually apply with a big crush to a car tyre but on a bike tyre, they end up pasting it all over the tyre’s surface and not the sidewall, making it lethally slippery.
Also these car washes tend to blast the s*** out of everything and anything with a high power jet washer. We’ve seen bikes with knackered regulator rectifiers, water in the headlights and in the tank, decals blasted off, all from a high power jet-washer at point blank range.
So be cautious.
Elbow grease
If you do want to get your motorcycle tyres looking back to their best, use a bucket of warm water, a stiff brush and lots of elbow grease.
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