reid@Glacier.ARPA (12/12/84)
Dear Fred at Varian, In your treatises on freewheel cleaning solvents you neglected to mention any brand names. Chemicals for sale to ordinary people in retail stores are sold by brand name, not by chemical formula, and the government-required label disclosure requirements are spotty. My city of Palo Alto is home to some of the best bicycle shops in America. Palo Alto bicycles has a worldwide mailorder business and a huge and reliable repair service. Wheelsmith has built bicycles for the olympics, has provided top-quality maintenance and engineering service to the local bicycle racing community for years, and is regarded as ``the best'' by almost every serious bicycle racer in this area. If you walk in to either Wheelsmith or Palo Alto bicycles and ask them for degreasing solvent, they will tell you to go to a hardware store or to an automotive supply store. If you walk in to any hardware or automotive supply store around here and ask the proprietor for "degreasing solvents", he will steer you to a shelf full of bottles and cans that are all marked "petroleum distillates". Whether or not they contain chlorinated hydrocarbons, or your degreasing solvent of choice, is not evident to the average retail customer. The proprietor of my local automotive supply store tells me that Gunk is his best-selling brand of degreasing solvent. The can of Gunk says right on the front of it "degreaser". If you are trying to inform the net.bicycle public in such a way that they can use your advice to clean their freewheels (as opposed to merely proving to us that you know more chemistry than we do, which you have already succeeded in doing) then you need to be more helpful and more specific as to how someone can purchase one of these wondrous chemicals that you are recommending. I have about 10 more freewheels that I could stand to saw in half for the sake of Science; I would be happy to repeat my experiments with the specific brands of chemicals that you recommend. I would also be happy to soak a brand new $18 Sun Tour Winner 5-speed freewheel in Berryman's Carburetor Cleaner for a week or two, and then test it to see if any of its delicate parts have been damaged, as you claim they will be. Brian Reid, Stanford Reid@Glacier.ARPA decwrl!glacier!reid