While toothbrushes are great for scrubbing the smaller, fiddly areas on a bike, even the “hard” brushes aren’t really up to scrubbing off months of grease and road gunk.

As I stood and stared at my road-schlop-encrusted mountain bike this weekend, I started to mentally prepare myself for the task. I had my bottles of environmentally-friendly degreaser to my left, my shop-grade paper towels to my right and my legions of splayed old toothbrushes behind me.

Just before I was about to start, my wife (who spends her days scraping and cleaning plaque-encrusted teeth) asked, “would a denture brush work better?” Since neither of us wear dentures, my response was, “Uhhh… I dunno. Maybe? What’s a denture brush?”

Well, I’ll tell ya… denture brushes are like mega-toothbrushes with a horn. They’re also the perfect schlop-encrusted bike cleaning tool. This pastel blue little baby scrubbed six months of hardened crud off the chain, the derailleurs, the freewheel, the cranks, the wheels and the frame. And, it’s still ready for more. The little horn-brush on the end worked perfectly for cleaning around the derailleur high/low set screws, and the thick hard bristles easily held up to all the freewheel and cog teeth.

Now, I can’t wait until the next cleaning (which, like in the dental world, only happens about every six months…) because I’ll be ready!

Of course, now that my dentally-wife had this wonderful idea, she’ll probably come up with some other bright idea, like using floss on the freewheel teeth…

The brush collection

Denture brush closeup

Derailleur cleaning