If you live in an apartment or even a house without a garage or a garage with limited space, you know how stressful it is to constantly keep thinking about how to keep a bike from rusting outside. And to be completely honest, if your bike is sitting out in the open with nothing covering it, the rusting process has escalated by a billion in the time you are looking this up.Â
Rust is caused by natural elements, like water, oxygen, salts present in the soil, etc, being exposed to metallic components of the bike that are not painted over or protected in some sort of way.
While most alloys are protected from rust, steel is an alloy that is most susceptible to rusting. Rust is inevitable when you take your bike out for a ride and it meddles with all of the natural elements. But rust can be prevented or for the most part, have a lesser effect on your bike by doing certain things to maintain the health of your bike.
There are certain things you need to be considering before you even think about storing your bike outside. Some of them are:
Climate
This is one thing that is out of your hands and a factor that has massive control over how rapid the decaying of your bike will be. If you live in a country/region where the rain is unpredictable, you might want to rethink the whole storing outside charade.
Water is the reason why a majority of the bike parts start rusting. On the same end of the spectrum if you live anywhere close to the sea and have salty and humid air floating around you, storing your bike in an non enclosed area might not be such a good option. No matter how hard you try, there is nothing that you can do about the salt and water in the air and you will have to find an alternative to storing it in the open.
Theft
If you live in an area that is susceptible to robberies/theft, it can be almost guaranteed that someone is either going to pick the lock on your bike or just pick your entire bike up and take it away. If your neighbourhood isn’t to be trusted, storing your bike outside is not the brightest of all ideas. Considering how expensive most bikes are, it might seem like easy money to most thieves.
If your neighbourhood is a cause of concern voiced in any of the above two factors, you might want to drop the whole idea of buying a bike before you can find a place to store the bike indoors. If your neighborhood is not prey to either of those two things, listed below, are the ways in which you can protect your bike from rusting while just sitting in the open and how you can cover your bike as much as possible while not being able to take it inside your home.
Ways to prevent/slow down the process of rusting
Cover your bike
This goes without saying, even if you have to leave your bike out in the open for whatever reason, it is important that you attempt to cover it as much as possible. This will protect your bike from factors that might be carried by air.
If you have a backyard that is too small for a garage extension, you can build a small shed for your bike, it will not take a lot of your time or your money and it will also ensure that your bike is protected as much as possible while also not taking a lot of space.
If this is not an option and you are in a crunch for space because of apartment living, small backyards etc, there is another method that you can devise. You could cover the entirety of your bike with a tarp.
Bike covers are lousy and expensive and they barely live up to the amount of money they demand.
Instead, you could get a tarp used for covering goods transported on open trucks. These tarps are available in a variety of sizes, the ones sized at 8X10 inches should be enough to cover any average sized bike.
However the sizing will depend completely upon the size of your bike, if you don’t know what size to get, measure the dimensions of your bike and multiply that by two, you should have a tarp big enough for your bike. It is okay to have a tarp bigger than your bike as opposed to a tarp smaller than your bike.
Lubricate
Lube up! Any part of your bike that you might think is susceptible to damage by rusting, lubricate it and keep it lubricated at all times.
Lubrication does not only help with the overall functioning of the bike but it also makes the bike parts somewhat water resistant. Any kind of wet lube like bike grease, bike oil, specialised lubricants, etc, will protect your bike parts from possible water damage.
Remember not to overdo the lubrication because wet lubes attract a lot of dirt and while it might not seem to affect the parts a lot on the surface, the salts in the dirt, eventually accelerate the process of rusting instead of slowing it down. Make sure that you have just enough to make water slide down the parts and not be retained but also not so much that every particle of dust sticks to the parts like they were magnets.
Keep your bike dry
If there is a sudden rainshower and your bike is laying outside, make sure that once the rain stops, you go outside and pat all of the bike parts dry. Even if you have covered your bike with tarp, it is important that you check the insides for possible water damage.
There is an array of things that might have caused water to penetrate the tarp. You might not have correctly placed the tarp to cover all sides and might have left some space for the water to get in. The heavy intensive rain might have caused the tarp to tear or bend leading to water penetration. If you buy a tarp of poor quality, it might not have the best insulating qualities, this might cause the water to seep through the tarp and drip onto the bike.
Whatever might have been the reason, you checking on your bike and drying it every time you find water penetrated will effectively slow down the process of rusting. The regular checking for damage will also help you identify if there are any problems with either the tarp or the way it is laid down which you can fix to prevent any further damage that might be caused by it.
Keep your bike clean
As I mentioned before, rusting is caused by a lot of elements excluding water. A bike sitting in open air or even inside your garage can rust solely because of its exposure to the oxygen in the surrounding air, there is only so much you can do about that.
However when it comes to rusting caused by exposure to salts in dirt/soil, you could prevent it. Make sure that you have a scheduled plan for cleaning your bike. Clean your bike every time you take it out for a ride or even move places. It is a common misconception that the bike can be saved from rusting just because it is lubricated.
Lubrication protects bike parts from bike damage but it also simultaneously makes the bike parts more prone to collecting dirt as dirt sticks to the lubricant sitting on top of the surface. Therefore it is important that you periodically check your bike for any damage, clean the dirt settled on the surface and lubricate it again. This will ensure maximum efficiency of your bike and a long life for it.
Even if your bike is not lubricated it could collect dust over a period of time just like any other object does. Therefore it is important that you keep checking the bike over and over.
Paint
Paint is an amazing insulator and if there is any part of the bike that is prone to rusting and can be painted over without affecting the functioning of the bike, do it. Painting over an area is the easiest way to temporarily protect it from rusting.
Paint, too, wears off over a period of time but for as long as it does not, you can be worry free. Obviously some parts like the bike chain cannot be painted over as that would hinder the working of the bike. For those parts, you can continue using lubricants to act as a barrier against water. But for others, paint away!
Conclusion
While it is advisable that you store your bike indoors to prevent rusting to the maximum, there is more than one way using which you can minimise rusting while your bike is stored outside. It is not impossible, it just requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep.