Manufacturer’s Information
Category: Motorcycle wash
Type: Aerosol can, 21 oz. (595 ml)
Manufacturer: S100 Cycle Care Products
Made In: Germany
Retail Price: $9.95
Application – Spray on cool surface, rinse quickly with high-pressure stream of water until “squeaky clean”.Note: S100 Cycle Care Products is not affiliated with the S100 brand owned by Dr. O.K. Wack Chemie GmbH
Our Opinions
We seem to take more heat about products we don’t like than for products we do, which is exactly the opposite of what we assumed when we started reviewing motorcycle products about 4 years ago.Believe me, we don’t make this stuff up just to get on people’s nerves. We tell it the way we see it, after using a product as directed over several trials. In the end, it’s better to take some heat and to tell the truth. You won’t find a more detailed set of motorcycle product reviews on the Internet or anywhere else, and that’s why webBikeWorld visitors keep coming back.
So here goes…
We’re just not big fans of these “quick wash” products, whether they come in a spray bottle or aerosol. They’re expensive and none of them, in our opinion, work as well as the much cheaper old standby – a bucket o’ suds.
Heavy dirt and grime need physical action for removal. This should be done with either a clean terry cloth towel or a sheepskin (faux or otherwise) wash mitt on a thoroughly wetted motorcycle.
Spending 10 bucks on a spray can seems extravagant. We’re not sure what it really saves. Sure, it does an OK job, as do some of the other motorcycle quick wash products, but compared to what? Spray some soap on a motorcycle and hose it down and chances are it’s going to look better than it did before. But what does that prove?
S100 cautions that the motorcycle must be cool, and the S100 Total Cycle Cleaner spray must be hosed off immediately with a high pressure spray. So if you have to drag out a hose anyway, what’s the big deal about throwing a capful of soap in a bucket?
I can buy nearly a lifetime supply of liquid car wash soap for $10.00. We average about 45 grams of S100 Total Cycle Cleaner for each motorcycle wash. That yields about 12 to 14 washes at somewhere around $0.70 each on the low side.
The S100 Total Cycle Cleaner comes out in a powerful foamy spray that blasts all over everything. Lots of foamy spray “dust” in the air, so don’t use it on a windy day. It immediately starts to “disintegrate” on the surface, and must be hosed off or it will leave streaks.
S100 says to make sure the bike is rinsed thoroughly, until it’s “squeaky” to the touch. I’m not sure if it’s the polish we use, but it never felt squeaky clean to us on any of the 4 different motorcycles we washed with it.
Our advice: save $10.00 and use a hose, water, liquid car wash and a sheepskin wash mitt for the best motorcycle wash around.
Score: 2/5
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Owner Comments and Feedback
Why do I like it? Well, I have found that this product STRONGLY enhances my ability to clean my bike in several ways.
Firstly, S100 DOES do a pretty good job of cleaning my bike. I would say that it does almost as good of a job as the regular method. One can clean one’s bike rather quickly in places that you just don’t have access to a bucket and sponge, etc. When on a trip, just about any hotel/motel will lend you their hose to clean your bike.So carrying a small bottle on a road trip will allow you to continually clean your bike without a bucket, etc. If you don’t rinse the product off both quickly and thoroughly, you will get some spotting. However this is also true of most car wash solutions anyway. Hand drying the bike with a chamois or microfiber towel will also take care of any spotting.
However, where this product really “shines”, is that it can GREATLY speed up how long it takes me to wash my bike AND help me do an even better job than I could without it. It does this by easily cleaning parts and places that I either can’t clean at all, because I just can’t get my hand or an implement in there, or by very quickly cleaning many parts of the bike that I can clean but would be VERY time consuming.A perfect example of both if lies in the spoke wheels of my VTX1300S. For the most part cleaning these wheels can be done by hand, but it is not a pleasant job and quite frankly I can think of better ways I’d rather spend my Sunday afternoons (like riding for example). As well, the hubs of all spoke wheels are very hard to clean and there are certain places on my VTX wheels, like the back of the rear rotor, that are almost impossible to clean.
S100 Total Cycle Cleaner cleans the wheels, hubs, rotors, etc. both with a minimum of time and effort but still does a very, very good job. There are many other places on my bike that are nearly impossible to clean properly by hand that Total Cycle Cleaner cleans also cleans easily and quickly.
So, in conclusion, I would say that S100 Total Cycle Cleaner is a very useful product to have in your wash kit. My recommendation would be to first use Total Cycle Cleaner on the parts of your bike that are hard to clean by hand or that anywhere else you feel this product would be beneficial, and then go on to rinse, wash, rinse, and dry your bike in the normal fashion.Using this product this way would also help keep its cost per use down to reasonable levels as you may find that you don’t really get too many washes from a $10 bottle if you use it to wash the entire bike.
Additional note: Recently, I have only been able to find this product in a non-aerosol pump container, not the aerosol container that was originally reviewed. It does not come out foamy like the aerosol, but comes out as a liquid instead. However, I have found that the pump container does not have a good nozzle and is not capable of applying the product in a fine mist as recommended by the manufacturer. Instead, the product is dispensed rather heavily.As a result, I have found that you can now expect at best only 5 or 6 washes per bottle when washing the entire bike. This, of course, makes this product ridiculously expensive. Hopefully S100 is aware of this and will address this issue in the very near future.”