Are you tired of your old and worn bike stickers and decals? Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Whether you bought an old bike in a thrift store or customized it years ago, you may want to find an easy way to remove everything.
Guess what? I have what you need: a 2 steps method to remove any bike stickers and decals.
Let’s get started.
How to remove bike stickers and decals -Step by step
#1 – The hair dryer technique
First, you want to heat the glue under the sticker. Using a hairdryer will help you a lot, I mean, without it you won’t be able to do anything.
If you can, use the maximum power heat and start shooting at your bike sticker and go back and forth along the length of the sticker to heat evenly. After 2/3 minutes, you should feel the stickers peeling a bit when you try to remove them with a finger.
To get rid of a decal, things are slightly different, I advise you to heat the decal as explained before with and hairdryer, but to use a knife (but be careful with a metal tool like this) or a credit card (don’t use this technique on powder-coated bike parts, you’ll damage the clearcoat) to scratch your decal while heating it. Please, be careful during the step as you don’t want to scratch the paint underneath.
Once removed, the sticker/decal should leave some glue marks you want to get rid of, let’s get into it.
#2 – Removal of glue residues
If your sticker was X years old (by X I mean a lot), you should have some glue residue that is not something you want to keep. That makes the bike dirty, and I like to see my bike clean.
3 possibilities here:
Use some hot water and a towel.
Gently rub the wet towel on the remaining glue and see what it does, if the glue gradually seems to go away, it’s perfect, continue until you have a clean area without any trace of glue.
Not enough? If hot water doesn’t seem to help with you your problem, upgrade to lighter fluid.
Use lighter fluid
I’m sure you have somewhere some Zippo lighter-type fluid that you can use to remove the remaining glue.
Simply put some on a soft cloth and gently rub the bike part you want to clean. The glue should start going away.
Use Goo Gone
Well, here it becomes more specific, not everyone has one bottle at home, but at least, the goo gone is designed to remove all goo and adhesive. And I can tell you one thing, it is very effective.
If you have some, it’s perfect, apply it on the area to be cleaned, and with a towel rub gently to remove all residual glue. It shouldn’t take long before having a well-cleaned bike tube.
However, be careful with this product, I personally didn’t see any issue with it, but I heard people complaining about the fact that Goo Gone is harsher than other products and could damage some parts of a frame. Be sure to test on a small part before going crazy.
What’s the easiest way to remove stickers?
According to personal experience, my favorite is the lighter fluid technique, I use it for many purposes and it always helps a lot.
Everything removed? There you go! You have now a clean bicycle waiting for you for the next ride.
