Mini Bike First Wash: Honda ST125 Dax

Monkey see, monkey do. Now, despite being a bit of a beanpole, I'm a sucker for a compact conveyance, so stick around to see how I got on with an off-the-cuff clean of a super cool Honda Daxx minibike. Right, Honda minibike, not a monkey bike, although they do make them now. This is the Daxx, I'm informed, which is something to do with the dash hound. Apparently it looks like a sausage dog, so that's what they kind of named it. Yeah, I saw this pop up on Instagram, and despite not being a car or being particularly dirty, I thought, ooh yeah, that's a little bit of me, that tickles my fancy. So, if it tickles my fancy, I thought it may well tickle a few of your fancies. I thought with it being small, with it being pretty much brand new to begin with, it might give me the perfect opportunity to see to what extent I can chat my way through a video in the moment, because I'm falling behind here, I'm scripting the racing, isn't really, isn't cutting it with the algorithm anymore, so I need to try and, wee, just grabbing the cranzle, try and figure out a way to get the content out a bit quicker, you know, and if getting things said in the moment, or for the most part, most of what I need to say in the moment, said in the moment, that might help, you know. Either way, this is cool, isn't it? Probably a bit too big for it, but it's quite squishy. Yeah, I'll have a little go on it later maybe, a cheeky driveway ride, we'll see. But yeah, it's brand new, it's only been out a couple of times, so, you know, it's not in desperate need of a clean butt, so it was something cool to get on camera, and, you know, you don't really get to know a vehicle properly, do you, until you've given it its first clean. So I'm just, I haven't really got a dedicated plan of action with this one, I just thought basically I'll do to it what I would do if it was my own, you know, and if I'd had it for a month or so. So looking at it here, there's a bit of oil or petrol spillage on the rear tyre. Yeah, the wheels and tyres are probably the dirtiest, but, you know, it might prove to be a super easy one, it's tiny, isn't it? You know, well, it's not as tiny as the original minibike, but compared to a car it's small. But it might be a fiddly one, you know, it might take just as much time as anything else, we'll see. Yeah, I kind of want to go for a ride more so than wash it, to be honest, but, you know, it's not what I'm here for. Reminds me of my first vehicle, my 50cc Peugeot Trekker Road when I was 16. Similar size, just pure fun factor, isn't it? You know, makes the world, twist and go, makes the world feel like it's in slow motion, you know. Even if the vehicles that you're around are, you know, two, three, four, five, ten times as powerful and quick, it's all you really need. But yeah, looking forward to getting to grips with it, so stick around and we shall do just that. Right, first things first, before I get anything on the bike, I like to fill my buckets up up front. So that once I've wet the bike, I haven't got to worry, you know, spend five minutes filling the buckets up while there's potential residue and water sitting on the vehicle drying in the sun. I've got some of Cargods Proteus Pure Shampoo here left over, just because it's what I've got to hand, but it's quite decent stuff, smells amazing. Two buckets, one for the wheels, one for the body, jobs a good'un. Probably a bit more there than necessary, but might as well finish the bottle off, eh? Jobs a good'un. I quite like these square bottles, I don't know why, but they slot and stack nicely on a shelf, you know. But yeah, I need to try and get in the habit of chatting away in the moment, to try and cut down the amount of time the videos take. I know you're used to sort of big linear word-for-word narrated scripts, but it's just not working anymore. So I'm not saying I'm going to stop doing that altogether, you know, I'd still like to think at the very least there'll be a beginning, middle and an end paragraph to sort of set the tone, catch up and finish up. But, you know, everyone else does it this way, don't they? And they seem to reap the rewards, so I've got to at the very least give it a go before packing it up or whatever, who knows. But yeah, hopefully as well you can understand me, because this is the real me, you know. This isn't forced and fake and putting my posh Hyacinth Bouquet phone voice on, so hopefully you can understand me, and if not, well, you know, you put the, er, subtitles on, you know. Anyway, the Trampy Old Maguires Bucket Stick, you've been long discontinued, still going strong, apart from the handles, but, you know, they're perfect for a job like this. I don't need gigantic American-sized buckets, especially for a job like this, these slot in the boot nicely, so I shall continue to use them. And then, now I've got this Turtle Wax wash mitt design for the wheels, which is slightly smaller, well, considerably smaller than, you know, a standard wash mitt for the body, so I thought that'd probably be perfect, coupled with a couple of, you know, super soft bristle brushes. Yeah, I think I've used a bit too much shampoo in these buckets here, but I'd rather have suds dry on the surface than unfiltered rinse water, because if suds dry, as long as they don't bake on for hours, you can reactivate them, either with fresh suds or water, and nine times out of ten, in my experience, they won't leave any streaking or spots behind, so keep that in mind if you, if you have no choice but to let stuff dry on the surface. Suds is better than straight rinse water, as counterintuitive as that may sound. Brushes, easy detail brush, definitely. A couple of small and medium wheel woolies, possibly. Viking transport brush, wheels, tie walls, possibly, definitely. Super soft detail brush, yes. Standard detail brush, yes. That should be it. Might add a few more as we go, who knows. Now, I am going to be pressure washing this bike, make of that what you will, but I will be doing it on a lower pressure. This old Cranzl, obviously, you've got the adjuster on the top there, so you just kind of dial it into exactly where you want it to be, almost that, a bit more, that will do, won't it? Perfect. And when you look at this bike, the engine's all exposed right at the front, so if you were using it in the rain, it gets soaked anyway, so not too concerned, should be fine. Big dirty skips just pulled up, yoink, just to add to the ambience. Either way, we shall crack on because we've got no other choice but to. So what I'm going to do is get some of the citrus pre-cleaner on the wheels and tyres, soak, pre-rinse, see how we go from there. Now, a lot of people will probably just soak the whole bike down in one go up front, which, if you're filming things from various angles for the sake of a video, makes sense. I'm going to try and stick with the standard methodology here, so I can keep track of what's going on and not have things drying on various materials and surfaces sort of indefinitely, if that makes sense. That's a mack on the discs, discs, try and stop them rusting away, a bit from behind, a bit of time to soak, and rinse your poos off, get it from the other side, and then I think we'll go Surf-X HD APC, a bit of a brush agitation, and then a contact clean with a shampoosie, not forgetting those tyre walls which have got something on them, oil or grease or something that needs to come off. Because it's a small vehicle, I might as well go into a certain level of detail with the clean here. You know, you could slap dash it and get it done in 10 minutes, probably, but, you know, for the sake of a video I'm happy to spend a couple of hours on it and hopefully get enough content to make an alright video. So, put the sun's bucket in, I don't know, let's start with the easy detail brush, the spokes as you would with a car, you know, easy access. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the easy detail brush, the original, was originally designed for motorcycle cleaning, which makes sense if you think about it, accessing tight nooks and crannies. It's arguably more suitable for a bike than a car, you know, it's perfect for this kind of thing. Even the caliper there, boom. Let's try sort of a standard bristle detail brush just on the tyre walls here like that, as opposed to, you know, the Viking, which is a bit more all-encompassing. Let's use both, eh? So we'll get the wall itself with the standard traditional detail brush and then give it a once over with the Viking. Well, as always, these are the shots I'm getting for the video, you know, once I turn the camera off I'll kind of re-go over everything, move the bike forward and backwards and whatever, so just bear that in mind. These are kind of the shots I'm getting for the sake of you, but there's still plenty done off camera to make sure that when the vehicle's handed over or I'm grabbing the after shots, pretty much everything's been taken care of, you know. Not sure if everyone does it that way, that's the way I do it. I've got a feeling this might turn out to be far more detailed than I'd originally planned, but, oh, such is life. I mean, I'd have skipped my naffed off, wouldn't I? But no, not any time soon anyway. The sights and sounds of a satisfying monkey bike clean. A Birkenhead skip in the background. Classic. Truman Show vibes, as per. That'll do for now to illustrate the general mini wheel approach. Let's get that rinsed off. I'd get rid of them if it was my bike. Like when you're a kid, first thing you did was take the horrible looking reflectors off your bike. I did anyway. De-badging, de-reflectoring from back in the day. I think the main camera might have shut down there for whatever reason, so I'm going to go back and refoam it over just in case. Again, such are the joys. I've got no idea what panel impact ratio this is. I haven't got the time or the inclination, to be honest. Just a few glugs in the snow foam bottle and that should do it. Highly unprofessional, I know, but, you know, let's get that blasted off so we can go on to a quick contact wash. Top to bottom. See, not too much pressure. Put your willy under that if you wanted and there'd be no trouble. Keep things moving, I guess. That's the key, that's the secret. Concentrate on those bits that were sporting a bit of dirt. Contact wash on the go. Do this while you were sitting on it if you wanted. Nice. Satisfying to clean. But yeah, you quite literally get a feel for the vehicle, don't you? You know, which if you weren't cleaning it, even though it's not that dirty to begin with, you wouldn't. So it is beneficial. Full LED all round, apparently, in retro style. So no conversion necessary, no faffing around with bulbs and resistors to bring it into the modern world. Honda's already done that for you, which is nice. Round the edges. I know I've used this easy detail brush on the wheels, but let's face it, they weren't dirty. You can just sort of get in between bits and bobs gently, you know. A bit easier than you can a wash mitt. It's worth spending a few minutes at least with one. I think most people's approach with something like this would be a bit haphazard, you know. Unless you're cleaning vehicles like this all day, every day. They always get a bit awkward, don't they? Air-cooled, no fan, just fins. Ambiently air-cooled, I guess you'd say. Rinse, wet wax, towel dry, blow dry. Check I'm recording there. I do not trust this camera yet. My sparkly face in the background overexposing things. Wet wax the bits that arguably will benefit from being wet waxed and don't on the bits that won't. Re-rinse to kind of activate and spread that. Take care of any excess residue for blow drying and then towel drying. So let's quickly towel dry the main open areas first. Reduce your likelihood of spots and then we'll go in with the mini blower and just force any water out the cracks and crevices. And then, you know, with a product like this Turtle Wax ceramic wet wax, as you dry and you're effectively buffing, spreading, activating, enhancing, protecting simultaneously without having to go in and do things separately afterwards, you know. And for something like this, it's got a million and one different surfaces and materials and loads of different finishes. Just spritzing something in like an all-encompassing fashion to get it all done to the same standard at the same time makes perfect sense, I think. So let's just hop on. So towel dry, blow dry, towel dry. I think's the best approach because either one in isolation isn't going to be able to, you know, fully complete the job. It might seem a bit counterproductive using both but it's not really. It's an amazing colour in the sun, this orange. Sort of ensure everything's attended to properly. Oh, look at that. Yoink. Fail. Touched the ground. It's over. That's all washed and dried then. A couple of things I want to take care of before wrapping it up. And one is a little bit of sticker residue here. So I've got a Blit R8 Morto Finesse, a guitar removing gel. Oh, look at that. Beautiful. Everywhere. Pat a bit of that over. Be careful because these are stickers, not paint, so it shouldn't be too stubborn. So it shouldn't need soaking. It should come straight off. Scooch that a bit. There we go. A little light finger bang. Wipe over with a separate damp towel just to knock back any solvency residue. And that's that. Not a big deal but, you know, if I hadn't have bothered getting my hands on it today then that probably wouldn't have been noticed and would have stayed there for the life of the bike. Serving to look unsightly and attract dirt over time. So there you go. I'm just going to move it back out into the sun now for the final bit. Bear with me. About there. Let's have a look. Look at that. Perfection in confection. So to finish up, the tyres are still a little bit brown and semi-stained with whatever was on them to begin with. So I'm just going to take the CFX HD and just finger fettle it over and that should be enough to knock it back and give it a fairly fresh finish. Yeah, there's not a lot coming off but isopropyl alcohol can work well as well. Obviously you can't really dress bike tyres so you want to make sure at the very least they're clean, you know. Should have gloves on for this really, otherwise you very quickly become one of them manky fingernail men, you know. Yeah, I'm not happy with that. Looks naff. I mean I'm getting fussy now before grabbing the after shots but when everything else looks a-okay it's the little bits that still stick out. So let me just see if I can find a more appropriate product that might clean these tyre walls up a bit better. Nice. Gion tar that I've nicked from the owner's garage. Seems to be doing all right. It's his vehicle, it's his problem, it can be his product to solve it. So I'm just going to give everything I want over with that, follow up with some all-purpose cleaner to remove the residue this might leave behind and that'll have to be that. Didn't expect to be tar removing the tyre walls when I arrived but there you go. Will leave them a bit stripped back and naked but that'll remove the balancing marks as well. Yeah, should probably get myself some of this stuff shouldn't I? I've had that bottle of Auto Finesse Tarminator for about five years. It's just good for spot work, you know, being a gel or if you're taking old number plates off or something. You've got all the cack from the double-sided tape. Yeah, this is nice stuff so there you go then. Note to self, liquid tar remover for tyre walls in the future. I think I've seen a maths-obsessed garage using stoners, is it, tar remover on his tyre walls after he's picked the off them before he's dressing or coating them or whatever. So yeah, fair dos. Obviously works, that will have to do despite them not being perfect. You get to a point now you start chasing your tail and you go far too far than what was originally planned for the sake of a free clean, you know, that the bike arguably didn't need to begin with. So yeah, packing up and naffing off. Sparks have turned up, the scaffs are smoking weird. If it ever was to begin with, it's no longer conducive to making a satisfying cleaning video as per anyway. I mean how long do you spend on something that size anyway? Three hours, that's adequate isn't it? Who else would for nothing? No one, that's who, just me. Yeah, exactly. Boom. But yeah, actually does look a bit better than before. This thing didn't really need doing so. Yeah. Let's **** it back in the garage because I'm good like that. That's enough to be. That's. See you later.