6. Windex
Price/Value: Pennies per use/3 (cheap isn’t a good value unless it works well)
Effectiveness: 2.5
Ease of use: 3.5
Cleanup: 5 (what cleanup?)
Overall: 3.5
Pros: You probably already own it, not as slippery on your floor as soapy water.
Cons: It’s not as slippery on your tire, either.
Windex, like soap, is a product commonly found in most households; the expense of using it as a dirtbike tire lubricant when tackling a tire change is almost incalculably small. It’s not as slippery as a 20:1 mixture of soapy water, however, and it dries out almost as quickly, but it leaves nothing behind to clean up and there’s no mixing to do. Our bottle’s spray nozzle was an on/off design, and didn’t allow selection of a narrow, precisely aimed squirt. While this resulted in a lot of wasted overspray, it was inconsequential. We don’t think the advantages (over soapy water) of a slightly slower drying time and zero mixing/cleanup effort outweigh the fact that this is the least slippery choice here. The whole idea of using a lubricant is to lubricate, and Windex just doesn’t deliver as well as the others. Before this test, we’d never used Windex as a tire lube, although we’d heard about people doing so forever. Now we’re even more puzzled by this, given the superiority of other handy options.
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