Removing stickers/decals from your bike frame (e.g. Surly frames)

If you, like me, are not sponsored by bike manufacturers and/or don't like all those silly decals they insist to put on their frames, you might be interested in reading this post.

I find the Surly ones to be particularly awful, with all those too-cool-for-school phrases. Luckily, these guys' decals are plainly glued on to the paint, and not clear coated. Not sure what you will have to do if you owned a coated frame - may be worth investigating!

In my case, all I needed was these items to remove a glued-on decal:

1) A hair-dryer to warm up the glue
2) A flexible plastic thingy (a credit card will do!)
3) Some ethanol-based solution
4) A rag

Step 1: hair-dryers come in useful, sometimes

Step 2: using a credit card doesn't always mean spending money

Step 3: rag and ethanol-based solution to remove glue

Step 4: a clean frame with no decals

So, the recipe, as see above in pictures, is as follows:

1) Heat up the decals with direct heat from the hair-dryer (a few seconds is enough, although this depends on your own machine!)
2) Scrap off the decals with the credit card (they fall off easily)
3) Clean up with ethanol-based solution to remove remaining bits of glue

Surly have their own advice on here