Portable Cleat Cleaner

If someone has ever played in competitive sports teams, most of their sports equipment will get dirty within the first 10 minutes of playing. If they play sports such as soccer, baseball, and football, they know that cleats are no exception. Mud clings to them, grass gets stuck, and it makes one's overall performance worse. That is why in order fix this problem, my simple solution of the Portable Cleat Cleaner will keep an athlete’s cleats clean and ready to play.

To start this project yourself, you first need to gather these materials:

• one, small toilet cleaner with a handle
• two pieces of flexible steel wool
• one container of krazy glue
• 6-11 zip ties
• 1 carabiner clip

For this project, you can use any type of brush as long as the brush has a handle. I chose to use this specific type of brush because it was lightweight, durable, and had an opening in the middle allowing the zip ties to pass through easily. You need the two pieces of steel wool to be pretty flexible, as it needs to surround the entire brush, no bristles should be showing, as it will impact the effectiveness of the product. The fact that you use krazy glue is a very important part of the process, as you need the steel wool to be on the brush firmly, and any type of glue less effective than krazy glue will not work. The zip ties are used to keep the steel wool in place and make sure nothing slips of in the building process. You use the clip in order to attach it to your bag or anywhere you can for easier access and making it more portable.

If you do not have some of the materials needed, you can go to the nearest 99 Cent Store or Dollar Tree to get these items very cheaply and quickly.

Preparing the steel wool is a necessary step to building the cleat cleaner correctly. When you first obtain the steel wool, it will appear to be very circular (like in the picture above) and will be very difficult to put on the brush. However, to fix this problem you must first stretch out the steel wool. You start by separating the middle of the steel wool slightly until there is a small hole, and then you stretch it both vertically and horizontally. You repeat these motions until the steel wool is more spread and stretched out, so that it may fit on the brush correctly.

You must now apply the Krazy Glue onto your brush. You want to apply the krazy glue where the steel wool will be touching the most, in order for the steel wool to properly stay fixed onto the brush. For my own brush, I applied the krazy glue along the metal wire since that was what i wanted the steel wool to stick to. It also made it easier to be fixed onto the brush and allowed me to know where to put the krazy glue so I didn't glue anything unnecessary to either materials.

For the next step, you are going to want to apply the zip ties in a certain way. Depending on the size and shape of the brush you are using, you can use as many zip ties as you want. I don't recommend a lot of zip ties, as they will get in the way of the steel wool already on there, so use a minimal amount of them. For my cleat cleaner, I used five zip ties. My brush is shaped like a oval with a slit in the middle, so i used two zip ties on each side and then one zip tie to secure the top of the steel wool. You want to pin as much of the steel wool down as possible, and you can experiment with how many zip ties you want to put and how you arrange them on your brush. After that, you just snip the hanging pieces of the zip ties off for a cleaner look.

What you want to do for this step is basically the same as the previous steps, with some minor changes. So for the bare side of the brush, you want to stretch out the steel wool again, however you want to make it bigger than the last steel wool in order for this side to take up more space. You then glue along where the steel wool is going to be and stick the steel mesh firmly onto the glue. However, you do not want to zip tie this side. The zip ties on the other side should be keeping the steel mesh in place, and zip ties holding the steel down on this side of the brush will only get in the way of cleaning your cleats.

The next step is to fix the steel wool all around the brush. When both steel wool's are on the brush, you are going to have some loose ends you don't want. These loose ends will more than likely show up where the two steel mesh's are meeting, so what you want to do is join the two steel mesh edges together. You can either use more krazy glue to stick them together, or you want to intertwine the steel mesh and just tangle them. After this step, there should be no bristles showing on the brush, only steel wool and the handle.

While the cleat cleaner is already portable due to its lightweight, you are mostly going to be using this product if you are in a sport which requires such cleaning. Therefore, a convenient way to carry this item around is to clip it onto your sports bag. To make this item clip-on, you first loop one more zip tie around the bottom where there is a whole. If your brush has no hole to loop the zip tie through, you can just drill yourself a hole to do this step. After the zip tie is set, you pick which clip you want to apply to the brush. I had five different clips to choose from, however I went with the largest one because it would fit better onto my bag.

YOUR FINISHED!

Now that you have completed your own portable cleat cleaner, here is a video showing how the product can actually work.