Originally Posted by
drlogik
It was back in the 1979-1981 time frame that I was X/C racing. That was back in the diagonal striding days prior to the "skate skiing". When the temps got to 0 degrees f or below we would use Pledge on the tips and tails for glide wax, not in the kick area. We would strip off all other glide wax before we sprayed on Pledge.
I tell you what though, nothing, and I do mean no other glide wax was faster than Pledge at below zero on the classic X/C skis back then. The only down-side was that it didn't last that long. If I was competing in a 55k race I used regular glide wax.
That was what I would suspect, you can often get similar effects by using shorter hydrocarbon chans it might glide like crazy but it will wear off or evaporate really fast, It might actually been posible to get a really quick start but the long lasting effect of regular glide wax by spraying the pledge on top of the glide wax right before the start.
Originally Posted by
drlogik
The one thing that makes me think that glide wax wouldn't work is if they changed the formulation drastically since then. If they add weird additives to the waxes, they may actually gum-up the chain. If you give this a try post back here or PM me and let me know how it works out.
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I mainly think that the formulation is made to do radically different things so it would be suricing if it being good at one translate to being good at an other
Originally Posted by
cbrstar
What about a product like Squirt Low Temp chain lube? I live in Alberta also and I can't help but think a synthetic lube will work way better in the cold. If you ever poured motor oil in a car at -30c you will see the synthetic stuff flows better. When you are winter cycling the maintenance you need to do is almost weekly and I can't help but feel that boiling your chain constantly is going to get really old really quick.
I tried the regular Squirt but it is just a water wax emulsion, so it take forever and a day to "dry" not the 5 min they say it should take, so that one just turned into a sticky black mess in no time at all,
but it might actually work a little bit better in the really cold as the water would freeze, but I think that in general it would be better to dissolve the vax in a fast evaporating solvant then emulsifying it with water.
I'm sincerely impressed by how knowledgeable you are about the paraffin and beeswax properties.
Is everyone in Sweden that smart? I consider myself somewhat intelligent, have master degree in math but don't even know the paraffin formula (although I hated chemistry from the first class).
I wouldn't call myself that smart I don't have any master degree in anything
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In the end it is mostly a combination of a good memory for details, being rather good at researching stuff, having done a bit of everything, and a rather good ability to combine all that and doing somewhat qualified guesses of how stuff should work.
It took me a good while to find what the formula and what hydrocarbon chain length would be at what level of liquid or solid (check "Alkane" on wikipedia), in the end I never found anything definitive and any oil/wax will be a mixture of different length of hydrocarbons but the ranges I gave is my
estimation of about whare the lengths should be found but it is not unlikely that it is a bit off or can be narrowed down significantly.
My wax mix might not last 4 weeks (for one application). It lasted about 2-3 weeks for me last year when I was commuting to work regularly (our company switched to work from home due to pandemic). My commute is 22km (round trip).
But your road conditions might be better than ours, with better snow removal and less slash/wet snow on the path. My chain was wet after each ride.
That sounds like it last a good amount of time.
I'm curious to know about your experience with the new mix.
I just bought a new batch of beeswax and thinking about buying/trading some motor oil from neighbors.
I agree with you that even if the new mix works well, it's not going to be perfectly reproduceable unless exactly the same kind of oil is used. I'll make a small batch, just enough to dip a chain in, to satisfy my curiosity.
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I will make sure to report back any discoveries and I am also curios how the motor oil mix will work out.
Exactly. An oil based lubricant will turn into a grinding paste and will accelerate the chain wear. The only good thing oil lubricants do - is silencing the chain.
But if you can stand the sound of a dry chain then you better of riding without lubricant at all, rather than a thick oil lubricant. Would be interesting to test how long a dry chain would last ...
That would be really interesting, I wonder if the Friction Facts guy have ever thought about doing a run with a dry chain to have a baseline to compare too, the way he test them is still a bit too clean so oils will most likely work at least a bit better then a dry chain during that kind of testing but I am sure that a few of the lubes he have tested actually perform significantly worse then a dry chain.
I find that an oil lubricant can work if you use a very thin oil and oil your chain frequently (thoroughly wiping the chain before lubrication). But that would generate a ton of garbage in form of oily rags or paper towels.
Yeah, that was my experience too but even doing that, I had to degrease the chain all the time or it would just get a layer of road dust after a short while, So I decided to see if I could find a solution that would be less work, I tried the CRC moly dry lube spray but it don't penetrate into the chain at all.
I would like to test this one as it create a foam that should be able to penetrate the chain allot better then a "dry" spray but I think it will be a bitt troublesome getting it sent to an different continent.
tsmoly.com/aerosol-lubricants-chain-cable-lube-with-moly-p-179.html
found a guy that was "testing" some different stuff for motorcycle chains youtu.be/taSc61XzufQ?t=190 and he test sprayed that one and it seems like it should be able to penetrate into chains
I think that I'll soon regret saying the things above because the reaction is going to be merciless
Oh well ... people should say what they think.
It feels like all community have a huge majority of people that have decided that the only way to do something is the way that it have always been done and have newer ever reflected about if there might be a better way to do stuff.
And here's a little bonus - a page from the 1992 Bridgestone (they used to be a major bike manufacturer/distributor in US in 80's) catalog:
Nice find,
Wonder how the butter beeswax mixture turned out
I would have used Clarified butter instead of regular butter to get rid of the milk solids and the water that could only mess up stuff in one way or an other.
It is also interesting that they already at that time was pushing for for the use of petroleum free products,
I am sure that it would be posible to replace both the paraffin oil and paraffin wax with natural sourced alternatives, the only problem would most likely be to ensure consistency between batches.
Olive wax might be a good substitute for the paraffin wax as it have similar length hydrocarbon chans but it is mainly composed of two molecules that are a bit more complex so will most likely not behave in the exact same way and that might be both good and bad depending on how it actually act.
I think it is a good idea to use a wax with a lower melting point mixed with the beeswax to get a good suspension with a lower melting point wax with the oil and beeswax instead of just mixing a oil and beeswax