Originally Posted by
redlude97
The point of posting the friction chart wasn't to argue about differences in the watt savings. It was to dispute your point that once the solvent evaporates, that the leftover wax is the same. It clearly isn't. Its also correlated with wax percentage.
While I'll agree that the two wax based lubricants aren't the same, there is nothing on that chart that indicates nor correlates to a higher wax percentage. We know nothing about the components of the mixtures other than they contain "wax". They could also contain other substances that could account for the differences in the lubricity. The chart tells us nothing other than one wax lubricant is marginally slicker than the other which would fit with having different components in the mixture.
You'd have to show me a concentration measurement of the two lubricants before I would accept that one leaves more wax than the other one.
Originally Posted by
redlude97
Since you're a chemist and I'm a chemical engineer, then would you know that water and oil don't mix without a detergent present since they are immiscible. You would also know that oils with a strong film strength and viscosity stick to the metal under the relatively low shear stress applied at the outer interface of the plates and rollers. Since the lubricant is hydrophobic there is no reason for the water to magically ingress to the inner roller via capillary action. Solid waxes do not provide this protection so water still gets into the roller and between the plates.
The lubricant is hydrophobic. The metal surface isn't. Water defines hydrophobic and hydrophilic behavior.
The water is also a denser liquid so there
is a reason and mechanism for the water to ingress to the inner roller.
You have the dynamics of the lubricants wrong. Any lubricant doesn't stay in the areas of pressure when force is applied to the chain. It squeezes out. In the case of oil, it can flow back in while in the case of wax it can't. The wax is simply too viscose to flow. The flowing of the oil acts as a pump to pump water/oil mixtures into the gaps during rain. The water doesn't "magically" move out of those areas when you stop pedaling with either lubricant. However with oil, the water is just masked by the oil sitting on top of the water layer so that the oxidation the occurs doesn't squeak. It's still oxidizing.
The pumping action with oil, by the way, pumps particulate into those gaps as well which leads to erosion of the metal due to the grinding action of the particulate which is usually harder than the steel. I hypothesize that since the oil captures particulate and pumps it into the gaps, the chain life is shortened. I would further hypothesize that there is no free lunch for the wax based (hot or solvent) lubricants because the pin/plate gap is starved for lubrication. The bottom line is that both mechanisms work to wear the chain at about the same rate so it hardly matters what lubricant you use. The only real question between wax and oil is which is cleaner?