elcruxio

when everything is chemistry, nothing is.

Water also doesn't do anything to titanium. Unless you stick a piece of it under a water cutter.

Now I don't know what's going on there, but I've observed several times now that I've put in a rusty chain and a much less rusty chain comes out. At times a rusted chain has come out pristine. I'm not that interested on why it happens but it's neat that it does. Maybe it's some combination of heat fracturing, agitation and the effects of an induction coil underneath. But maybe you can figure that one out?


in this quote there are some fairly wild assumptions. But I believe particle size in non sticky materials isn't dictated by hardness. The wax does eventually come out. Otherwise what would be the point of even rewaxing? You could just infinitely refresh a chain with a heat gun.

How could the water add something exactly?

Also, not much sticks to the outside of the chain especially if the chain has had time to dry.


So if we still entertain the idea that the chain isn't actually hermetically sealed, can water or salt water get in? You do know how road salt works don't you?


There's just so many completely unsubstantiated claims now. It's like a reverse gish gallop.


So what ends up at the bottom of the wax puck?


It's not that small of a gap though...


but the grit had no mechanism of holding on to the waxed chain...?


Then again you go against said amateurish test results with anecdotes so...

I might. You don't know what I might or might not do.

every three days

So the point was that the chain is almost 100c when it comes out. It'll cool quickly due to evaporation. It won't take long for it to dry completely.

To my knowlege water doesn't actually wash away wax or oils without detergent. But I'm not a chemist so what do I know...

this sort of information makes me worry about the nature of the bubbles that rise out of a boiled chain put in hot wax...

This one's only off by around 0,2C so that's alright.

I suppose I could also use a meat thermometer...
some models have bluetooth now!

I just wonder how I've managed for so long with no lab grade equipment...

I've actually found this knob on the side of the crock pot. If the wax is still solid, i turn it, a light goes on and the wax begins melting. If the wax gets too hot, turning the knob the other way shuts off the light and the wax magically stops getting hotter.

It would seem that chemistry is in fact metaphysical philosophy.

luckily the waxes today are better than the waxes of yore.

All I know is that before the boiling water step my wax was dirty. After the boiling water step my wax is no longer dirty. Such a result pleases me greatly. Especially when a damp rag doesn't remove rust or salt.

Isn't mineral spirits essentially turpentine? Naphta is a lot more dramatic in the vicinity of open flames.

Oh you! Isn't this just a very elaborate strawman argument?

But the wax gets dirty and such things sadden me. Ok, my wax doesn't have additives but scraping the bottom of the puck clean is such a chore.

cyccommute 

Well that’s a classic non sequitur. The water isn’t reacting with the titanium under a water cutter. It is reacting to the pressure of the water from the water cutter.

Water doesn’t remove rust, plain and simple. What you might be observing is not “rust” or the oxides of iron but, rather, iron that has been oxidized with chloride. Iron chlorides are water soluble and look a bit like iron oxides. But iron oxide is water insoluble.

It’s only seems like a wild assumption because you don’t understand the material. Wax basically has no particle size from a melt. It does not crystallize but is more like a plastic or a gum. It is rather ductile and can be reshaped and reformed endlessly and will still never break apart into any kind of discrete particle. Chains have to be rewaxed because of the plastic nature of the wax. Pressure on the wax causes it to squeeze out of the high pressure areas at the pins and plates connection. Some of it may end up being forced out of the chain which will required added material but, for the most part, the wax remains in the chain but just not in the place where it is needed.

Yes, you could just refresh the chain with a heat gun but a heat gun has little control and you might end up heating it high enough for it to flow out of the chain or even catch fire. Putting the chain back in the hot melt is more efficient. Using a solvent wax does the same.

Water adds oxygen. Oxygen promotes rust.

Nothing on the outside of the chain has much to do with damaging the chain. It’s what is inside the chain that is the issue and that doesn’t dry all that quickly. The squeaks you hear from an unlubricated chain isn’t due to anything on the outside. The squeaks a coming from inside the house (to quote horror movies of old).

As my wife so cleverly observed this morning while we were talking about this, the idea of using wax is to seal the chain. And, yes, I know how road salts work. Do you understand the concept of polar vs nonpolar compounds? Short version: Salt is ionic. It has no affinity for nonpolar compounds like wax and oil. It will not dissolve into either in any amount. Water is polar and it will dissolve sodium chloride (and all of the other chlorides used on roads) in very large amounts. That brings up another point on why to avoid the boiling water step. Boiling water will melt and remove the wax but will introduce any dissolved salt into the chain where it can do all kinds of damage. Salt catalyzes rust.

What part is unsubstantiated? Do you disagree that chains get dirty through use?

A much smaller amount of surface dirt than you think.

I dare you to measure it. It is on the order of thousandths of a millimeter. Grit that is small enough to make it through the gap has to be that small.

No, not really. Wax on the outside of the chain falls off relatively quickly upon use. The surface of the chain may hold onto a small amount of dust through static but it’s not much nor does that happen very often. But, again, the wax is keeping the grit out of the chain because it fills the gaps in the chain and doesn’t flow.

You do seem to get my point!

Don’t go playing dumb. You know exactly what I mean. “You” could mean you personally or “you” as in people. Generally, people don’t blow on cold things to “cool” them. To do so would be silly.

And?

No. The point is that the chain cools quickly and water inside the chain is trapped in the chain for an unknown amount of time where it can introduce oxygen which promotes oxidation of the iron in the chain

Water below the melting point of the wax won’t wash off the wax. Water above the melting point of the wax…50° to 70°C…will cause the wax to melt and, because the wax is lighter than the water, will cause the wax to be removed from the chain.

That’s just air trapped in the chain. You have mentioned before that you don’t heat the wax over the boiling point of water. Any water inside the chain has a greater affinity for the steel than the wax does and will stay in place. If there were enough water in the chain to actually flow out, the bubbles would fall, not rise. Water is denser than wax and other hydrocarbons.


You’d better go recalculate that. 0.2 isn’t 20% of 100.

You really are being intentionally dense. My comments were directed to your comments about needing very fine control of the wax melt. You have no ability for fine temperature control with a crockpot. Telling someone not to heat the wax above a certain temperature with a crockpot is not something they can control…not that it matters. Wax isn’t damaged by heat.

Waxes haven’t changed significantly in the last 100+ years and certainly not in the last 40 years. Gulf Wax is the same wax as my mother, grandmother and even great grandmother bought to seal jam jars. There really is nothing to do to “improve” them.

Turpentine is a distillate of trees, usually pine trees. It is very different in chemical structure to mineral spirits. Mineral spirits are also known as “mineral turpentines” but that is because mineral spirits can be used to to do a similar job like diluting paint or cleaning paint.

cyccommute 

Gravity is caused by large concentrations of matter or “stuff”. “Stuff” or matter is just a mass of chemicals.

cyccommute 

Don’t go getting you knickers in a knot. I’m just having a bit of fun at other sciences’ expense. That said, I fail to see how the definition I presented…”the branch of science that deals with the identification of the substances of which matter is composed; the investigation of their properties and the ways in which they interact, combine, and change; and the use of these processes to form new substances”… limits chemistry in any way whatsoever. What is not covered under that definition? From Wikipedia

Mass is matter and the study of matter and all the wonderful things matter does is chemistry.

asgelle

Well then, as performance art goes, this is pretty weak.

Alan K

It seems that this thread is well on its way to the second definition of Chemistry, according to the Oxford dictionary:

2. the complex emotional or psychological interaction between two people.

[As for the gravity, you are only describing an observation, not the mechanism as to how it happens.]

Alan K

Once the chain lubrication has been discussed to everyone's satisfaction - I know, a tall order - perhaps we can start another thread about how bicyclists like to use their toilet paper rolls, paper coming off the top or the bottom of the roll and why - a detailed discussion of merits and demerits of the two ways is certainly to follow.
Surely, bicyclists do it for better (scientifically sound) reasons than the masses.

Geepig

Technically, removing the paper from the top or bottom of a roll generally only occurs when the paper is pulled off the roll sideways, and yet since most toilet rolls are placed openly rather than in contained spaces, most toilet paper comes off the side of the roll.

base2 

Due to an ongoing dispute in the Base2 household over who has to take the new roll wrapper and old roll tube to the recycling, our toilet paper comes off either the left or right side of the roll and is only accessible from the bottom. The top makes a great shelf for your phone or coffee cup while you are sitting across from it to do your business.

cyccommute 

If that is the metric, physics doesn’t have a mechanism either.

Alan K

Please note the gravity of the matter, we have already moved on to more pressing things.

elcruxio

[QUOTE=cyccommute;23126815]Well that’s a classic non sequitur. The water isn’t reacting with the titanium under a water cutter. It is reacting to the pressure of the water from the water cutter.

It's not though. You tried so hard to make this whole discussion about chemistry, but it just isn't. What's happening to the surface rust isn't known. It might be chemistry, it might be not. But what you've done is go about claiming there isn't a known to you chemistry related solution to that and so you must be correct and everyone else is wrong.

Except when you push the water with enough pressure to make it into a pressure washer. I have in no way or form claimed that there is a chemical reaction behind what's happening. That was all you. You created a mental cage of your own imagining and that's frankly not my problem.

I also don't care what the surface rust on my chains is called. To me its rust. You can go exercise chemical vernacular pedantry somewhere else. This is the bike forums. Bike language.

So a few things.

Firstly: "Paraffin wax is a solid crystalline mixture of straight-chain"

and secondly, the wax I'm currently using and the waxes I've been experimenting on turn into a fine powder in certain conditions. Am I imagining things or....?

I've read somewhere that the atmosphere also contains small amounts of oxygen. A scary thought.

If the chain actually sealed it wouldn't shift properly. I mixed a batch of wax that would seal the chain and it took 200km before the chain began shifting properly but the friction was unbearable even then.

A waxed chain isn't actually sealed from the elements. But the surfaces have a coating of wax which protect the metal underneath. However when the wax wears off, water and salt water can again begin their dirty work of rusting things.
But if we boil the chain we can of course assume that the salt gets dissolved in the water and then the whole chain gets an even coating of the now salty water. If the chain holds maybe 0,1 grams of salt and we boil the chain in a liter of water... Well I'm not bothered about the strength of the solution.

You realize that you claim this with no actual knowledge of experience. It's a guess from your part but you claim it as truth. Why? Don't you believe in the scientific method?

The roller moves around quite a bit...

It does that to some extent but it doesn't keep water out. But it does keep the surfaces protected from water.

Well it's not like the chain is left to hang about for months on end. The correct way is almost directly from the water to the wax.

If this were true you could wash wax off with just boiling water. I tried today. Couldn't do it no matter how much I tried. I dipped a spoon in some wax and then boiled it for a few minutes. When the spoon came out from the rolling boil and cooled it still had a thin layer of wax coating it. I tried putting a drop of water on the spoon during waxing it and kept it there until the wax cooled. Still had a coating of wax under the drop.
But during my testing I did notice that water in molten wax is super mobile. It flows quite readily.

Actually if that were true you wouldn't ever need soap. Oil is lighter than water so you would just need to soak dirty dishes in hot water and the oil would be removed and replaced by water.

So you book learning might be techincally correct on paper, but it doesn't apply at all in the real world.

So I'm willing to admit I was wrong on this one. You do need that 100c before you can boil the water off. But it would turn out that it doesn't actually matter one bit. Quite unsurprisingly water in molten wax just flows off metal surfaces as soon as it can. I Mentioned I did some testing today. During the water drop spoon waxing test one challenge was to actually keep the water droplet on the spoon long enough for the wax to solidify. Water becomes seriously slippery in molten wax. Your typical wetting due to surface tension just doesn't happen. In fact water is quite readily replaced by a film of molten wax.

I also poured some water in the waxing pot, tried to boil it off and then poured the water wax mixture off with some water still remaining at the bottom after the pour. If your theory was correct the water would have left "bald" spots on the bottom of the pot. It didn't. A solid coating of wax was left.

What this does with chains is that if you agitate the chain or just lift it out from the wax, all water that is able to will flow right out and drop down to the bottom of the pot. And since a chain doesn't really have any pockets to hold water, it just flows out. But to be safe it's a good idea to agitate the chains a bit before lifting them out.
It also turns out that if there's water trapped inside the chain after it cools down, that's ok too. The water can't penetrate the wax film. So when the wax solidifies any water that's exposed to air will just evaporate out anyways while the metal surfaces have a wax coating.

This is all really interesting stuff.


The thermometer I have is a pretty high quality tool. I've tried it against other types of thermometers and it's accuracy is within 0,2C

I never wrote anything about needing very fine control. If you really wanted to you could perhaps read from between the lines that the temperature range required is between molten and 100C, but 40 degrees celsius in this context is not "very fine control" in my opinion.

Wax and oils and other long chain hydrocarbons are damaged by heat. It just depends on the heat and time used.
But I still posit that crockpots have this knob on the side that lets one add or lessen the temperature if they so wish. It's not like you plop the wax in and it's all "jesus take the wheel" after that. You can regulate the temperature just like you can with a stove. The wax gets too hot, turn the crockpot down or off entirely. It's too cold, wait for a while. The crockpot is just much slower than a stove so you don't have to be constantly next to it while the wax melts. It takes mine about 1 hour to melt a kilo of wax on the Hi setting.
So if I check in on the wax every hour or so I'm golden. After it's molten I can boil the chains and dip them in.

You as a chemist should know there are tons of different grades of paraffing waxes and microcrystalline waxes. Gulf wax is just one among many.
Modern chain waxes are (luckily) beginning to slowly resemble ski waxes. Especially now Rex got in the game.
If you know about ski waxes you know there's different grades, types and hardnesses for different conditions. That's what I'm looking forward to in chain waxes.

Camilo

Why microfiber? I just use old socks, rags made from t-shirts, frayed towels, etc.etc.

cyccommute 

You keep dragging this discussion off into other points that you try to say are not chemically related. Your thoughts are a bit scattered like the above response. You are commenting on something that is unrelated to the quote.



The only reason that you can push water with enough pressure to make it into a “pressure washer” is because of the chemical nature of the water. You have claimed that boiling water remove rust but there is simply no mechanism for that to happen. As I said, you are observing something else and you don’t have the experience nor knowledge to know what that something else is. I have offered an hypothesis of what it could be but I have not seen the material so I can’t be positive of what it is. I am on fairly certain ground saying that boiling water does not remove dissolve rust.

Your prerogative. Leading a horse to water and all that.



Paraffin wax is not “crystalline” in the same way that ionic compounds and some organic compounds are crystalline. Sodium chloride for example is highly ordered with a cubic crystalline structure that makes it brittle. Sugar, an organic compound, can also be made into a crystalline structure that is brittle. Sodium chloride will naturally form back into the cubic structure if you dissolve it and remove the water. Sugar is much harder to get to go back to the crystalline structure if you dissolve it.

Paraffin from a wax melt will not for a crystalline structure as the rapid cooling does not allow for the material to be come oriented. The crystalline structure of the wax also involves far longer chains of molecules that are very difficult to order into a brittle structure like sodium chloride or sugar (or thousands of other compounds). It comes out of the melt in a much more amorphous structure that is similar to glass without being brittle. The result is a very plastic structure that is difficult to “grind into a powder”. The low melt point doesn’t help either as it doesn’t take much energy to melt the material during grinding.

If you are seeing “powders”, could they be from additives you are using rather that the wax itself?

Yup. Has oxygen. What air lacks is a vehicle to set up the oxidative process. You need a little bit of potential differential for that to happen so that electrons can flow. Oxygen in the air will eventually oxidize the iron but it is a very slow process. Water increases the oxidation reaction significantly. Add some chloride ions to the mixture and the process is turbocharged with the chloride acting as a catalyst. Chloride ions have an affinity for iron and will pluck them out of the body of the iron object. But iron has a bit higher affinity for oxygen…it’s a lower energy state…so the chloride is released and goes back for another bite. Round and round it goes until there is no more iron.


A waxed chain isn't actually sealed from the elements. But the surfaces have a coating of wax which protect the metal underneath. However when the wax wears off, water and salt water can again begin their dirty work of rusting things.[/QUOTE]

Are you being deliberately obtuse? The wax keeps most of the elements out of the chain because “the elements” generally means water and minerals from dirt. It is “sealed” in such a manner that it is difficult to get those “elements” into the chain. Some can get inside the chain, of course, because the chain isn’t hermetically sealed but a lot less material gets into the chain than if oil is used. Oil provides zero sealing of the chain at all and, in fact, serves to pump “the element” into the chain.

Um…what!!!??? I have nearly 50 years of bicycle riding experience and just a few years less than that of bicycle mechanics experience. I’ve cleaned a whole lot of chains! I’ve observed a whole lot of solvent after cleaning as well as putting my actually hands on thousands of chains…my own and those that have been abused by multitudes of people. I can reasonably say that this chain has very little grit on it as evidenced by the cleanliness of my fingers

2013-07-26 08.06.29 by Stuart Black, on Flickr

And this one has crap loads of grit on it without even touching it. (I did have to touch this bike and it was a less than pleasant job to clean it)



Have I quantified it? No. But a qualified difference is enough in this case. One has little, one has a lot.

The roller isn’t all that important nor is its movement. The roller is relatively tight to the plates as well. The gap would still be on the order 100ths of a millimeter which is still microscopic. Additionally, the roller should be filled with wax which acts as a reservoir for refreshing the contact points.

Try to keep your story straight. If the surface is protected from water, you wouldn’t have any oxides of iron that can be removed with water, now could you?


Well it's not like the chain is left to hang about for months on end. The correct way is almost directly from the water to the wax.


Forum rules keep me from properly responding to this but let’s just say that is a chicken anal effluent way of saying that education is useless. I don’t just have “book learning’”! Yes, I have a college degree in chemistry but I also have 40+ years of experience working in chemistry to go along with my 40+ years of doing bicycle mechanics. I’ve got at least as much practical experience as you do and I have more eduction in the topic at hand than you do.

Oh, really? Is this not you in post 7

Crock pots don’t allow for that kind of control.



Oh, really? Where did you learn that? Waxes, oils and long chain hydrocarbons are removed from petroleum at much, much, much higher temperatures than can ever be generated by a crock pot or even by flame. The autoignition point of paraffin is around 245°C and the boiling point is around 360°C. In air, it will ignite at 245°C if it is made into a vapor but it can be boiled in air as long as there is not the proper air/fuel ratio. It will remain wax upon cooling. Even on high, a crockpot won’t approach either of those temperatures.

Again, you are missing the point…especially in light of your “hot wax should never get to 100c” comment. The crockpot’s controls are too coarse to allow for any temperature control. The temperature will be what it is. Temperature isn’t a concern but you can’t claim to keep the wax at a certain temperature with such a crude device.

There is not nearly as great a difference as you are making it out to be. It will certainly make little difference on an already super efficient drive train like that found on a bicycle.

elcruxio

You'll remember that it was you who brought the chemistry into this and tried to limit the discussion to only focus on the chemistry. Afterwards you did a comical cop out by stating everything is chemistry. But I'll leave it at that.

You meant to say, there isn't a mechanism that you are aware of?

I don't go about spouting professional lingo to laymen. Neither should you.

Again backing to professional language semantics. Tiresome.

That might be true for some paraffin waxes and not at all true for others.

I don't use additives.

Don't go making your own terminology. "Sealed" is different from "protected".
The inside of the chain is not sealed. It is protected. If it was sealed the chain could not move or there would be significant friction.


Huh. That is a very dirty chain for it to be waxed. If I rub any of my chains there's just a few particles that come off. Some of them might be a bit gray sometimes but my fingers come off totally clean. No black smudging or anything like that.
So if that's your experience about waxing and grit attaching itself on the outside of the chain, I can understand why you'd think the gunk at the bottom of the waxing pot is coming from the outside. But it turns out we're simply discussing completely different things here as I initially suspected.


And mine have none or as close to when compared to your example.


The wax becomes pretty mobile as soon the chain is used. The rollers move freely as soon as the chain has been broken in. The point of using wax is not to have the chain full of it but to have a layer of it on all metal surfaces.

I thought you would as a chemist know that waxes aren't that hard and can shear off when subjected to enough contact with harder materials such as the cogs of a cassette or the cage of a derailleur. When the chain is used and shifted between gears the contact between the chain outer plates and shifting devices is inevitable, not to mention the contact between rollers, cogs and chainrings.
When the chain is used the wax layer gradually becomes thinner and less uniform exposing the metal beneath to the elements. At that point if there's water or salt water present the chain will begin to rust.

It also depends greatly on the harshness of the conditions on how long the chain can remain protected between waxings.

I think you knew all that but just wanted to attempt a low blow.

I'm not particulary affected by the outside surface rust but I do care about how long the inside of the chain remains protected.


Could be. But like I've mentioned before, perhaps it is that knowledge that you have that prevents you from seeing the matter for what it is.

Indeed it is. That's not "very fine control".


That's good to know. But like I said, depends on time and temperature.


I must remember to stop cooking because apparently since my stove doesn't monitor the temperature of the food I apparently lack fine enough control to do it safely. How on earth has the world survived until this point.

Oh I don't really care all that much about efficiency. As long as the drivetrain is as efficient as you get with paraffin wax, I'm golden on that front. Any more efficiency is just a nice bonus.
What I care about is waxing intervals and chain longevity especially in difficult conditions. And I can already guess your comment about chains being cheap and expendable but 12-speed chains aren't. Neither are 12-speed extra long chains you need combine from two chains. And 12 speed cassettes in XD-driver are insanely expensive.

And so far typical paraffin didn't really make the cut.

But none of the above addresses the actually important issue this all began from and you completely failed to comment on in this latest reply.

Can boiling water wash off wax? Can it make the steel beneath "wax free"?
You mentioned that boiling water strips the wax off steel and based that on lightness, affinity or whatever. My testing doesn't support that at all. In fact I've found that it is exceedingly difficult to completely remove wax from metal surfaces with just boiling water.
I also noticed that water doesn't wet metal surfaces if there's molten wax present. The water will slide off any metal surface if given the opportunity (ie. tilt) and flow to the lowest point it can find as the wax is lighter than the water.
So after boiling a chain and putting it in molten wax all of the water will be removed at the latest when the chain is lifted out of the wax and left to solidify.

jadmt

I have about 300 miles on this chain so far since last waxed and about 1800 since it was first waxed and still is quiet and smooth shifting. no mud but some wet riding. that is rubbing hard between fingers and thumb. One of the benefits I guess of an 8th grade eduction (see what I did there) I am guessing if I knew all the chemistry behind this my fingers would have been dirty...

cyccommute 

I brought chemistry into this discussion because the discussion is about chemistry. You may not think so but what other branch of science covers dissolving a solute in solvent. If you want to dissolve something, you don’t go asking a physicist.

No. I meant what I said. There are ways of removing rust through the use of chemistry…there it is again…but boiling water isn’t going to do it. If you have a mechanism for dissolving rust with water that is unknown to millions of chemists, iron makers, machinists, etc., please, by all means, present it.

I dumbed it down as much as I could. You are into the “sticking your fingers in your ears and singing ‘la, la, la, la, la’” phase now. I’ll agree that the discussion is tiresome but not for the reasons you think. Telling a professional chemist with decades of experience that he doesn’t understand chemistry when you aren’t a chemist gets old.

Nope. Paraffin can be ground under certain conditions to a finer particulate. Once melted, however, it doesn’t go back to a powder. If it did, it would be useless as a lubricant.

You mentioned additives earlier in the thread and you talk about experimenting with various materials.

I’m not making up my own terminology. You are limiting the meaning of to “seal”. There are various levels of sealing something against the elements. If done right, wax inside the roller is sealed against water and dirt infiltration. Bicycle bearings use “seals” all the time and they aren’t locked into place to do so.


It’s a clean enough. And that chain was not cleaned previously to my touching it. It’s an in-use chain. As to grit on the outside, I’m the one arguing that external grit isn’t that much of a problem because grit doesn’t stick to the wax.

Completely missing the point. Your comment was that I don’t have the experience to know how dirty a chain is. Examples were provided to show the opposite.


This just illustrates that you have no idea what you are talking about. The space inside the rollers is filled with wax as it sits in the melt. When you remove the chain from the melt, the wax hardens on the outside very quickly.
That leaves a significant amount of wax inside the rollers. The roller will move freely because the wax is soft and plastic (easily deformed) but the wax will remain inside the rollers. The wax will never be mobile which is why wax is used. It doesn’t flow. It can be pulled a bit like taffy but it doesn’t move nor flow in a way that can be described as “mobile”.

That lack of flow is also one of the problems with wax. Once it is pushed out of the pressure points, it doesn’t flow back like oil would. That’s why waxed chains start to squeak after rain. It isn’t because the wax is “washed off” like so many say. It simply can’t flow back to the pressure points so rust can start to form at those exposed places. Oil flows back into those pressure points but it carries with it the grit it picks up from the outside.


Yes, I know all that. You are the one who both complains about the elements rusting your chain and says that the chain is protected against the elements. Can’t be goth.

Not as low as the “book learning’” thing.

Knowledge, in my long experience as a scientist, does not get in the way of understanding. Quite the opposite. You can run down my “book learnin’” all you want but I have more knowledge and experience about what is going on with lubricants than you do. Many of your comments illustrate that you have no idea what is happening nor can you explain them.

It “depends on time and temperature” if you have an infinite amount of time at the temperatures we are talking about. Wax isn’t degraded at the boiling point of the wax which is far above the melt point.

Again being obtuse. Your stove has much, much finer control than a crock pot. Even the burners on top have finer control.

cyccommute 

My chain is clean enough for my purposes. I don’t need to eat off it. I can make my chain that clean but there is really no need…just as there is no need to clean a new chain to the point where it could be used in a clean room prior to waxing. There is no benefit of making it that clean.

jadmt

see that is where we totally disagree....I can change a rear tire without gloves and then take a leak with out getting my unit greasy......see simpleton minded folk like myself look at the world completely different than people like you. I am 100% serious there is no way you could fit into my world and no way I into yours and because of it the world is a better place and Silca will keep on making money selling hot wax. Hot example if we were riding together and I got a flat I would would pull my wheel and whip out my Park patch kit and you would say whoa wait you should use a rema kit as it is the only one that works and I would be like dude I have tubes that are still holding air for 10 years that were patched with a Park kit.......then you would tell me but it will eventually fail as it is not chemically the proper bonding agent or something like that.....our brains think totally different and that is ok...but remember your purpose is not everyone's purpose.

cyccommute 

I can clean a chain cleaner than you could ever clean it using my knowledge of chemistry. I can go through multiple cleaning steps that make more chemical sense than anything that has been presented by Silca, Zero Friction, or some yahoo with an 8th grade education (see what I did there?).

My point is that all of those steps are completely unnecessary. The difference between you and me is that I know why the extra steps are unnecessary and a complete waste of time, chemicals, and money. My results would be exactly the same as the elaborate cleaning steps people do…i.e. clean drivetrain compared to oil, less mess with regard to oil, less need to clean constantly compared to oil, and similar mileage compared to any other lubrication system. The only difference is that I can do that without having to do a lot of extra unnecessary work.

I’m not against waxing. I’m just against unnecessary work purported to absolutely necessary for a brand new chain. While a new chain from the factory may be coated in a wax lubricant, the chain has been cleaned much better during the manufacturing process than you can clean it at home. It simply doesn’t need the amount of cleaning that people purport it does. If the chain were a used chain that had been lubricated with oil, yes, use a multistep cleaning system…although several rinses with mineral spirits would be all that is needed…prior to waxing.

New chain? Nothing really extra needed.

As for changing wheels, I don’t get my hands dirty when fixing flats because I can do it without handling the chain at all. Even the example I gave above of an absolutely filthy bike, I took the wheel out and put it back without having to handle the chain.

elcruxio

No one was discussing dissolving anything before you blew in like the kool aid jug frothing at the mouth about dissolving and chemistry...

Sigh...

I guess I'll just have to keep repeating this. I have no Idea what's the mechanism behind what's happening.

Oh ok then


yup. I've tried various different types of waxes. I haven't tried any additives ever nor have I ever stated that I have. If you believe I use additives you need to work on your reading comprehension.

A seal typically prevents water ingress etc.
you could argue that you can seal a material like seal wood fibers with varnish etc. but that wasn't the context here. Protect has a far more suitable definition for this situation.

O-ring motorcycle chains are sealed. Wax can't accomplish the same effect.

Do you think my chains aren't in use chains? They never get that dirty. That's oiled chain levels of crud.


This is unfortunately just an assumption of what's going on...

correction. A waxed chain will begin squeaking after several rides in the rain.


Sadly you are right. I had to leave my goth days behind. At least the clothes. The music stays forever.

Anyways, what are you talking about? Are the concepts of time and gradual wear foreign to you? It sure seems like it.

so what does that book learning tell you about wax being able to be washed off by boiling water alone?


If you can't imagine how one would control temperature with a crock pot you're beyond help.