Originally Posted by
seypat
You've also got to get yourself a cooker/ingredients and deal with the prep/maintenance both pre and post waxing. That's a lot different than bottles of brake cleaner/lube and some paper towels. Not to mention removing the chain and keeping a spare quick link close by.
I have a mini crock pot. The only ingredient you need is paraffin. There is no prep/maintenance pre/post waxing. That's the beauty of it.
Sure, it is easier to put tri-flow or whatever on your chain. It is the mess and labor after 300 miles where this pays off. Also, my drive train lasts years rather than months now, under the gritty sandy conditions where I ride. The chain cleaner sits unused. I don't even have to use one of those brushes to clean the cassette. Even my derailleur pullys are pristine. No greasy hands when I change a chain. No chain tattoos. No sand/lube grinding paste chewing on all the cassette and chainring teeth.
I have a friend who I ride with whose white carbon Trek Domane has a brownish chain-stay from all the crap he dumps all over his chain, and there are globs of filth that accumulate in his cassette and derailleur. That's just nasty.
Of course everyone should do as they see fit. If I lived where it rains all the time, I might not want to wax my chain. But it does a disservice to tell people it is prohibitively time-consuming, or that you need to put in toxic ingredients like teflon powder or molybdenum sulfide or whatever the magic ingredient of the day might be. Pure paraffin, aka canning wax, is all you need to do this.