Maelochs

Yeah, I am familiar with this school of thought. In fact, chlorinated chemicals are treated in the same fashion by some: Fluorine, or Chlorine, is Evil, and must be eradicated.

It is easy to see why .... but them petroleum is a lto worse and does a lot more damage. Why don't they crusade against oil? Because it is too useful, in our current culture.

Fact is not every fluorinated or chlorinated compound is equally destructive, and as with oil, how the industry handles the chemicals is key. Because industry is occasionally careless with toxic chemicals, there are problems, but the answer isn't to try to ban everything---the answer is to ban the stuff that does no good, has safer alternatives, or which is exceedingly toxic, while taking much greater care in every phase of the extraction/manufacturing process. Otherwise you get a baby/bathwater situation where stuff which is useful and harmless gets banned because it is simpler to write slogans on placards, than to actually try to explain complex but worthwhile policy.

Been there, got over that.

Maelochs

Yeah .... maybe you overthink or maybe you just don't think that broadly.

Sucks to be you if you have extreme sensitivities. I have met people who had to strip every bit of carpet out of their homes and scrub all the paint off the walls, because the out-gassing made them ill. Sucks to be them, too ... but you should not make general policy based on the most extreme exceptions.

Maybe in all that "thinking," you should have thought about getting a job which didn't make you sick?

There have been to instances in my life where the only jobs available were working in very dangerous, toxic environments. In both cases I worked just long enough to save up money to have a cushion to go job-hunting. In both cases, I ended up washing dishes, because dirty a job as that is, it is not harmful .... and it was a place to start over. If you chose to work for so long in a toxic environment that you got poisoned .... well I wouldn't have. But it was your choice.

Cyclist0105

@Maelochs

No, I did not misspeak, as Cyccommute claims. My clarification was so that those who might have trouble reading sentences might better understand the specifics, and it stands on its own merits. You guys should pay attention to the words.

Originally Posted by JAG1 View Post
I tried Organic Wax and PTFE and I like it. With a quick link, to clean just remove the chain and drench with boiling water, drop the chain in the previous wax melt (135-degrees F), then dry and rinse again with boiling water.

Geeze... yes I tried Organic Wax and PTFE and I like it. Does the sentence state that this happened in the past? I believe the answer to that question is yes. So then, to clean the "waxed chain" I use a quick link.

At least ya'll got that part right.

I find it amazing that you and Cyccommute have looked at my chain to determine its cleanliness. Have you ever ridden past power blowers that clean streets here in San Antonio in August? At 103-degrees F?

The melting point of the wax that I use is 130-degrees F. Lay down on the tarmac here on blacktop roads when it is 103-degrees F, you can fry an egg.

I promise you that that sandy grit and grime gets into the chain. Perhaps I am misstating this also.

I do drop the chain in the leftover wax in the SST 5-lb heavy 6-inch pot. and once I pull that out, I let it dry. Once it is dry, I again pour boiling water to remove excess wax. The wax inside the chain is not removed, only the excess wax. If you or Cyccommute have ever waxed a chain, you would know how much excess wax is there. Am I misstating this also?

If Cyccommute says that rinsing the chain with boiling water after the waxed chain is useless, then so be it. However, what Cyccommute actually said was:
"If you are using wax, there should be nothing in the wax or stuck to the wax that causes problems. I’ve used hot wax in the past and I use solution waxes now. There is no need for cleaning because the chain isn’t dirty."

...and what I actually said to elicit the above remark was:

"Originally Posted by JAG1 View Post
Well, when my chain was waxed, at some point I wished to clean and re-wax it, as stated.

I simply rinsed it off with a hose to clean weekly.

So, to re-wax it, I rinse it with boiling water, and re-wax it. If you simply put a dirty chain in the clean wax/PTFE, well you can reason this out for yourself."

By the way, I am quite sure that Cyccommute has no skin in your championing what you think I said. Parsing posts quotes to get a "snarky win" is beneath us all. It is no mystery as to why so many folks are permanently banned from this board. I daresay that your conversation with me would be civil face-to-face, and that is all this reply is attempting to accomplish.

Just don't twist my words on behalf of another. With Posts: 13,207 you might have stumbled across this before.

No hard feeling at all here. I try to walk my talk and when others point out "What you actually said" and copy a post out of context, it shows a lack of respect. You could have read the top quote that Cyccommute began with.

Here is the post:

"I tried Organic Wax and PTFE and I like it. With a quick link, to clean just remove the chain and drench with boiling water, drop the chain in the previous wax melt (135-degrees F), then dry and rinse again with boiling water.

10-minutes top, no black oily rags to drop into landfills.

My thinking is that PTFE cookware is likely to be more of a culprit (how many billion households the world over wax chains vs. Teflon cookware thrown away over the last 50-years).

Anyway, most, if not all, of the top lubricity liquid chain lubes contain PTFE and are simply washed away 10-20 times per year.

I fully agree with woodcraft, we all must do what we can to stop this headlong rush to exterminate all life on earth, we do not own the land and the oceans, we are merely the lousy stewards."

Anyhow, I stand by my words and try not to explain what others meant, as I cannot read minds. If you choose to suggest what someone meant and defend it by taking a quote out of context, what might that say about you? I ask, because I do not know, and do not wish to put words in your mouth.

I hope that I have alleviated any concerns expressed in your response. Obviously, the excess wax is somewhat removed, but you should know that. One would have to disassemble as shown below to effectively remove all the wax by simply rinsing (my words, not washing) the chain to remove any grit and grime embedded in the chain links. I believe that it was a reasonably crafted response designed to be helpful to the collective. Appreciate your comments...see this is Passive Aggressive, as you might recognize.

All that I am doing here is pointing out how the collective here loves contention, there are better ways for discourse. I try to pretend that we are sitting across from each other having a coffee in a friendly discussion of bicycle-related subject matter.

pdlamb

I wonder if that was the organization that tried to get the California legislature to outlaw "any chemical containing chlorine" in the middle 70s? As I recall that story (from the other side of the country), it made it through one house and went to the other before some Berkeley and Stanford chemists caught a few of their representatives before the final vote and pointed out table salt contains chlorine (NaCl), and salt is necessary for human life. Supposedly the bill was quietly tabled soon after that.

The point is that there are (way too many) people who are terribly afraid of Chemicals! and don't realize that they themselves and everything around them is also made of Chemicals! Mindlessly parroting the Chamicals! paranoia makes a person look and act silly, and isn't really a useful part of a conversation. There appears to be a minimum threshold level of exposure for every chemical below which no adverse effect is known; the Chemicals! fear is only useful in those cases where that threshold is exceeded.

(Did you know that your body also needs a trace amount of arsenic?)

c_m_shooter

It probably only causes cancer in California....

Racing Dan

I cant understand why ppl go on and on about all sorts of extremely elaborate cleaning and hot-waxing procedures, but no-one ever posted anything about the possibility of a DIY emulsion wax, like Squirt or Smoove.

woodcraft

I couldn't find any info on that. Maybe you are referring the the ban on DDT and PCBs (chlorinated compounds) that happened in the '70s. Was that mindless paranoia?

The minimum threshold below which something is not known is ignorance.

cyccommute 

And, again, why? Do you not see the problem? If you use boiling water to remove the wax, more boiling water after waxing is just going to remove the wax. Why not just skip the waxing in the middle. It would have the same effect.

The whole point of using wax is to have a clean drivetrain. Grit may stick on the wax but it does so in smaller amounts and with less tenacity. It’s also not likely to get down into the internals chain because the wax isn’t fluid.

Your wax isn’t going to melt from the heat either. You may be able to fry an egg on pavement (which you probably can’t) but your bike chain isn’t in contact with the pavement.

It can get on the chain. There’s a difference. Unlike oil, wiping off the outside of the chain will remove grit that may get stuck to the outside without pushing the grit to the inside. The wax is solid and fills the space that grit could get into unlike oil which doesn’t fill the space.

The excess wax will either flake off when riding…not a problem and it carries grit with it…or you can wipe the excess wax off while it is still liquid. I can think of no time when water is good for a chain. And, yet again, if you use boiling water to remove wax, more boiling water undoes what you just did.

Yes, that is what I said. And I have “reasoned it out for myself”. There’s no reason for what you are doing. It’s unnecessary based on years of wax usage…not hot wax but wax, nevertheless. The wax only carries surface dirt as detailed above…if it carrying any dirt at all. I’ve ridden mountain bikes in extremely dusty conditions with wax lubricant as hot as you have and never had dust sticking to the chain.

I’m not trying for any “snarky win”. I am trying to point out to you where you can streamline your procedure by getting rid of unnecessary steps. It’s a chain. It doesn’t need one hundred step process to clean and lubricate a chain. No matter how many steps you do, you won’t get significantly more life out of your chain. If the extra steps don’t do anything, why do them?

To address your banning comment, in nearly 20 years of participating, I’ve only ever been admonished once by the moderators. I go to great lengths to be respectful and helpful. I disagree without being disagreeable. I am trying to help save you some work.



I don’t disagree with woodcraft…at least not entirely. I spent my entire career studying ways towards sustainable energy. But we should concentrate on problems that are actual problems rather than chase squirrels. Calling PTFE a “problem” or saying that it is “concentrating in our blood” is a squirrel chase. It’s also far off topic for this discussion.

Part of why I comment on procedures like yours is to do the same thing…be helpful to the group. People read these posts about chain cleaning and seem to feel that they need to do cleaning with many different solvents, ultrasonicate, do multiple washes, etc. To go back to woodcraft’s point, all that extra work isn’t just extra work, it is generating waste. Technically, your boiling water rinse before and after should be treated as a hazardous waste and not just poured down the drain. Although wax is mostly nontoxic, it is a petroleum product, floats on water, and is nearly as permanent as PFAS chemicals or plastics. It could even be said to be related to plastics. Cleaning with water based degreasers generates huge amounts of waste that should also be treated as hazardous waste.

My point is that by cutting back on steps and cutting out unnecessary steps, you actually do something to “stop this headlong rush to exterminate all life on earth”, if only in small amounts. One of the goals in any modern chemistry lab is to reduce the amount of material you use, the amount of waste you generate, and the toxicity of that waste. As a chemist, I developed procedures that used less of any given solvent. If I can do a procedure (and get the same result) with 10 mL of solvent instead of 500 mL, I’ve reduced the waste and saved precious research dollars in the process. Waste disposal can cost as much as the chemicals we use. If I use a less toxic solvent…a relatively harmless salt instead of pyridine, for example…I’ve reduced the cost of that disposal as well. As an added bonus, I’ve done my part to save the planet.

When it comes to bike chains (and parts in general), using wax based lubricants removes the need for constant cleaning of the drivetrain. I also use cartridge bearings exclusively so that cuts down on the need for cleaning and rebuilding. See where this is going?

cyccommute 

Emulsion waxes are challenging. If they were easy, we would have had Squirt and Smoove 40 years ago. DIY probably isn’t going to happen. You’d need an emulsifier that probably isn’t something you could drop down to the local Ace to buy. Squirt’s SDS list it as “Emulsifiers................................: (Cas no. Proprietary)..:”

It’s not a trivial problem to get a highly water insoluble material like wax to stay in emulsion.

cyccommute 

No, it is not. There are lots of chemicals that have a minimum threshold of toxicity and even have benefit. Sodium chloride…”salt”…for example is toxic in high amounts and beneficial in lower amounts. Generally those are known and have even been tested. LD50’s (the point where half of a population of test subjects die) are known for thousands of chemicals. That’s only one measure. The health effects based on concentration for thousands of chemicals are also known.

Yes, there are some chemicals that we don’t know everything about but the only way we find out is to test them. Just standing there shouting “Chemicals!” and carrying a pitchfork isn’t helpful.

And, again, this is not germane to the discussion. To get back on point, heating wax to its melting point does not create benzene.

Racing Dan

Are they really that challenging. For instance, making hand moisturisers from readily available emulsion-wax is a popular (female) pastime. They can make it in a cookpot with a few cheap ingredients. In the metal industry, cutting fluids are more often than not emulsions too. Available by the barrel ready to mix, albeit not waxes. Just mentioning it to say that elusions for different applications are not that uncommon. EDIT: Not to mention, all sorts of emulsion waxes for furniture. Carnauba wax in emulsion for instance. Available by the gallon.

So, what makes you believe emulsion bike lubes isn't simply readily available products repurposed and marketed for and other market?

Phil_gretz

I can't believe that no one has mentioned Kekule's rings? Who remembers how Kekule had the dream about snakes swallowing their tails and rolling down a hill? This gave him the idea for the 6-carbon ring structure for the benzene molecule, with alternating single and double bonds within the ring. Anyway, I remember it...

cyccommute 

Yes. Yes it is that challenging.

“Wax” isn’t used in moisturizers. Shea butter or some other fatty acid is used. Fatty acid might work on a chain but it is subject to oxidation through either air or organisms or both. Wax, on the other hand, isn’t. Fatty acids also don’t have much in the way of lubricity and, because they can be broken down by organisms, they don’t have much lasting power.

Not uncommon but not meant to thin enough to go on and then thick enough to stay on. Emulsions have been around for eons…longer than mayonnaise…but they can be very tricky. Water and “oil” may not mix but when the “oil” is a fatty acid, they mix better. Water and hydrocabon oils don’t mix well at all.

Carnauba wax isn’t an emulsion. It is a wax with similar properties to petroleum wax. It doesn’t dissolve in polar compounds and dissolves well in nonpolar compounds. The DIY recipes I’ve found use oil or solvent to dissolve the wax. No water.

The “Don’em Postulate”. Everything new is hard because someone has already done ‘em easy stuff. I can’t really say if the wax emulsion is used in another market but the Squirt people made it into something that can be used for bicycles. I haven’t used it myself.

woodcraft

I was attempting to point to the logical problems with pdlamb's statement: "There appears to be a minimum threshold level of exposure for every chemical below which no adverse effect is known..."

With a reported ten million new chemical compounds produced each year, this would hardly be comforting, even if it made sense.

IMO, reducing use of highly manufactured cleaning products, cosmetics, food, etc. etc. is prudent,

so in that light, lubing your chain with paraffin looks like a good choice.

pdlamb

I'd forgotten about the "rolling down a hill" portion of the story. Was this the first recorded bicycle dream?

Maelochs

That's a lot of words to say that you didn't say it correctly the first time. Have a nice whatever.

Maelochs

By the way, I used to clean my chain with mineral oil before waxing, and after, it depended on how long it had been since I waxed. I am not certain that No grit can work its way inside---at some point I figure (if I waited too long) that some dirt might have worked its way inside.

Of course, mineral oil is toxic, and after I let the gunk settle and pour off the cleaner portion for reuse, the remainder is Really nasty (It can be put into automobile oil which can be dropped of at gas stations for recycling.)

I prefer to clean my chains with Simple Green, which is water-based (Oh Noes!! Dihydrogen oxide is the most deadly chemical!!) but still dissolves the old wax. I am still left with an oily paste of dirty muck .... but I figure it is mostly wax and soil, and is probably a lot less toxic .... but I have never had it analyzed. Again, just about anything can be dumped into used auto oil bound for the recyclers, because that stuff contains just about everything noxious already.

Finally .... if anyone has a DIY wax emulsion that doesn't need a chem degree to create,. please let me know. I end up doing touch-ups with a commercial wax emulsion, and I would certainly brew my own. However, as Cyccommute notes, it is Not easy to get flakes of wax to stay suspended in a an easily evaporating liquid which is not itself toxic (for instance, wax would melt in gasoline, but .... )

Wattsup

What an amazing thread.

indyfabz

Everything you were hoping for?

Maelochs

Well, chain-lube threads tend to be pretty amazing around here ........

Do you wave at passing cyclists? Are you offended if the other cyclist doesn't?

These are the issues upon which rest the fate of the universe .... I hear.

Phil_gretz

It doesn't have to be.

EDIT: I keep this around for food-safe applications. For example, when the bread maker motor is binding on the resistance of the paddle assembly within the mixing bowl. My wife alerts me to the problem, and I simply work this into the teflon-ish washer through which the paddle drive passes. Works a charm, and keeps you regular, too.

jaxgtr

I'm guess it keeps your chain regular too

woodcraft

If only there was information online about how to effectively use wax to lube bike chains

Maelochs

I think you have missed the point, the shaft, the flights, the nock .....

livedarklions

You are actually waxing wrath.