roiikka

Wondering if this'll save me 5$ here and there as I work on alot of old bikes. 99.9 percent kosher food grade that is. Pharmaceutical. I buy it off amazon by the quart.

Thanks in advance!

bboy314

I dunno, but I’ve been saving money by vaping tri-flow myself.

veganbikes

People are always trying to cheat the system just use a bicycle lubricant they are designed for the purpose and not super expensive if you don't want them to be. There is a reason well beyond marketing for getting a proper bicycle lube.

3alarmer 

​​​​​​​...why would you want to use a hygroscopic liquid as a lubricant for bicycles ?

Kontact 

You should totally save $2 by using a possibly damaging oil on your $70 chain. Economics.

JohnDThompson 

Vegetable and animal based oils and greases can go rancid, producing fatty acids that can corrode aluminum and steel parts. Mineral-based lubricants are more stable, and not significantly more costly.

SoSmellyAir

I have tried vaping before. I didn't like it, so I switched to IQOS. If you can afford non-suspect vape fluid and paraphernalia, you can afford bike chain lubricant, which you do not need to use a lot of per chain.

roiikka

This. Thanks

roiikka

This is more along the lines of what I was thinking. Wondering 'in caution'. Vape juice steeps like tea but that's only with all the products in it combined. Otherwise it's basically just vegetable oil. And like was noted before not exactly the best if it's not made for it.

roiikka

There will be no contact 😎

roiikka

Likewise I've also seen concoctions of mineral oil and motor oil mentioned elsewhere as well as here on the forums

fooferdoggie 

Plus dogs may lick your chain and make it rust.

roiikka

Or lick a nut or two and make you cuss. It helps with aerodynamics

cyccommute 

Glycerin is not an oil or grease. Glycerin comes from the hydrolysis of fatty acids like those found in animal fat and vegetable oil. It is an alcohol that is water soluble which makes it a poor choice for chain lubrication. It’s slick feeling but is not an oil.

cyccommute 

At least those are made of water insoluble materials.

SkinGriz

Thanks for explaining about glycerin.

Maybe you can explain it. At work I tried some veggie based biodegradable chain lube. Definitely didn’t last as long as normal MolyB misty chain lube. Why? That was ~8 years ago, maybe different result now.

elcruxio

Could it be that the biodegradable oil in question was made of vegetable oil?

also it's really difficult to evaluate why some oil lasted longer than some other oil we have no details about. Biodegradability likely had nothing to do with it.

cyccommute 

Think of what “biodegradable” means. Biological organisms can “degrade” the material. We humans (as do all animals) “degrade” materials every day. The other organisms in our guts actually do the heavy lifting of breaking down the biomass we drop down our gullets to them. Oils from petroleum…aka “mineral oil”… have already be biodegraded in small part before being buried as well as during burial. Most of the stuff that would be useful to organisms has been stripped off and what is left isn’t useful to most organisms so it sits around and nothing happens to it.

Vegetable fats…as well as animal derived fats…have a water soluble components which allows our onboard organisms to utilize the energy in the fat. That water soluble part is what causes those biodegradable lubricants to wash off relatively quickly. Mineral oils don’t dissolve in water so they stick on longer. They can be removed by water but it’s more a process of floating the oil off rather than dissolving parts of it.

tFUnK

I was going to say something about water solubility. So if you're only riding in dry conditions, and you have jars of it laying around, I don't think it'll hurt. I'm not saying it's ideal or that it'll be better than actual chain lube, but I'll probably be better than no lube.

Relatedly, if you only ride in cooler temps, you might try coconut oil as a wax alternative 😉 (only semi joking).