Originally Posted by
cubewheels
My bike is dirty from mud, not oil. I think you're really taking me for someone really stupid with their bikes. Who rides with their bike smudged with oil all over??? It will put permanent stain on your clothes!!
Just about anyone who uses oil based lubricants “rides with their bike smudged with oil”. That’s the reason that people have to clean their bikes and drivetrains all the time. I’ve pointed out that I don’t clean my drivetrains ever. Could there be a correlation?
Again, making assumptions, theorizing, speculating in a biased way. You've forgot about the sheet of newspaper I put between the rearwheel and the drive train. How many times I'm going to tell you??
I didn’t forget the newspaper. The fact that you have to use newpaper to keep oil off the rim suggest that you are flinging oil all over everywhere. If you weren’t flinging oil everywhere, you wouldn’t need the paper. I can clean and lubricate a chain...even with oil...and
not have to mask the wheel to keep the oil off of it.
Also when you backpedal, excess oil that is flung away only goes downwards, not up (It will get flung upwards if you pedal forward). So I only need to put a sheet in the lower half of the wheel.
The last time I checked the chain is a loop. If you are spinning it fast enough to “fling oil off the chain”, you are flinging it off the chainring as well. That means upward because of the whole “loop” thing.
No problem at all with oil getting anywhere but the drivetrain and it only takes a couple of seconds to put the newspaper sheets in.
Your reasoning makes no sense. You are masking the wheel to prevent oil getting on it but you aren’t getting oil everywhere. Why are you using the paper then?
I never have that problem you describe after backpedaling and wiping. Why would a drivetrain keep dripping and flinging oil after you have backpedaled and wiped off excess?? Not in my experience!
Oil is a liquid and it flows. If you have enough oil to lubricate, you have enough oil to flow due to gravity. Nearly every person who has described using oil for chain lube on the forums has described wiping off oil before or after a ride. That is oil that is flowing under gravity. Once the oil is gone, you add more which starts the whole process over again.
I did read
all of your procedure. I just find it to be too involved and too messy. ATF isn’t an all-in-one solvent/lubricant. If nothing else, dilute it a little with mineral spirits (or equivalent). The mineral spirits will do the job as a solvent and the ATF will stick around after the mineral spirits evaporates. You can then dispense with the masking. On the plus side, your ATF will last longer.
I really am trying to be helpful here. I used to lubricate with oil and had to deal with the constant cleaning. I went a different way about 20 years ago and found that I didn’t have to clean all the time. My chains last as long as most people claim theirs last so I don’t see a downside. If I got significantly less mileage out of my chains, I’d put up with the mess.
My career has been developing processes and procedures for chemical reactions and analysis. I try to simply everything as much as I can. When I read a procedure, I try to understand why someone is doing a step but if I find that I can cut out that step without having an effect on the results, I will cut the step. If someone finds a superfluous step in my procedures and can show that it doesn’t affect the results, I’ll cut out the step as well.
Any procedure should be constantly evaluated for any steps that can be cut out. If you can lube your chain without masking, isn’t that better? If you can lube and clean your chain in less than 10 minutes, isn’t that better than taking hours? Chains are cheap. Nothing you can do to them are going to make them last much longer than the average. If doing elaborate procedures doesn’t provide better results and/or results in more work, why do them?