I found a thread on chain wear at the Bacchetta forums. Here was one interesting reply:
I know this will be hard for some to believe, but...
My main riding partner back home in NH, Chuck Deliere, got over 25,000 miles out of his '98 Aerocycle SRAM PC59 chain...and it still measured in spec and shifted great! Chuck and I don't ride in the rain very often, but take the time to apply White Lightning to our chains every 150-200 miles.
I got a great tip from a chain engineer at SRAM about ten years ago. When asking about what the best treatment for chains was, his first tip was NEVER clean your chain with any solvent! His explanation was that none of the chain lubes could really penetrate into the interior of the chain wear surfaces after they had been stripped out by solvents. He suggested "any of the wax based lubes"
That contradicted a lot of the chain dogma I had heard over the years, but the proof to me was in Chucks chain!
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I miss bicycle commuting.