Originally Posted by
One Wheel
As a farmer, with diesel equipment and a farm diesel tank, maddog34 is correct and you are wrong.
As a chemist, I can tell you that diesel fuel
should not have water in it. It can’t dissolve water to any appreciable amount. As I said, 3 tablespoons of water can dissolve in 100 gallons. If you have water in your diesel, the diesel didn’t carry it there. You have a leaky tank or you left the tank open and rain water got into it. In other words, someone screwed up.
I also have a farm gas tank; that, isopropyl alcohol and HOT water, plus an old toothbrush, are what I use for cleaning chains before hot waxing them.
Oh, joy! Another “I use gasoline” post. And, as a bonus, an overly elaborate cleaning system that is at cross purposes to actually cleaning the chain.
Using gasoline is just plain dumb! There is no temperature where you safely use gasoline without an extreme risk of fire. Gasoline has a flash point of -40°F. It’s no more effective than mineral spirits but it’s a lot more hazardous as well as much more toxic. Mineral spirits has a flashpoint around 150°F which means it is harder to ignite and much less likely to cause a vapor plume. That’s the main hazard with gasoline. It forms a vapor plume which can ignite many feet from the source of the liquid.
Honestly, you have diesel so why not use it. Much less chance you’ll burn something down.
As to your cleaning system, why and how? Do you use the water
after the gasoline and isopropyl alcohol? Why do you use hot water at all? Water, of any temperature, is ineffective at dissolving grease, oil (including diesel), or wax. Most all bicycle lubricants are water insoluble to an extreme extent…see the diesel water solubility above. If you were to use a water based degreaser followed water then followed by the isopropanol and then followed hydrocarbon solvent (other than gasoline), the water step makes at least a little sense. Or you could do a “one and done” by just skipping to the hydrocarbon solvent (again,
not gasoline). Shake it in a jar, remove the chain, let the solvent evaporate, and go wax it.
Regardless of what you’ll read on-line or see in some YouTube video, chains don’t need to clean room clean to wax them. The wax is compatible with any lubricant commonly used on a chain. The wax will stick to the chain and will actually act as a solvent on its own. Wax and oil are part of the same group of compounds with difference in molecule chain length only.