Originally Posted by
Wattsup
Your guess about the "dirt" is just a guess.
Nope. Not a “guess”. Or, at the very least, an “educated” guess in the fullest meaning of that phrase. I’ve spend a lot of time studying the mechanisms of chain wear as well as having a lot of experience with materials and viscosities. My riding conditions are not any different than yours. I do lots and lots of riding in dusty conditions. I’m aware of what dirt does with both wax and oil as well as the strengths and, more importantly, the weaknesses of each.
I have my doubts that the marks on the rag are just metal particles, as that would be an awful lot of metal coming off in such a short amount of time.
Metal wear can be deceiving. A very small amount of metal particles can look like a whole lot of metal on a rag. A chain, for example, wears only a few grams, at most, to get from 0% wear to 0.75% wear and it does that over 3000 miles of use. The particle size of the metal is very close to nano particle size which is defined as particles which has one dimension at least less than 100 nm or 0.0001mm. Get a whole bunch of individual particles together and they look black because of the way they reflect light. Not all of the particles, by the way are steel. Some are aluminum and, yes, some are the grit from the ground.
When I said "inside" the chain, I meant on the exterior surfaces that I can't get the rag to.
Anything on the outside of the chain…whether using oil or wax…is of little concern. Oil can cause very large particle to cling to the chain but those can’t get into the chain to cause problems. Small amounts of dust can cling to the chain when using wax but, again, that’s not anything that can cause problems. The particles you need to worry about are the ones that are microscopic and can get down into the guts of the chain where they serve as a grinding paste at the pin/side plate interface. Wax keeps the particles out of the chain so grit wear is not much of a concern. Oil pumps the grit particles of the right size right down into the gap where it can do its damage.
The caveat is that wax doesn’t flow back into the gap so you have much more metal-on-metal wear which means the chain doesn’t last any longer than when using oil. The wear interval on chains is about the same independent of the lubrication used. It doesn’t really matter how what your use or how often you clean. You are going to get about the same wear.
As for "obsessing", thank you for your concern about my time! I sometimes wonder who are the most fanatical, the waxers, or the anti-waxers!
Not an anti-waxer. I use, and have used, solvent wax systems for probably close to 30 years. White Lightning hit the market in the mid 90s and I was a very early adopter. I detest oil lubes…not because they are ineffective but because they require constant cleaning of the chain, the rider, and just about anything within a 2 mile radius. I get the same wear results with wax without the mess which is why I use it.
My comments about time were aimed at the general population. “We”, as in cyclists, spend way too much time worrying about chains.
p.s. if it's metal, a magnet should attract it in the molten wax, right? I'll let you know.
Not necessarily. Some of the metal…probably the bulk of it…is aluminum from the chain wheels so it isn’t going to be attracted to a magnet. However, magnetism gets weird when the particle size gets small.