Originally Posted by cyccommute

A lot of it is from reporting here on the Forums. There are always some outliers who claim 20,000 or 30,000 miles but, as with most outliers, those shouldn’t be given much weight. Let’s look, however, at some data. This is from Silica’s website and, to give them credit, they don’t appear to be massaging the data. In the chart below, the column marked with the red arrow shows the wear interval in close to real world conditions…i.e. with all the crap that the world throws on our exposed chains. There are some highs and some lows but, for the most part the average of the 10 different wet lubricants is 3100 miles. There is a fairly high standard deviation of 1380 miles but, honestly, that is probably the standard deviation on all chains’ wear. Take out the bottom 3 and the average rises up to about 3700 miles with a standard deviation of 1000 miles. Saying that chain wear is from 3000 to 4000 miles is still on pretty solid ground.

The data for estimate for the hot wax is questionable in my opinion.