cyccommute 

While I agree that there is no need for a boiling water wash, there is also no need for the odorless mineral spirits step for subsequent waxing. The wax doesn’t get contaminated like oil based lubricants do. On subsequent waxings, the wax is the solvent and is all that is needed to clean the chain. Just drop it in molten wax and be done with it.

I just reviewed the “Silca system” video on Silca’s wax webpage and it shares the same problems with all the other “systems” for chain cleaning out there which I will address below. It has one major problem that I’m going to address before going any further. The presenter says to put the mineral spirits in an ultrasonic bath at 65°C (150°F). This is dumb and dangerous! The flash point of mineral spirits ranges from 38°C (100°F) to 60°C (140°F). It would be bad enough to heat a flammable material to over its flash point but ultrasonication agitates the solvent which is an efficient way to make more vapor. Mineral spirits is only slightly toxic so that’s less of a concern than making a very efficient fuel/air ratio. In other words, it’s a great way to set your house on fire! Don’t ultrasonicate solvents at all and especially not above their flash point!!!

It is overly complicated with unnecessary steps that are done for no reason. Mineral spirits is a degreaser and a damned good one! There is no need for any step past doing a mineral spirits wash. You can do 2 washes if you like but there really is no need. If you really have to do two steps, put the water based degreaser first, followed by a water rinse, followed by an alcohol chase, and then polish it off with mineral spirits. The reason for that particular order is to do any water based steps first because water and mineral spirits are incompatible. Water based degreasers have surfactants…soap to regular people…in them that changes the chemistry of water so that water can dissolve some water insoluble compounds. The amount of nonpolar material that can dissolve in a water based degreaser is limited to the carrying capacity of the surfactant in the water and is also limited by the amount of surfactant in the water. Diluting it reduces the carrying capacity.

That limited carrying capacity of a nonpolar compound also means that far more of the surfactant has to be used to do the same job. Think dish soap in a sink. At some point the bubbles go away which means that the soap..again, a surfactant…has glommed onto all the oil that it can and it needs more soap and fresh water. The volume of mineral spirits needed to do the same job is a tiny fraction of that needed for a water based degreaser .

The surfactant also has to be removed. If not removed the surfactant will sit on the metal doing what surfactants do…grabbing onto nonpolar compounds. Alcohol will remove some of it but it would be best to use clean water to flush which means more volume of cleaners needed…usually many times that of the initial degreaser mixture to remove it.

I’ll get into the procedure now. He says that the chain needs to be soaked overnight in mineral spirits. That is completely unnecessary. Degreasing with mineral spirits takes minutes especially if you agitate it. Put it in a bottle…I use old Gatorade bottles…shake it hard for until your arm gets tired, about 30 seconds, and take the chain out. That’s all that is necessary. No ultrasonic bath needed nor heat needed…see above. The chain could go from there into the wax melt directly, although I would probably leave the chain in a sunny spot for about an hour so as to keep from putting flammable material into a hot wax melt. The wax melts above the flash point of mineral spirits and going above the flash point of any solvent is to be avoided.

He states at about 1:20 in the video that “mineral spirits speeds up the rust process if there is any water present”. That’s news to this chemist’s ears. I’d like to know the mechanism for this accelerated rusting in mineral spirits. If the worry is about moisture, it can be removed with a water soluble solvent like acetone or alcohol. But, no, mineral spirits won’t make your chain rust.

He also mentions “degassing” several times. There is zero need to degas anything in chain cleaning. There are, occasionally, reasons to degas solvents but simple chain cleaning isn’t one of them. Ultrasonic cleaning vibrates the object being cleaned tor remove any stubborn particles that might be on the object but even that is unnecessary if you have a clean object to begin with. A new chain is clean and an old waxed chain isn’t dirty enough to worry about. Oiled chains are a different matter entirely.

Overall, the “Silca system” is the same as all the other procedures out there…unnecessarily complicated with a lot of useless work. A good procedure should use as few steps as necessary and each step should have some justification for doing it. Chain cleaning can be done in a single step, be it a new chain or a gunky, old winter chain. And when the chain needs to be rewaxed, it doesn’t need any further cleaning. Don’t over think it.

Finally…I know this is going on for far too long…it’s a chain! Chains are cheap and chains will wear out. There’s no need to spend an inordinate amount of time maintaining a chain nor any need to spend an inordinate amount of money on a chain. $40 for a pound of wax is a silly amount of money to spend. Silca can claim that their wax is all secret and will make you a winner of the Tour de France just by using it but they are blowing smoke up your nether regions. A one pound block of Gulf Wax at Safeway costs $7 and will do 99.9% of what Silca’s wax will do.