[QUOTE=cyccommute;23126815]Well that’s a classic non sequitur. The water isn’t reacting with the titanium under a water cutter. It is reacting to the pressure of the water from the water cutter.
It's not though. You tried so hard to make this whole discussion about chemistry, but it just isn't. What's happening to the surface rust isn't known. It might be chemistry, it might be not. But what you've done is go about claiming there isn't a known to you chemistry related solution to that and so you must be correct and everyone else is wrong.
Water doesn’t remove rust, plain and simple. What you might be observing is not “rust” or the oxides of iron but, rather, iron that has been oxidized with chloride. Iron chlorides are water soluble and look a bit like iron oxides. But iron oxide is water insoluble.
Except when you push the water with enough pressure to make it into a pressure washer. I have in no way or form claimed that there is a chemical reaction behind what's happening. That was all you. You created a mental cage of your own imagining and that's frankly not my problem.
I also don't care what the surface rust on my chains is called. To me its rust. You can go exercise chemical vernacular pedantry somewhere else. This is the bike forums. Bike language.
It’s only seems like a wild assumption because you don’t understand the material. Wax basically has no particle size from a melt. It does not crystallize but is more like a plastic or a gum. It is rather ductile and can be reshaped and reformed endlessly and will still never break apart into any kind of discrete particle. Chains have to be rewaxed because of the plastic nature of the wax. Pressure on the wax causes it to squeeze out of the high pressure areas at the pins and plates connection. Some of it may end up being forced out of the chain which will required added material but, for the most part, the wax remains in the chain but just not in the place where it is needed.
So a few things.
Firstly: "
Paraffin wax is a solid
crystalline mixture of straight-chain"
and secondly, the wax I'm currently using and the waxes I've been experimenting on turn into a fine powder in certain conditions. Am I imagining things or....?
Water adds oxygen. Oxygen promotes rust.
I've read somewhere that the atmosphere also contains small amounts of oxygen. A scary thought.
As my wife so cleverly observed this morning while we were talking about this, the idea of using wax is to seal the chain. And, yes, I know how road salts work. Do you understand the concept of polar vs nonpolar compounds? Short version: Salt is ionic. It has no affinity for nonpolar compounds like wax and oil. It will not dissolve into either in any amount. Water is polar and it will dissolve sodium chloride (and all of the other chlorides used on roads) in very large amounts. That brings up another point on why to avoid the boiling water step. Boiling water will melt and remove the wax but will introduce any dissolved salt into the chain where it can do all kinds of damage. Salt catalyzes rust.
If the chain actually sealed it wouldn't shift properly. I mixed a batch of wax that would seal the chain and it took 200km before the chain began shifting properly but the friction was unbearable even then.
A waxed chain isn't actually sealed from the elements. But the surfaces have a coating of wax which protect the metal underneath. However when the wax wears off, water and salt water can again begin their dirty work of rusting things.
But if we boil the chain we can of course assume that the salt gets dissolved in the water and then the whole chain gets an even coating of the now salty water. If the chain holds maybe 0,1 grams of salt and we boil the chain in a liter of water... Well I'm not bothered about the strength of the solution.
A much smaller amount of surface dirt than you think.
You realize that you claim this with no actual knowledge of experience. It's a guess from your part but you claim it as truth. Why? Don't you believe in the scientific method?
I dare you to measure it. It is on the order of thousandths of a millimeter. Grit that is small enough to make it through the gap has to be that small.
The roller moves around quite a bit...
No, not really. Wax on the outside of the chain falls off relatively quickly upon use. The surface of the chain may hold onto a small amount of dust through static but it’s not much nor does that happen very often. But, again, the wax is keeping the grit out of the chain because it fills the gaps in the chain and doesn’t flow.
It does that to some extent but it doesn't keep water out. But it does keep the surfaces protected from water.
No. The point is that the chain cools quickly and water inside the chain is trapped in the chain for an unknown amount of time where it can introduce oxygen which promotes oxidation of the iron in the chain
Well it's not like the chain is left to hang about for months on end. The correct way is almost directly from the water to the wax.
Water below the melting point of the wax won’t wash off the wax. Water above the melting point of the wax…50° to 70°C…will cause the wax to melt and, because the wax is lighter than the water, will cause the wax to be removed from the chain.
If this were true you could wash wax off with just boiling water. I tried today. Couldn't do it no matter how much I tried. I dipped a spoon in some wax and then boiled it for a few minutes. When the spoon came out from the rolling boil and cooled it still had a thin layer of wax coating it. I tried putting a drop of water on the spoon during waxing it and kept it there until the wax cooled. Still had a coating of wax under the drop.
But during my testing I did notice that water in molten wax is super mobile. It flows quite readily.
Actually if that were true you wouldn't ever need soap. Oil is lighter than water so you would just need to soak dirty dishes in hot water and the oil would be removed and replaced by water.
So you book learning might be techincally correct on paper, but it doesn't apply at all in the real world.
That’s just air trapped in the chain. You have mentioned before that you don’t heat the wax over the boiling point of water. Any water inside the chain has a greater affinity for the steel than the wax does and will stay in place. If there were enough water in the chain to actually flow out, the bubbles would fall, not rise. Water is denser than wax and other hydrocarbons.
So I'm willing to admit I was wrong on this one. You do need that 100c before you can boil the water off. But it would turn out that it doesn't actually matter one bit. Quite unsurprisingly water in molten wax just flows off metal surfaces as soon as it can. I Mentioned I did some testing today. During the water drop spoon waxing test one challenge was to actually keep the water droplet on the spoon long enough for the wax to solidify. Water becomes seriously slippery in molten wax. Your typical wetting due to surface tension just doesn't happen. In fact water is quite readily replaced by a film of molten wax.
I also poured some water in the waxing pot, tried to boil it off and then poured the water wax mixture off with some water still remaining at the bottom after the pour. If your theory was correct the water would have left "bald" spots on the bottom of the pot. It didn't. A solid coating of wax was left.
What this does with chains is that if you agitate the chain or just lift it out from the wax, all water that is able to will flow right out and drop down to the bottom of the pot. And since a chain doesn't really have any pockets to hold water, it just flows out. But to be safe it's a good idea to agitate the chains a bit before lifting them out.
It also turns out that if there's water trapped inside the chain after it cools down, that's ok too. The water can't penetrate the wax film. So when the wax solidifies any water that's exposed to air will just evaporate out anyways while the metal surfaces have a wax coating.
This is all really interesting stuff.
You’d better go recalculate that. 0.2 isn’t 20% of 100.
The thermometer I have is a pretty high quality tool. I've tried it against other types of thermometers and it's accuracy is within 0,2C
You really are being intentionally dense. My comments were directed to your comments about needing very fine control of the wax melt. You have no ability for fine temperature control with a crockpot.
I never wrote anything about needing very fine control. If you really wanted to you could perhaps read from between the lines that the temperature range required is between molten and 100C, but 40 degrees celsius in this context is not "very fine control" in my opinion.
Telling someone not to heat the wax above a certain temperature with a crockpot is not something they can control…not that it matters. Wax isn’t damaged by heat.
Wax and oils and other long chain hydrocarbons are damaged by heat. It just depends on the heat and time used.
But I still posit that crockpots have this knob on the side that lets one add or lessen the temperature if they so wish. It's not like you plop the wax in and it's all "jesus take the wheel" after that. You can regulate the temperature just like you can with a stove. The wax gets too hot, turn the crockpot down or off entirely. It's too cold, wait for a while. The crockpot is just much slower than a stove so you don't have to be constantly next to it while the wax melts. It takes mine about 1 hour to melt a kilo of wax on the Hi setting.
So if I check in on the wax every hour or so I'm golden. After it's molten I can boil the chains and dip them in.
Waxes haven’t changed significantly in the last 100+ years and certainly not in the last 40 years. Gulf Wax is the same wax as my mother, grandmother and even great grandmother bought to seal jam jars. There really is nothing to do to “improve” them.
You as a chemist should know there are tons of different grades of paraffing waxes and microcrystalline waxes. Gulf wax is just one among many.
Modern chain waxes are (luckily) beginning to slowly resemble ski waxes. Especially now Rex got in the game.
If you know about ski waxes you know there's different grades, types and hardnesses for different conditions. That's what I'm looking forward to in chain waxes.