Originally Posted by
cyccommute
I use the dry. It appears to me to be a saturated solution of wax in solvent perhaps with divided Teflon in it, although that part is questionable. On my fingers, it doesn’t leave any kind of sold residue. Wax should dissolve in mineral spirits as well. Heptane, hexane, mineral spirits, toluene, xylene are all similar enough in properties to be used.
Unfortunately, evidently NOT mineral *oil*; I have a couple big bottles of tiki torch fuel bought cheap at the end of summer, it's mostly that plus a little citronella; It makes a great chain cleaner, I put it in the Park on-bike chain cleaner, works great. But I put some in a sealed canister along with a couple chunks of wax, months later the wax was still not dissolved.
One would think that white lightning dry ("Clean Ride") has gotta have something else in it besides heptane. Probably wax.
EDIT: White Lightning Wet Ride contains petroleum lubricating oils, and sulfonic acids, the latter of which help polar and non-polar materials (water and oil) combine (think a soap or detergent).
Funny, decades ago I thought about dissolving wax in a solvent to make my own waxed cotton jacket by just spraying on and letting the solvent evaporate. Might have worked, but I found online a proper old-school technique that used beeswax in place of paraffin, raw linseed oil, and real turpentine, all melted in a pot, brushed on, then melted in with a blowdryer, took hours over a whole day; Variations of this were used to make "oilskin" rainwear before rubberized cloth. More wax improves water repellency but at the expense of flexibility, especially at colder temps, the raw linseed oil helps that, and the turps acts as a drying agent for the linseed oil I think, but it still takes a month or two for it all to cure and shrink to a point of fabric flexibility. I did a Filson jacket that had been returned to Filson after being washed (removing all wax) and shrunk to my size, came out better than new.