Originally Posted by
Anicius
The main reason to remove the manufacturer's lubricant may be to avoid softening the paraffin wax with a solute. But some hot-waxers deliberately introduce softening agents. Your line of argument generally matches my experience, but I think that hard paraffin wax is only marginally soluble in mineral spirits. I have been using mineral spirits to clean the chain and relying on a thorough hot wax bath and agitation to remove any remaining crud on the chain. What settles out in the wax bath can be scraped from the bottom of the block after it cools. I put a mesh screen in the bottom of the pot to permit the crud to settle below the chain, maintain a temperature around 170 degrees F. so the wax fluid is thin to aid penetration, agitate and flip the chain over a couple of times in about a half-hour period, and let the bath cool until it's starting to skim before removing the chain. However, I'm now inclined to skip the cleaning (mineral spirits state or a boiling-water bath) and drop the uncleaned chain in hot wax as sufficient for both cleaning and waxing.
After removing the factory lubricant, there really is no need to do any kind of cleaning on a waxed chain. For hot wax, as you have pointed out, the chain can be dropped into the hot wax and what little grit is on the chain will simply settle to the bottom. You could put a mesh stand of some kind in the bottom of the pot to keep the grit out of the chain while stirring it around.
I drip wax and only clean the chain once. The wax is dissolved in mineral spirits in that case and, since it is so fluid, it flushed the small amount of dirt that gets stuck on the chain out with the solvent. But I never have to clean the chain nor drivetrain other than the initial cleaning.