Originally Posted by
Kontact
You don't need a chemistry degree to select melt wax for its superior cleanliness in dirty environments, or the presumption that any watts savings is going to come from that cleanliness on top of the well established lubricity waxed chains have in tests.
You may not need a chemistry degree but it helps to understand what is going on. Without someone with a chemistry degree doing the work, you’d still be using bacon or goose grease as a lubricant.
What a chemistry degree is good for is explaining why you think water, naptha, pine tar, Teflon or whatever other bright idea people have to "improve" an already superior method of chain care might do.
Yep. Or why you wouldn’t want to put some of those things in a wax lubricant or why you wouldn’t want to use water to “clean” a chain for waxing or any number of silly things people do in their 750 step chain cleaning process…749 of which are completely unnecessary.
And you'd still be guessing.
Educated guessing which is far superior to just plain guessing with no idea what you are talking about.
Why not just use wax and only wax, folks? This thread is a perfect example of good idea gone wrong.
Wax is not perfect. Oil is not perfect. They both have their flaws. Sometimes,,,using some scientific knowledge…items can be improved. Wax has the major flaw of not being able to flow. That starves the pressure points of lubrication. Wax does not…and cannot… “wash off” in presence of water. What it can do is move away from the pressure points and allow infiltration of water which allows for oxidation of the metal. That’s the “squeak” people hear after rain. It can also cause metal-on-metal grinding of the chain which causes the chain to wear. Softening a hard wax like canning wax can allow some partial flow of the wax back into the pressure points.
Adding a lot of solvent to the wax to make it into a liquid mixture can also make the wax easier to apply and get it into those pressure points on the fly rather than having to wait until you have a crock pot nearby.