Originally Posted by
cyccommute
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.
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.
Educated guessing which is far superior to just plain guessing with no idea what you are talking about.
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.
There is no way wax allows hundreds of miles of lubrication by remaining a solid that doesn't flow at all inside the pressure points of the chain. If that worked, chains would be made with PVD coatings much harder and longer lasting than any layer of hard wax could possibly be, since wax is softer than a fingernail. Or nylon bushings, which are also far harder than wax.
The problem here is that wax is not a lubricant for any other industrial uses, and the fact that it works as well as it does on bicycle chains is essentially counterintuitive and outside engineering practices. So if you have a flawed belief about what is going on inside the chain, you really can't advise anyone how to improve that performance.
So "chemistry" aside, the OP is maybe having a problem with his complex wax procedure. Wax is cheap, so if simply throwing the chain in wax is not acceptable, use two pots of hot wax - one to clean and one to lube. That avoids questions of chemistry and allows the chain to be lubricated the way people have been doing for 50 years at least.