Originally Posted by
Kontact
What I don't understand from your position, is how you acknowledge that the force applied to the parts needing lubrication is in the area of 20,000psi, claim that wax is essentially a deformable solid, and then believe that immense pressure is going to leave any residual hard wax in the 20 degrees of mating area between those two linear parts. You are describing a super material, much harder than the steel acting on it.
It is difficult to impossible to completely remove every molecule of a substance by pressure. A very small amount of any lubricant is going to remain at the interface. That’s how any lubricant works on any surface. Oil is squished out of the pressure point but not all of it.
It is the equivalent of saying that you can press down on a piece of fishing line with a knife, but that it never quite gets cut all the way through. Two pieces of steel grinding against each other are going to be metal on metal after one or two passes if the wax material is a true solid. You think wax always behaves as a solid, yet you ascribe some magic ability to stay in between mated steel parts for not just seconds or minutes, but 10-40 hours of use!
These is just so much wrong with this paragraph. First, wrong analogy. A better analogy would be a rolling pin rolling across dough. You can thin it out to a molecular level and some would remain under the pin. Next, I have never said that wax performs as a solid. I have said over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again that wax is plastic. I have also said that the reason that most of the reason that wax does not perform well in water is because the pressure pushes most of the wax out and allows for metal on metal wear. Wax never has been, never will be, and cannot be water soluble. There are substances that can be added to make it water soluble but you’d have to go out of your way to add it. The reason I know that there is bare metal at the pressure point is because water exposure quickly leads to squeaking due to rust formation at the pressure point. And this can happen to a freshly waxed chain as anyone who waxes chain can attest.
And you keep talking about heat as if the whole chain needs to come up to the melting point of wax. Only the critical friction points need to get warm, and that that heat would essentially be expended by liquifying the wax, cooling that area back down.
If you heated even a localized point on a steel chain enough to melt wax with a melting point of 130°F, the heat would flow not to the wax but to the other parts of the chain. Wax is an insulator with regards to heat flow. Steel is a conductor…a very good one at that…with regards to heat flow. Any heat generated would flow into the other cold parts of the chain and would simply not be hot enough to melt wax. Heat flows to cold.
Which is only the case if that amount of heat is necessary, but as we have established, shearing action will cause paraffin wax to liquify at the "slip melting point" - the thing you've never heard of, apparently.
You haven’t established anything. No, I haven’t heard of “slip melting point” before. But from what I can find out about it,
it is not what you describe. From what I can find (not just on Wikipedia), it is a way to measure mixtures of fats and oils that have poorly defined melting points due to a wide range of molecular ranges. A tube of the material is heated and the slip melting point is the point where the mixture “slips” in the tube because it is starting to float on the melt.
What you describe is likely
shear melting point which is when the melting temperature is reduced due to shearing force on a substance. That the wax is under shear force is not something I would dispute and is likely the cause of the plasticity of the wax. However, that doesn’t mean that the wax is liquid nor that it can flow back into an area still under pressure nor even under reduced pressure. In fact, remove the pressure and the shear and the wax would solidify again. There is no driving force to get the wax to flow backwards against a pressure causing it to flow outwards.
So we can either believe that hard wax is stretchier than taffy and stronger than kevlar, or we can consider that slip melting and the fact that wax expands as a liquid might explain how trapped wax could keep surging into the void left when the linear load drops and the wear points of the chain leave a gap, much like how grease leeches oil out of its matrix to lubricate a bearing.
That’s a false dichotomy. Wax is plastic. It can flow under pressure. But the flow is going to be in only one direction…from high pressure to low pressure. It can’t flow in the other direction. And, if you could make the wax liquid, it would flow away from the high pressure area even faster and more efficiently.
At least my explanation sounds possible.
Only if you ignore a whole bunch of chemistry and physics.