Originally Posted by
elcruxio
I'm guessing that a chain that moves will agitate the solvent wax and thus make it dry quicker.
Any burns one does on a solvent wax (nobody should do that. It was just a test for a laugh) should be done with the chain off the bike. But it was interesting how the wax was deposited inside the chain and didn't burn off with the solvent.
That’s because wax has a very high flash point. It will burn but it needs some kind of mechanism to get the wax volatile enough to combust. That’s what a wick in a candle is for. If you just try to burn the wax by heating it to a liquid and getting it to burn, there isn’t enough wax vapor above the liquid pool to sustain burning. You need the wax pool to be hot enough to get to the flash point.
The idea behind heating water emulsion wax is to make it dry quicker than the recommended 24 hours and make the resulting wax molten and homogenous instead of the tacky wax flour that results after the wax has dried. Ie. make it work even if relative humidity is high.
Thermodynamics says no. Heating the a water emulsion wax won’t really help make it dry more quickly unless you keep it heated. Heating it and then applying it to the chain is going to suck any heat you added out of the liquid and bring it back down to the temperature of the chain very quickly. Water evaporates very slowly because of hydrogen bonding that makes it difficult to get the water into a vapor. The other part of the problem is that water evaporation takes energy which cools the whole system as it evaporates. When a surfactant is added that is meant to make the water compatible with a hydrophobic material, the evaporation process is even slower. Air moving over the chain
would increase the evaporation rate, however.
And as I noticed, heating a chain enough to melt wax /evaporate water doesn't take long even with a blue flame lighter. I'm guessing it'd take a few seconds to run a chain through a gas stove flame so an easy quick chore while cooking.
I don’t see the need. You are over complicating the process. If the solvent or water takes 24 hours to evaporate, just apply it the night before riding. Or just apply it and let it evaporate as you ride. Nothing is going to be harmed by the wax being slightly softer.
So there shouldn't really be a difference between how long wax lasts on a chain (solvent or water emulsion) given that the actual wax is the same. What I meant is that when applying, one uses so much more solvent wax. In order for the solvent wax to remain fluid, it needs to have a water-like viscosity, which results in a lot of applied wax with some of it flushing though the chain (which in some cases is of course a desirable thing) It begins hardening the second it leaves the bottle and in my experience a fair amount is left on the outside of the chain.
On the other hand water emulsion waxes tend to have the viscosity of wet lubes so you can apply it one drop per roller. Ok, sometimes the drop rolls off the chain so you need to add another one, but in general a bottle lasts quite a few applications.
I haven’t used the water based wax lubricants. I’ve seen it applied and it seems much thicker than wet lubricants. Solvent wax is more like oil based lubricants in viscosity which makes sense as oil based lubricants have a fairly high solvent level in them. TriFlow, for example, is around 50% “aliphatic solvent”. White Lightning is around 60% which isn’t that significant a difference. Squirt is about 60% water but the wax and emulsifiers are going to significantly thicken the material.
Both work and on short tours it doesn't really matter. On longer tours it can make a difference which one chooses if resupply isn't easy, especially if one uses particularly long chains and/or rides in weather that eats up chain lube. Our cargo bike (that we use for touring) chains are nearly 200 links so give or take double that of an ordinary bike. It takes a while to lube those up.
I have carried a 2 oz bottle of White Lightning on tour for years. Over several 1000+ mile tours, I have yet to empty the bottle on tour. I get similar mileages per application as I am now…in excess of 400 miles…so I don’t need a whole lot of lubricant. On a long chain bike…I have a tandem…I use a little more per application but the additional amount needed isn’t all that onerous.