Originally Posted by Sheldon Brown

Unfortunately there are too many variables, so nobody has ever been able to do any sort of controlled study.

I (ahem) believe that I'm the first to ever find a valid way of comparing different makes/models of chains in a reasonably rigorous fashion. I made up chains pieced together from three different lengths of three different brands of chain, gave them to hard-core commuters to ride for a while.

Since the three types of chain were all on the same bike, ridden on the same sprockets, by the same rider, on the same roads, in the same weather conditions and with the same cleaning/lubrication regime, I was able to measure the elongation of each section and see which brands had elongated more.

At that time, Sachs (Sram) and Shimano were tied for first place, a couple of Taiwanese brands didn't do so well.

I welcome others to repeat this experiment with newer models.

Unfortunately, you really can't compare lubes this way, so you wind up with too many variables.

Sheldon "Praxis" Brown
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