Depending on the product, petroleum jelly could contain different materials. Some Vaseline products have cocoa butter added. Others producers may added fragrances or lanolin. Those wouldn’t have any effect on the performance. The cocoa butter Vaseline is pretty pungent.

”Grease” on a chain is likely not the material that is made from a salt of a fatty acid and oil that is more traditional grease. It is much more likely to be a soft wax. It feels like that and it is colorless and translucent unlike most waxes which are much more opaque.

Adding materials together to make a mixture…in this case a homogenous mixture called a “solution”…is definitely within the chemistry wheelhouse. Chemistry is the study of the properties and behavior of matter. Fluid dynamics is certainly chemistry…although I doubt it has much to do with what is happening here.

So help an old stoopid brother out here, I get almost daily updates from Josh at Silca and even in the marginal gains podcasts thy tout the superior performance of the Silca wax system and all of the additives. The current bunch of pro's riding in gravel events are using the Silca system as I can see. So what is the difference in the wax and all of the additives? I don't have an opinion one way or the other. My RAAM experience was with chain oil and our chains performed reasonable well over the 2500 mile ride. But we also changed chains on each overhaul. Waiting to hear what the differences are. Smiles, MH

I’d also love to know.

Silca vs grocery store paraffin?

Silca vs paraffin+ptfe (and maybe mineral oil)?

There’s lots of home made recipes out there. I can’t say I’ve really looked at them.

What about downhill ski wax? That’s gotta be pretty durable and stay softer at lower temperatures? Maybe.

Additives might make the chain run smoother, but I doubt it does much to extend how long it lasts on the chain.

Fwiw, I rewaxed that chain along with a couple others in the queue.

I’m mountain biking tomorrow then working the next 4 days, so who knows when I’ll actually get to test it.

Geezzz... I thought it was just me. And I am more of a Ravel rider. That is, not so much large gravel, but short rides of trashed out asphalt and chalice. I also have found heavy weight oils not working well either. Lately I just load up my chain with ATF and then wipe it off along with all the gunk. I then do it again till the chain looks reasonably clean. I am actually kinda surprised that my chains hold up as long as they do. So far its been a pretty good method for a lazy bastard. ATF is cheap...

As to the OP: I remember years ago guys at the motor pool talking about an additive to light weight oil that would leave a Dry Surface Lubricant on moving parts. Ya might want to look up DSL Dry Surface Lubricant as an additive.

To remove surface contaminants, a wipe followed by agitation while immersed in OMS work better than any water and detergent combo.

And now you've introduced mineral spirits into the chain, which the wax has to displace.

But hot wax is a great cleaner, and particulate will settle to the bottom.

I let the OMS evaporate before I put the chain into the Crock Pot of wax. Even if the OMS does not evaporate completely, there is no displacement; rather, the OMS and paraffin are cross-soluble (per my research, confirmed by cyccommute).

Both the chain as well as any desirable additives (e.g., PTFE, MoS2, WS2) would likewise settle onto the bottom among the particulate.

So you haven't used hot wax? The dirt sinks to a layer thinner then than amount of exposed pin sticking out of the side of the chain - so unable to get in the part of the chain we are lubricating.

I have no idea about the additives, but if they have a similar mass to wax, they won't sink out or float up.

I do hot wax. See above reference to Crock Pot in post #35.

That may be the case, but I try to keep the wax clean.

The Silca additives sink to the bottom.

For the price (about 7 times the cost of Gulf Wax), the additives should provide much more than marginal gains. For that price, the damned stuff should make you coffee every morning and give you a massage after the ride. I’m not sure what the “additives” are in Silca’s wax but I really doubt that they prolong the life of a chain over other lubricants, make the chain…which is already a highly efficient system…highlier efficient, or do much more than make your wallet a lot lighter. The problem is that no one is really doing tests that are valid, repeatable, or independent. And, yes, that includes Zero Friction.

Wax works. Oil works. I’m not certain that not using anything wouldn’t work. Too much ink has been spilled and far too many electrons have been murdered looking at slight differences in chain lube and stating that it makes a huge difference.

How many lifetimes do you have to do tests? You can test each and every variable listed above. You have 5 variables. Let’s say you want to test it on three types of bikes…road, mountain, and gravel. That’s 3 more variables. Conditions…wet or dry…are two more variables. To do a full factorial design you’d need to do over 1000 experiments to see all the different permutations and cross effects. It spirals out of control quickly. That’s going to be 3 to 6 millions of miles of riding and a lot of record keeping. It could also be outdated in just a few years due to technology changes in either chains, lubricants, or bicycle design.

And the problem is there is probably very little difference in any of it. Pick a lubricant you like and one that works for you. It likely won’t make much difference.

Mineral spirits is far easier for the wax to “displace” than water is. Wax is water insoluble and unmixable. If you use water to “wash” a chain, you really should use another solvent like alcohol or acetone to chase the water off.

Wax doesn’t have to “displace” mineral spirits. It simply dissolves it.

Well, the biggest advantage of hot wax lube is that after cool and hard, dirt shouldn't stick to it like with oil. So that's the key question: At the end of the first gravel ride with a freshly waxed chain, is there grains of dirt adhered to the chain? If yes, that's the issue. If no, it's something else, like greater chainline angle from the Gravel being 1X? Or all chains don't have the same sideplate gap? (below)

Sideplate gap can very quite a bit on chains. Little to no gap keeps the rollers where they should be on the inner plate bushingless nubs, but makes it harder for the hot wax to penetrate around the rollers if that gap is tight, and makes the chain more laterally stiff. I used to run a bit of gap when I used wax, recent decade has been oil lube and less gap, but I'll be going back to wax this year. But whatever gap you use, go through with a chain tool and make sure the gap is the same, and the pin protrusion the same on each side, for all links. I check this whenever the chain is off. I think with some of the newer chains with flared riveting on each side, no adjustment is possible.

I don't know why you would want to mix or put into solution anything you don't want in your wax. Water, being insoluble, is going to sink to the bottom of the wax as it is displaced. Just like the grit and dirt.

My point was that mineral spirits doesn’t hurt anything. Water, on the other hand, has much more of an affinity for the metal surface than the wax does…it’s a Van der Waals thing. Water on the metal may be encapsulated in place when the cold chain goes into the wax melt and not likely to come off. In essence it is at the bottom of the melt.

Additionally, the chain sits at the bottom with the grit and dirt. As you point out, an excessive amount of water would also sit down there but that Van der Waals thing is going to make the water cling to the chain better than anything else in the pot.

Finally, the mineral spirits will evaporate. I’m not a fan of heating flammable liquids but the heat of the melt will help remove the solvent over time. That’s how drip waxes work. The solvent isn’t detrimental to their performance and, in fact, make for easier application.

Exactly why I use chain lube.

As a owner of a chemistry degree, one of the few posters that makes sense in this thread is cyccommute. On certain technical topics, there is simply no substitution for having sat in dozens of tedious lectures spanning 4 years that covered things down to the atomic level.

One of the main reasons that there is so much BS and unsubstantiated arm-waving on the fringes of the bike industry is the lack of the technical education that the industry simply cannot afford. Maybe the big boys like Shimano and Specialized and Giant can buy folks with masters degrees, but I doubt players below this.

As a practical cyclist doing big miles over mixed surfaces including gravel, for a chain regime that consumes my time and $$ better deliver big savings in watts and equipment longevity. First off, mechanical losses on a bike are tiny, dwarfed by aero. Second, chains are cheap; I go through at least 3 per year; who cares?

I'm not seeing any evidence here that would support anything but a cursory wipe-down with a rag and liquid lube, and replacing a chain when it gets to 0.5 to 0.75, depending on how expensive is your cassette and rings.

For me, it’s a cleanliness thing. The only lube, dry wet or some combo that doesn’t get black and filthy and everywhere is wax.

Squirt does a great job but for the price of 2 small bottles I can buy a huge brick of paraffin and a Goodwill crockpot. On my MTB, a reapply Squirt every other ride or more on longer ones. I’ve also noticed build up.

So it’s definitely not a money issue.

Time? Yes, it takes longer. I do it on days I’m just hanging out with my kids and my wife is working. It’s a fun little project they like helping with and it’s not done when I’d be out riding.

Paraffin is cleaner than Squirt too. Though both are clean enough to keep me happy.

This is along the lines of what I have been saying for years. This old chart from Ceramic Speed shows the difference in wattage loss in 55 different chain lubricants. The range is from 3.9 to 9 W or a difference of 5.1watts.
the bulk of the lubricants fall in the range of 5 to 7W meaning a range of only 2W difference. Perhaps that means a lot in a competitive environment but for us mere mortals, it’s not that much to worry about. There are many other factors, mostly to do with aerodynamics, that could be changed that would have a greater impact.

I would most certainly agree. I use a drip wax and have for a couple of decades or more because it is quick, clean, and easy. I am under no illusion that it is “superior” to oil in lubricity nor am I under the illusion that oil is “better”. The only reason I use it is because it is cleaner than oil and it is easier to do than drip wax. I’ve used oil…even Phil Wood Tenacious oil:eek:…and I’ve done hot wax. I didn’t go faster or slower with either. I didn’t get more or less mileage out of a chain with either compared to drip wax.

I do strip the factory wax off a chain before I install a new chain but that is only because factory wax gets black and dirty while the drip wax doesn’t. But I don’t strip it because I think it will interfere with the drip wax. That’s just silly since the materials are nearly identical.

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.


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.

And you'd still be guessing.


Why not just use wax and only wax, folks? This thread is a perfect example of good idea gone wrong.

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.

having lived in Sisters, Oregon, i can verify this!
red cinder dust and powdered kitty litter EVERYWHERE, in the areas outside of town.
east of Bend becomes mostly powdered kitty litter.
Diatomaceous Earth is mostly dead sea organisms... Diatoms.. plankton