I was about to say, ice skates employ pressure melting...

But no. from wiki on ice skating:
The above, friction melting with ice skates, does not necessarily mean that is happening with wax in chains. Maybe yes, maybe no. The wax could simply be functioning as a solid sacrificial bushing.

Just to clarify.

A mini crock pot can bring wax from cold to liquid in about an hour or two. Closer to two unless it’s already hot outside.

In that time, the wet chains are laying on a rock in the sun and wind. At some level, I’m sure you could find some moisture deep within it. From a practical standpoint, it’s dry.

There are some people using an ultrasonic cleaner between waxing, unless you go really nuts, those are usually water based. It’s fine as long as you dry it off.

Water vs not water is not the hill I’ll die on. The bottle filled with soapy water that I shake with the chain turns black. This is on chains that seem really clean. All that black in my soapy water would otherwise end up in my crock pot.

Im sure mineral spirits, denatured alcohol, or diesel fuel would do a better job. But then I’d have a bottle of nasty and stinky stuff to deal with.

The first pass is going to remove 99%, and then each additional pass is going to remove more and more. You're suggesting that you can grind a solid between two pieces of hardened steel 10,000,000 times over 200 miles and the amount of hard wax molecules remaining is the equivalent of oil?? C'mon.


Plastics are solids. As I pointed out with nylon fishing line, plastic solids will be severed by sufficient force. Up to 200psi over millions of cycles is more than sufficient to part any plastic.
Insulators don't fail to melt if you go over their melting point, they just don't conduct heat efficiently. Are you seriously suggesting that wax doesn't melt against hot metal????
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Slip melting point and shear melting point are related. Slip melting is a methodology to measure approximately how the wax shear melts using a non-shearing technique.
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You keep repeating this, even though I have said repeatedly that the flow wouldn't happen under pressure but after the pressure is removed. Why do you keep insisting on the opposite of what I keep saying? Are you not understanding, or are you deliberately obfuscating? Clearly what I am describing is a cycle of heat and pressure causing localized melting, then removal of pressure and the liquid wax flowing back into the gap.

Really?

You should worry more about your chains and less about the purity of your crock pot wax. The point is to lubricate your chain, not make pretty wax.

Break off a chunk and try the sauce pan method without washing the chain. That way you will only "sacrifice" a small amount of wax to the evils of impurities. And you might find that after several wax cycles without soap, nothing black comes out of the chain.

My decades old pan of wax, deep in my bike supplies, that I will pull out this year to do multiple chains after I buy them, was pretty darned clean after 15 years of use on the same chain, but I did recall some metal particles at the bottom. Was not a problem, never contaminated the chain, But I thought if desired, I would loosen the wax with a bit of heat and then scrape off that layer. Well, a couple years ago, someone said I only needed to add some water to the wax before heating, just enough to float the wax above that layer (this is with no chain). If heated slowly, the wax will melt before the water boils. Once melted, let the wax cool to solid and it will still be floating on top of the water. Remove the wax puck, wipe the metal particles out with a paper towel and dispose in trash, dump remaining water, and wax is cleaned. I haven't done this yet, but it sounds good in theory.

Regarding how clean the wax stays, my experience way back when was, if I pulled the chain the moment I heard squeaking (once I got home from the ride), and promptly waxed, the wax never got much contaminants. The metal particles noted above are the sum total of 15 years of about 5000 miles per year, and that amount sure wasn't much. So until squeaking, I think the wax keeps the critical parts apart. Which would explain that one chain going an estimated 70,000 miles. However the outside of the rollers were noticeably cupped in shape, when pulled off to replace.

It does that, and yes the principle is a sound one. Wax, being less dense than water, will float; pretty much everything else not wax ought to end up either in the water or perhaps concentrated near the top or bottom layers of the wax puck so easily scraped off if desired.

Silca's formulation includes nano-grade Tungsten Disulfide (presumably there to act as a lubricant; Molybdenum Disulfide acts similarly), whose density is significantly greater than water, may tend to settle out given sufficient time. Whether this in fact happens remains to be seen, as does what ends up being separated out for eventual removal in the water layer.

I just waxed my road chain yesterday, it saw limited usage on my Tarmac after it arrived early last September. Prior to waxing I cleaned it according to Silca's instructions, my Park gage indicates less than 25% wear. I think I rode it less than 300 miles before relegating it to use on my trainer. Be curious to see what settles out of the wax in my Silca heater when I do my trainer chain (new last Christmas) next time.

Here’s a review paper on the physics of ice skating. This quote

confirms what I’ve been saying about the idea that wax melts during use. There would be detectable heat in the chain links if any kind of melting was occurring. Remember that ice has a melting point that is 100° to 120°F lower than wax. Shear melting of the wax might decrease the melt point of wax but it wouldn’t reduce it to say, room temperature.

This paper suggests that even that idea of shear resulting in a lower melt point is wrong. Shear of wax results in larger crystals and a higher melt point, not lower.

I’m not a fan of doing any kind of water wash on chains. Even with drying, water can be trapped inside the chain and the place where it does the most damage is in the places that are most difficult to get it to evaporate from. Rust formation can be relatively rapid as anyone who has ridden a waxed chain in the rain can attest.

Mineral spirits and diesel are solvents that can be used to strip all the wax from a chain with the former being superior to the latter. However, if you want to dry the chain after using water, denatured alcohol would be the solvent to use. It is infinitely soluble in water so you could use it over and over and over again. Or you could do what you are doing now just substitute alcohol for water and skip the detergent. If all you are trying to do is remove any surface dust from the chain prior to rewaxing. Or you could just drop the chain into the hot wax since the wax after it is melted is just a solvent as well. There are lots and lots of elaborate procedures for cleaning chains out there that use multiple unnecessary steps. Chain cleaning really should be simple.

The water idea would be fine as long as you don’t get the heat high enough to boil the water. Crock pots aren’t known for having very good temperature control and even on low, they can get past the boiling point of water. Water trapped under a layer of wax could rise to a higher enough temperature to flash to steam which would blow hot wax out of the pot. I’d probably add water at the end after the pot has been turned off and the wax is starting to cool. The debris would still fall out into the water and you’ve reduced the risk of a steam explosion.

This isn't true on a basic thermodynamics level - heat that is generated inside the chain and expended in a phase change of the wax is not going to make the chain progressively warmer. Especially if we know that the temperature of even a dry chain doesn't rise despite the wear friction that clearly wears out chains over time.

You seem to think that the amount of heat necessary to melt a few micrograms of wax for a very brief time is going to be obvious against the background ambient temperature on a steel chain that is all surface area. That's like expecting to hear a squeaky shoe in the middle of Def Leopard concert.

Where did you study thermodynamics? Phase changes carry the heat with them and can be either endothermic…sucking up heat…or exothermic…giving off heat…but the heat is still there. If it sucks up heat, the heat has to come from somewhere. If it gives up heat, the heat has to go somewhere. Chains don’t heat significantly because they don’t generate much heat over time. They generate a little, of course, but the amount is extremely tiny and stretched out over weeks to months of use.

The amount of heat to melt even a few micrograms of wax at every pressure point every time the chain undergoes pressure would be far greater than what is generated by even a dry chain. And before you go saying that it is intermittent melting, how would that mechanism work? Do the molecules of wax count the times they’ve undergone pressure and jump in on every 100th revolution? Or if we can anthropomorphize a bit, does the chain call for a bit of wax every now and then?

Heating leaves evidence. Even the skating example above leaves heat trails in the ice that can be measured. Part of that quote from the paper I gave above stated that a conductor…brass…performed more poorly at sliding across ice than an insulator…wood…because the heat generated by the melt of water was conducted into the metal rather than the ice. And water is a much better conductor than wax is. Any friction that is enough to melt the wax would have to come from the chain being warm enough to melt the wax.

If the system worked the way you want it to, the wax would have to get hot enough to melt and would be able to keep all that heat to itself. There are a couple of thermodynamic problems there. First, heat flows from hot to cold but not the other way around. If the wax were hot enough to melt, it would give its heat off to the metal. The other is that conductors allow heat to move while insulators don’t. If the metal were to get hot enough to melt wax even locally to the pressure point, the heat would flow into the rest of the chain rather than into the wax. If the metal were cold and the wax melted next to it, the metal would suck the heat out of the wax and stop it from melting.

There is also the problem of the melt temperature increasing with shear.

The chain friction doesn't need to melt the wax - that's the point of lubricants: To avoid metal on metal friction. The wax being crushed inside the chain as it turns to come off the cassette and turns again to go on the chainring would provide mechanical heat, just like bending a piece of plastic makes the plastic warm at the bend point. Take any solid, crush it, and it will heat. That heat won't necessarily heat the surrounding metal (wax is an insulator, right?).

And yes that happens on every cycle of the chain, which is generally once every three pedal rotations. So about twice every 30 rpm. (2 x 30rpm x 60minutes x 10hours = 36,000 cycles in 200 miles) Those are just the peak pressure points when the full rider power is going through the taught part of the chain AND the link pivots. Which doesn't mean it has to happen when there is little power or chain tension, or that it can't happen at other times due to other forces.


I understand why you find this explanation difficult to stomach. Do you understand why I find it so incredibly unbelievable that the wax is acting like a solid nylon bushing for intense metal on metal contact for tens of thousands of cycles? What other solid material with a hardness below that of balsa wood behaves that way?

I am entirely open to any explanation of how a room temperature solid that acts like plastic could lubricate a chain better than a wicking oil. I just haven't heard one yet.

After some experimentation I have found what waxing routine works best for me. I've gone back and forth from oil to wax, wax back to oil since the 1970's. It wasn't until I got introduced to "Bergman's Formula" fly floatant 20+ years ago that the light bulb went on in my head. Bergman's is a home-made fly floatant made from Coleman Fuel (or VMP Naphtha) and paraffin wax (e.g. Gulf Wax in the grocery store).

Ten or 15 years ago I made a really stiff batch of Bergman's specifically to wax my chain. It seemed to penetrate into the roller bearings better than hot waxing. I fooled around with the Bergman's until I found a naphtha to wax ratio that seeped into every roller bearing and left enough in there to last hundreds of miles. Last year I thought I could improve on that.

I stripped a new chain mid last year and soaked it in the Bergman's for a few days (as usual), jiggling a couple times a day. I pulled the chain out and hung it in the garage to thoroughly dry. I then hot waxed it in Silca Secret Chain Blend wax.

Wow. That chain is still running smooth, fast and with no noise after about 10 months of pretty much non-stop riding. I pulled the chain off the bike a few weeks ago and measured it. It was the same length as when I first put it on.

Is that a lot of effort to just lube a chain? Oh heck yeah it is! But I don't care, I enjoy fooling around with things like this.

Soak your chain in napalm. I love it!

I can’t say that I’m going to jump on this project right away, but I’ll keep that in mind for my next round of waxing.

He's doing a complicated version of what I had suggested: Wax the chain to clean it, then wax again in the good stuff to lube it.

Kontact,

Essentially, yes you are.

I do have that "complicated" extra few steps. Is it worth it? Maybe no, but I don't care. I strip with plain Coleman fuel three times when the chain is new to get literally everything out of the chain. Then I dry thoroughly, then wax in Bergman's then hot wax. I have found that hot waxing a stripped chain doesn't really sink into the roller bearings as well as a watery thin mix of solvent and wax first. That stuff does sink in. Then the hot was with Silca.

For a deep re-waxing I usually use just the Bergman's out of a squirt bottle.

What part of heat flowing do you not understand. If there is “mechanical heat”, there is heat. It would transfer to the chain and heat the chain up. Using you bending plastic example, how do you detect the heat build up? By the transfer of heat from the plastic to your hand. The piece of plastic feels warm because the heat is flowing from one body to another. While wax is an insulator, the metal doing providing the mechanical heat isn’t. If you heat the wax enough to melt it by providing mechanical heat from the chain, the chain will heat. It doesn’t so the wax isn’t melting.

The Johns Hopkins study showed that there is very little heat generated by a chain void of lubricant. With a lubricant, the heat generated would be even less. Less than very little is an even smaller amount which means that there is no driver for melting the wax. No heat, no melt. And before you say “but crushing heats it”, crushing would possibly provide heat but, again, if you provide heat, you would see it in the chain.

You are misunderstanding or misrepresenting my point. I’ve not said that wax “acts like a solid bushing”. I have said all along that the wax is displaced from the pressure points. The metal isn’t smooth so it could retain a small amount of wax in a layer on the pressure point providing lubrication for a while. Those of us who use wax…solvent or hot melt…know that it doesn’t last forever and has to be replaced. Oil doesn’t last forever either but that is because the oil flows away under gravity. Wax doesn’t flow under gravity but it can be pushed out of the pressure points. At some point, there isn’t any wax left at the pressure point as evidenced by squeaks from metal corrosion forming after exposure to rain or water.

It doesn’t and it isn’t. That’s another one of my points. The material make of the lubricant doesn’t really make a difference. Chains last about as long no matter what you use to lubricate them. The lubricity from the lubricant lasts about as long no matter what you use as the lubricant. The difference is that mechanism of chain wear. Oiled chains die because they incorporate hard grinding materials into the pressure points through the action of pumping oil in and out of the gap between the pins and plates because they pick up and retain grit from the environment.

Waxed chains don’t pick up grit from the environment because the open internals of the chain are stuffed with excess wax. However, waxed chains will die from metal-on-metal contact because the pressure point is starved for lubrication. This is evidenced by, again, the “washing away of wax” in rain. That is a physical impossibility and there must be another mechanism for why people notice waxed chains getting noisier after water exposure.

The only real advantage that wax has over oil as a lubricant is the cleanliness. Any claims to the contrary are pretty much snake oil…which could be an okay lubricant…as good as petroleum oil or as good as wax.

It smells like, victory. :lol:

I just doused my mtn bikes chains with KMC wax in a bottle. Interested in the outcome. Both new un-used.

When you say "physical impossibility" I can't imagine how you are thinking about this. Wax isn't water soluble, but obviously water and pressure will tear wax off metal.

I simply disagree that wax or any chemical can lubricate a metal on metal surface for long periods simply by hiding in the low spots that don't bear any load (unless it can flow). When the wax is gone from the bearing surfaces, the chain squeaks because it is no longer lubricated. If you used a chain plated in Teflon and rode it dry it would squeak in 20 minutes, not 10 hours. And that's a better dry lubricant with better adhesion.


Heat that you can't measure against the background is still heat. If it is sufficient to force micrograms of wax to briefly behave like a liquid, that is not something that is going to be measurable on a system that doesn't produce measuresble heat even when it is loudly grinding itself to death.

That’s not napalm. Napalm is so named because it used aluminum salts of napthenic acid and palmetic acid, both of which are carboxylic acids. Making them into a salt makes them a surfactant or, in lawman’s terms, a soap. When mixed with a volatile chemical, the anion end of the chain turns inward making a micele and gelling the volatile chemical.

Wax dissolved in naphtha is essential every drip (or solvent) wax formulation. The only drip wax that doesn’t use naphtha that I know of is Squirt which uses surfactants (without the naphtha).

There is no pressure to the water. And everyone…I mean everyone…says that the wax is “washed off”. It can’t be dissolved by water in any appreciable amount. You might…might…be able to get parts per trillion in deionized water but add in even small amounts of a salt and that solubility is going to be dropped by several orders of magnitude. The salt isn’t just sodium chloride, either. Rain water splashed from the ground is going to pick up all kinds of ionic substances.

And I have demonstrated numerous times that there simply isn’t any heat available to do any kind of melting of the wax. As to Teflon, it would be doubtful is a Teflon coating has better adhesion than wax. Teflon is very slippery material and getting it to stick to a surface is a tricky operation. Having it stick to a surface in the face of any kind of metal contact is nearly impossible as any owner of Teflon coated pans can tell you. And that is a much thicker coating than you’d find on a chain.

Where is your evidence that this mysterious heating can occur? You say there is no heat above background in a system that doesn’t’ produce much heat anyway and, yet, there’s enough heat to melt a substance with a high temperature melting point. Additionally, you’d need enough heat to melt the wax to a liquid and to keep it as a liquid for long enough for the wax to flow back into a pressure point after the pressure has been released. Liquid oil is squeezed out of the pressure point but it can move back into the void until such time as the pressure is reduced to low enough for the oil to flow back. You are trying to flow a solid uphill and into the wind.

Heat that you can’t measure over background is heat that isn’t there. But to melt wax you’d need a lot more than just a small amount of heat. The heat generated from an ice skater moving across the ice can be measured. They aren’t making much liquid water while skating and, yet, the heat from the action can be measured. And the ice is a low melting point substance. Wax has a melt point that is 100°F hotter than the melting point of water. If it is 100°F hotter, it takes more heat to make it melt.

Finally, think if this is bulk. If you dropped a cold chain onto a cold piece of wax, how much flow of wax would you have into the chain? What if you dropped a hot chain onto to cold wax and immediately removed it? Would the chain lubricate? What if you dropped a cold chain into the wax and removed it before the chain had had time to heat up to the melt temperature? All of those are similar to your idea that somehow no heat is needed to melt wax in even small quantities. It is much easier to believe that a small amount of wax remains on the nonsmooth surface of the metal than a solid flowing into the pressure point.

Which only builds the case that the water isn't dissolving solid wax.

You asserted numerous times that chains don't increase in net temperature over time, which isn't what I'm claiming. The two have little to do with each other.

I have no evidence, other than known mechanisms like shear and the obvious fact that solid wax has no reasonable ability to lubricate metal for the mileage we know it does.
Just as you have zero evidence that is what you believe is happening - even when faced with the obvious problems with your theory like the water issue and the incredibly long time a supposed hard substance behaves like an oil.

This simply ignores the actual amount of heat it takes to make small things happen at very small scales. You keep talking about this as if the entire chain jumps to 130F all of sudden, rather than a very small amount of wax gets squeezed hard enough to change states extremely briefly. I feel like you don't believe in evaporation because the water never gets to 212.

In these examples, the hard wax would have impressions left in it by the impact of the chain, rather than having chips of wax missing. The question you should be asking is by what action you get that plastic deformation? What is happening on very small scale that allows the wax to change shape? What would happen if the wax was at 0 instead of room temperature?


Science is full of funny fine effects that don't seem to make a lot of sense: Non-Newtonian fluids (another shear effect), the Leidenfrost effect, sublimation. You are so insistent that shear can't force wax into some sort of liquid state without major amounts of heat, yet you've never even heard of it before yesterday.

(lots of above): The hot wax penetrating between the rollers and inner plate nubs, is not difficult. It's more difficult to penetrate between the pins and the slip-fit on the inner plate holes; That wear interface accounts for ALL chain stretch. I never took a chain apart to examine the wax there, but it must have penetrated, because it wouldn't squeak for 1000 miles or so.

The chain does most of its bending going around both derailleur pulleys (if applicable), but the chain tension there is LOW. Where the chain tension is high, is where the wear occurs, and that is along the aft 180 degrees of chain wrap around the cog under drive tension, and there is much less bending of the chain there, and the smaller the cog, the greater the wear. If the chain is worn, but on a newer cog, the chain force will not be distributed even on the cog teeth, but will be a few or one tooth near the top, possibly resulting in chain skip as a result. But my point is, at the wax interface, high force, low movement there. So I think to be durable, the wax between the pin and inner plates, just needs to be hard enough to not squeeze out the sides, and I think that is true, especially since the wax coating there is VERY thin, and well captured on all sides, between the pin, the inner plate holes, and the outer plate inner sides, as long as nothing melts the wax during chain operation.

I could be wrong, but I'm going for the wax-as-solid-bushing theory of how the wax works, if a hard paraffin wax with no softening agents. Regarding the micro-local-melting theory, I'm still trying to think of a lab test, perhaps at larger scale or different shape, that could test that.

It be clear, I’m not arguing that wax…or any lubricant for that matter…never penetrates into the plate/pin interface. Of course it does. However, once the chain starts being put under tension, any lubricant is going to be forced out of the interface. In the case of oil, as soon as the pressure is released the oil can flow back into the interface. This might happen as often as the chain roller transferring from one tooth on a cog or chainwheel. Oil might even flow back in under a vacuum. As the tension is released, the interface could cause a cavitation which would suck the oil back in. The mechanism really isn’t that important, however. Only the fact that the oil flows out and flows back.

Wax, on the other hand, is a plastic solid. Pressure at the interface can only push the wax out. It cannot flow. There is simply no evidence that there could be any kind of “melting” of the wax to have it flow back.

It doesn’t matter what the movement of the chain is. The wax is what moves and it is too plastic to resist movement under pressure. If it were brittle like a crystalline material it would stay in place and resist being pushed out but wax is essentially amorphous and has little structure to prevent flow under pressure. Think of how you can deform wax with a finger nail or even how you could displace a tiny amount with pressure from your finger. There also is nothing in the chain to prevent movement of the wax in any direction. Wax that is trapped at the pin/plate interface can easily be squeezed into the gap between the plates or into the roller. Wax in the roller itself is also going to be lost by being pushed out of the roller by pressure. It will be a smaller amount of movement because the roller isn’t under much pressure but wax will eventually be lost to the outside of the chain over time.

If a chain had higher friction and a source of heat, I could possibly see how the wax might melt. But the evidence against the idea of wax melting is large.

• ​​​​​​​Chains are stone cold even after hours of use so there’s not heat to work with.
• Johns Hopkins showed that there is almost no friction even when the chain has no lubricant.
• Waxed chains wear out at about the same rate as oiled chains without the grinding grit that eventually contaminates the oil.
• Wax doesn’t flow in contact with cold metal.
• Wax doesn’t last forever which would be expected is some micro quantity of wax were being melted and moved back into the contact point. There is a comparatively infinite reservoir of wax in each roller.
• Waxed chains start to make noise after being exposed to water but wax is not water soluble so there’s noise comes from water exposure of bare metal.

There is also the example of skaters presented above. Heat in the tracks of the skate can be measured. Ice is being melted in that contact point. The temperature is raised only a few degrees…maybe 10°F…and it still leaves a trace on the ice. Melting wax…even a tiny amount…would require a temperature rise of 60° to 80° F. It would leave a mark…i.e. the heat would be evident.

I can propose a mechanism for how the wax could be refreshed in the pin/plate interface. There is wax inside the roller. Immersion would completely fill the gap. As the chain moves around some small amount of that wax could shear off and fall into the pin/plate interface. It could than be pulled into the interface through the movement of the chain. It wouldn’t be a lot and it would be a random process. It’s also far more believable than melting wax with some invisible heat process.