^^ "Hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk."
Hot enough to bake grease onto a chain?

Depends how dirty the chain is. I clean my chains after each ride so they don't get very mucky and cleaning is easy -- a squirt of Rock'n'Roll Gold or Boeshied T9 and a wipe does it. This entirely avoids the more complex procedures.

Btw: all chain manufacturers recommend that you don't use acidic/detergent solvents like the popular citrus degreasers. Chuck out those chain scrubbers and save your citrus degreasers for other tasks.

Damn, even though the premise was spurious, we STILL managed to turn this into the 10,000th how-to-clean-a-chain thread. Any bets as to how long before we get to WIPERS vs. DEGREASERS all-out war?

Chain Lubes and bearing greases are topics guaran-damn-teed to produce multi page threads no matter how dumb the original question appears. Bring popcorn and set a spell. This isn't over.

:popcorn: :D

What do you do with the waste water once you're done?

As for the never-ending controversy, I appreciate all the ideas we're seeing here. I'm glad no one is shouting now, at least not yet.

This is one rare area where I disagree with Jobst Brand'ts advice. I feel that any of the above techniques is better than normal neglect! (Jobst's advice, if I remember properly, says that solvents and lubricants are worse than useless if you don't remove the grit completely.)

Yep, CVD's a good way.

Could also try to grow a self-assembled tribological monolayer on the oxide layer with some octadecyltrichlorosilane in cyclohexane.

Remove cassette and chain and clean with paint thinner.