lots of interesting theories, good reads, thanks.
anyway, fact is that a waxed chain runs much smoother than a oiled chain, the waxed chain also covers lots more distance than a oiled chain. also its much cleaner than a oiled chain, and stays clean, its does not collect dust and dirt. same as for rain rides, last weekend i had to ride 102k most of it in heavy rain, I had to get to my hotel reservation since the next day I had to get home. normally I would stop and not ride in such conditions a long time. the chain is still behaves great, no new wax, close to 1000k now. perfect!

Not wanting to sound like a rabid ZFC fan, but this bit is perhaps relevant:

OTOH, Silca had endurance chips that can double the expected life of immersion wax. So... YMMV

You can’t take something that is water insoluble and mix it with water and expect it to hold in any kind of homogenous mixture. With wax, you can’t really even expect a heterogenous mixture. Pound the wax into particles at the atomic level and it still won’t mix with water. The wax will just float on the water. The water based waxes use emulsifiers (Squirt says <5%) to hold the totally incompatible materials together. An emulsifier is just a specialized surfactant. And, while the water will evaporate, the emulsifier will not. Waxes are not reactive so the emulsifier is still there ready to become active if exposed to water.

Organic solvent based waxes don’t use emulsifiers and, when the solvent evaporates, only wax remains.

A hair drier or a heat gun is not something I carry while on tour. With solvent based wax lubricant, no heat is needed.

Silca doesn't use a surfactant but they do have a small amount of alcohol as carrier (that's one way to make the wax "small"). Rex doesn't disclose how they achieve the emulsion but I doubt they're using a surfactant. Otherwise they'd have a hard time making the claims they're making.

Unfortunately you can't get those in the EU, so one either needs to make their own or go with water based. I've had a hard time finding solvents that can dissolve Rex chain wax.


Yup. Which is why the flame of a stove would work just as well.

I will wax again when the chain does not behave and my ears hear the chain longevity is secondary to me. if the chain is worn out i buy a new one.
I want to cycle, not be on top of an excel sheet and see when I have to wax the chain again, it goes by feeling. I am joking!
P.S. most probably I will wax this weekend, so aprox under 1000k is a good number.

It doesn’t matter if Silca uses an alcohol as a carrier or water. Both have similar properties and wax is not very soluble in either. You might be able to get the wax to dissolve in one of the higher carbon count alcohols but volatility of the alcohol goes down very quickly with increasing carbon molecules. For example, methanol (a 1 carbon alcohol) has a vapor pressure…an indication of evaporation rate…of 12.5 kPa at 25°C. Water has a vapor pressure of 3.17 kPa and n-Butanol has a vapor pressure of 0.58 kPa at the same conditions. The higher the vapor pressure, the faster the material will evaporate. With a vapor pressure of about 5 times less than water, n-butanol will take a very long time to evaporate.

Silca is very cagey about what is in the wax with their SDS containing more “unknown” statements than any SDS I’ve ever seen. Rex is equally cagey. But both have to be using something to modify the solubility of the wax and there are very few substances that can do that and any of them are not volatile. In other words, they solvent may evaporate but anything else…wax and emulsifier are still that.

You can buy it from Kunstform via mail from Germany. Or from Holland Bike Shop. That’s just a couple of examples.


I’ve got better things to use a stove for than unnecessarily drying wax. Put it on at night and let it dry while you sleep. Keep it simple.

In the context of drip waxing while on tour, it should be noted that depending on where you’re going, White Lightning Clean Ride can not be taken on an aircraft.
On my last trip this past September​​​​​, the inspector at Haneda airport in Tokyo wanted to see the SDS for my Ceramic Speed UFO drip before she would allow it.

I always thought waxing is most suitable for weekend warriors. You only ride in good weather. If it is raining, you stay home. You like your stuff looking shiney because cycling is nothing but a lifestyle hobby in your eyes. Perfect case for wax.

Commuting, maybe if you use two bikes, a waxed bike for nice days and an oiled bike for wet days.

Touring, hard no to wax.

Where have you gotten that strange notion?

+95% of the riding that goes on in my household is all weather commuting or utility riding year round. I maintain all the bikes we have, and since I like to make life easy for myself, all of them have waxed chains. Having tried pretty much all the other alternatives from cheap to expensive to diy, hot wax won out with reduced maintenance time, ease of use and increased longevity of components. Cleanliness is a also really nice with small children.

I knew I should have taken a picture from my last commute! I had my rear mech caked in a pound of slush and the cassette was nearly completely covered by it when I got home. It was a miracle I could change gears in the first place. For these kinds of conditions wax works best especially when the slush has salt in it.

Waxed our chains on our last tour too. It worked fine. Could be better but that's solved (aha..!) by either a solvent based wax or heating the chain. For non-flight tours the solvent wax will probably be the best option.

Surely going culinary with your chain in the kitchen is more time consuming that squirting oil in five seconds.

Remove from bike, wait for wax to melt, play chef, pull out, cool, work the links loose, reinstall. In the amount of time it took you to do that once you could have squirted oil hundreds of times. And don't forget the cleaning you have to do to a new chain before you can even wax it for the first time.

If you are OCD and wash your oiled drivetrain compulsively every week, I could see how waxing can alleviate the OCD and save time on washing. Other than that oiling is way less time consuming.

Never had any problem carrying lubricant, as checked luggage. Silca's Super Secret uses water for its emulsion

It's not so much the squirting of oil than wiping away the excess, which you kinda have to do if you don't want your drivetrain turning into a sludgy mess. In our winter our conditions a dry lube leads to daily relubes and a rusty chain that lasts a year of riding tops. With a wet lube you get a dark brown rusty sludge that makes the chain + drivetrain sticky, affecting shifting, causing drag and the chain again lasts at most a year.

I suppose you can waste a lot of time waxing chains. With a single chain drip wax usually works best.

I rotate multiple chains. For me the process is more like I turn on the crock pot, go do something useful for an hour or two. No need to be on call next to the pot when the wax is melting. After the wax has melted I dip all the used chains in and hang to cool. Takes from a few minutes to fifteen depending how many chains I have for waxing. I do that usually once every one or two months.

When it comes to swapping a used chain for a freshly waxed one, you surely cannot believe that takes much time at all. Even with my super fiddly E-cargo bike it takes at most five minutes. Breaking the links is at most ten seconds. After that it's just putting on a chain and quick link. It's faster than oiling a chain.

I'm pretty far away from OCD. I don't wash our bikes. Tried washing chains briefly and decided it wasn't for me. Much fuss for next to no gain and a huge fuss getting rid of the wash chemicals.

With hot wax no need for washing or harsh chemicals. Also If the chains were wearing at the same rate as with oil I'd be looking into replacing around twelve chains right about know after three years of waxing. However I'm not registering any wear on even the cargo bike chains and those have gone through the wringer. 6000 miles, 90Nm of torque and regular 200kg loads as well as more than 1000km touring with 250kg loads should have caused some wear on the chains but there's nothing.

And you would be wrong. No, I don’t hot wax but I do use wax in solvent. I also ride in all kinds of conditions including lots and lots of rain. First up, Michigan. One day of riding from Fond du Lac to outside Appleton, WI. 61 miles with all but about 5 of it done in rain.





Next day. Not all day but far more intense.



Missouri living up to its name of misery. All day in a cold rain.



My fingers were pruney enough that I couldn’t use my phone’s touch screen properly



Ontario’s back roads. Water and dirt.



Snow in Colorado. Not water from the sky but it does melt and become water.



I’ve ridden lots of miles in rain with solvent wax. Yes, I have to apply lubricant after rain but if you think that you don’t have to with oil, you don’t understand how water and lubricant interact.

If you don't hot wax then this discussion has nothing to do with you.

I'm wrong about what exactly? You and I are not even talking about the same subject.

I think hot wax has a lot of benefits as you state. I just don't think saving time is one of them. It's burdensome. I started doing it this year for our fair weather weekend bikes which get very low milage. They never get wet and the low milage means I can go months between waxings. So here the clean leg benefit starts to win.

On the commuter and touring bikes it's totally the opposite situation. I will never waste time waxing those. I almost never wash my commuter bike (several years without washing). Squirt, rag, done. When I was younger maintenance felt like hobby tinkering. Nowadays I realize it's nothing but yet another household chore.

You are the arbiter of what can be discussed now? Hot wax is just one way of making wax liquid. Solvent makes wax liquid as well.

I’m fairly certain I laid out the case of why you are wrong quite clearly. Perhaps you need a synopsis. Waxing is not something that is only suited for weekend warriors. As a tourist and year around commuter, I have used solvent wax exclusively for nearly 30 years. I’ve used it in cold weather, in warm weather, in thunderstorms, in drenching all day rains, in melting snow, and even in mud. It works just fine with the added luxury of not needing to clean my damned bike every week.

Bikes don’t need to be covered in oil to work properly. Nor does the wax need to be hot for it to be effective.

I was talking about hot immersion wax. If you drip wax exclusively without the hot part, good for you. You're using a different system.

You've never practiced immersion wax and therefore know nothing about it. Why barge into something you know nothing about and yell at the sky?

I'm not the arbiter and nobody can stop you... feel free to carry on yelling at the sky alone. Enjoy.

Nice of you to bring back the thread just to **** talk others, we all know tourers are the only real cyclists, not some hobbyists

I'm a weekend warrior.

Nope, not a different system. Hot wax and solvent wax are still wax. One is just using solvent to make the wax liquid. Water emulsion waxes use water and emulsifiers to get the wax into the liquid(ish) state while organic solvents are used to get the wax into the liquid state in solvent waxes. All of them are waxes and all of them depend on the same state of the wax…i.e. the wax being liquid…to work.

And you know that I’ve never practiced hot waxing how? New alert: I have done it long ago. Long before it got popular. Probably before you were born or, at least, when you were but a wee lad. Long before the internet became a thing. I found the process tendious and not worth the effort. I liked the cleanliness but not the fussiness. When White Lightning came along, I embraced it because it was easy to apply, gave the same results as hot wax without the fussiness, and it worked. I could even apply it on the road when I needed without having to melt wax with precious stove fuel and without carrying around a lump of wax and a pot to melt it in…never mind a silly hair drier.

Not yelling at the sky. Informing people who generally have no chemical experience that they don’t need to do something silly because there are better ways to do it. I have a degree in chemistry and 40 years of chemical research experience which allows me to see through the murk of the myths about waxing. There’s a whole lot of silliness surrounding waxing expounded by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

It definitely can be burdensome if you don't have a good system in place. But once you do it does save time in maintenance and cost in replacements. Depending of course on where you live. If you live somewhere sunny and nice, anything works. If you live where I do there are things that work and things that definitely do not.

Samesies! That's what I think too! That's why I like doing it less. And with hot waxing I can.

Now I don't know where you live but judging from your comments I'm going to assume it's not really challenging weather wise. For us here squirt and wipe isn't really viable unless you don't mind bad shifting, drivetrain losses and replacing chains and drive train components often.

IN my 55 years of bicycling, I have never had a rusty chain, and that includes commuting in the winter in Pennsylvania where the salt on the roads is deeper than the snow. I also have never waxed a chain, nor have I obsessed about lubing it. I simply lube when necessary. It ain't rocket science.

I'm happy waxing your chain works for you. I know that it can work, and I know many prefer it, but you don't have to make things up in order to extoll its virtues.

How can dissolved salt be deeper than snow? Or alternatively solid salt isn't really the issue you seem to consider it to be...

I do a double boiler with a metal dog bowl. Bent coat hangar to hold the chain. Same procedure that 95% of people use.

When I tour I ride in all weather, but at home I only ride in good weather. For recreational rides, why would I go if it is raining? I just wait till the next day. Cost of replacing worn drivetrains is not a factor for me. Bicycle components are extremely cheap, much cheaper than maintaining cars. I wax only for the benefit of clean legs.

For bad weather, it doesn't matter if it's oil or wax, it's all gone after one wet ride and the chain is making noise. With oil I just squirt and wipe. With wax even if I'm rotating between several chains, I still have to physically swap the chain. Later I have to re-wax all the chains in the kitchen. If I was riding in rain frequently I would be in the kitchen all the time which is not something I want to do. So I stay with oil for bikes that see bad weather.

They don't use salt water, brine, here, they throw salt, rock salt. You also are talking the comment way too literally.