waxing philosophical

There’s a saying – “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” – that can be attributed back to sometime in the 1500s. It can be supplanted with any number of modern parallels; the car mechanic drives a Camry with 300,000 miles on it and no working AC, the carpenter’s cabinet doors all stick when it rains, the doctor smokes a pack a day and prefers his martinis drier than the Sahara in multiples of three, you get the idea. It is a reference to people who possess a deep well of knowledge about a given subject, yet in spite of this knowledge and their evident skillsets, they choose to somehow not apply it to their own personal existence. Here’s another one: Don’t look too closely at the bicycle mechanic’s bike.

I like to think I am a competent mechanic. There was a time when I called this my profession, when I had spindle tapers and lengths memorized, was able to identify ball bearing sizes from across the room, could twist up a very nice set of wheels in an hour and change. I knew what kind of grease went where, and why, and where it wasn’t supposed to be at all. I could find the creaks, and fix them. I was also pretty heavily invested in racing during this time, so my personal bikes were kept in a state of competition readiness. When it came to drivetrains, I was a vocal devotee of regularly scraping the gunk off chainrings and cogs, of carefully cleaning chains when conditions deemed necessary, and of specific lubrication with Boeshield T-9. Apply liberally, rotate cranks for 30 seconds. Wait one hour. Wipe off excess. This Was The Way. Anything else was wrong.

Then I stopped working in bike shops, and at some point after that I stopped racing, and in a while the care regimen I once so rigidly adhered to regarding my own bikes… lapsed.

Lube became “whatever might be nearby or free.” Maintenance turned into not really doing anything until the identifiable telltale noises of mechanical distress could be heard from a distance, then applying whatever lubricant was on hand until things were quiet and continuing on my way. Cleaning of drivetrains only occurred when chains were being replaced. And, since I was enjoying a rotation of test bikes that were usually only around for a few months at a time, any sort of mechanical neglect and/or failure to clean drivetrain components would eventually get put back in a carboard box and shipped off to become someone else’s problem. Out of sight, out of mind.

Within this highly abusive mindset, I developed a hatred of wax based lubes. This probably had its origins in muddy NorCal winters, when early wax products like White Lightning regularly failed to perform for any reliable span of time longer than an hour or two. Whatever the origin, this bias took root and held firm for the ensuing decades. This held true even as wax converts spoke glowingly of being able to touch their drivetrains without first donning hazmat suits or activating their gag reflexes, and others told seemingly fantastic tales of increased chain and cog lifespans.

For the past few years, I have lived in what is essentially a desert environment. It is almost always dry. The sludgy NorCal winters of 30 years ago just do not occur here, and the number of mud rides I might encounter in a given year can probably be counted on one hand. I began to think, maybe it is time to re-interrogate my anti-wax bias.

The universe heard this and, when I ended up in Baja this winter having forgotten to pack any chain lube, supplied me with a bottle of Allied Graax wax-lube that had been lurking around the depths of a traveling toolbox. This was to be my only chain lube. Lo and behold, I found myself quietly impressed by how well that wax lube worked in the desert. Drivetrain stayed clean, dust didn’t adhere to it and proceed to gum up the works, and I could go about 5 rides, maybe more, before I even had to think about re-application. This, of course, along with the 600 or so words of preamble before this, greased the skids so to speak, and I returned to the mountain desert where an underused crock-pot and a box of Silca products awaited. Time to go full-nerd, and hot wax my chain! The Trek Fuel EX test bike I had been gushing over last fall was sitting at about 30 hours of use and deserved a spa day, so it would be the guinea pig for this experiment.

Hot waxing chains is not really new, but Silca has been at the pointy end of this modern interpretation of it for a few years now and has gained a solid core of adherents to the process. These adherents can come across as zealots. Increased drivetrain lifespan! No more Fredmarks! Oil based lubricants are the tools of cavemen and devil worshippers! This zealotry is understandable, because aside from there being some very tangible benefits to Silca’s method, there is also ritual involved. And zealots loooove them some ritual.

What It Is

Lapsed bike mechanics might not be so keen about ritual, and they also tend to be skeptical of zealots. But here we are. Lapsed bike mechanic meets Silca Secret Chain Blend Hot Melt Wax Chain Lubricant With Nano-Scale Tungsten Disulfide and comes away wondering why he carted around such a dickish attitude about wax for so many years. But still, removing chains, cleaning them, cooking them in wax, then reinstalling. Doesn’t this all seem a bit mustache twirly? Like, is this really worth the hassle?

You might be surprised.

So, the setup: A 500g bag of Silca Secret Chain Blend costs 40USD. Silca Endurance pucks retail for 30USD. A bottle of Silca Chain Stripper will set you back 36USD. Bottles of Silca Super Secret Chain Coating start at 16USD. Then a crock pot, or an Instant Pot, or Silca’s little wax cooker available for 99USD. All of these are needed to get started, unless you opt to try and melt the wax sous vide style in its bag, in a pot of boiling water on the stovetop. We can argue about the merits of that method later, but I would encourage going the crock pot of Silca cooker route. All this product adds up, but all of it is, to varying degrees, reusable. Still, it’s an investment.

What It Involves

Now the prep: If the wax-curious cyclist is dealing with a brand new chain, it will still need to be removed from the bike, then stripped of whatever coating it came with. This is where the Chain Stripper comes into play. Drop the chain into a vessel big enough, pour the stripper in with it, shake the bejesus out of it for about a minute, remove chain, rinse off with water, and proceed to the next step. Should the wax-curious cyclist be dealing with a used, previously gunked up chain, it is advised to dunk that chain in some kind of solvent and give it a clean BEFORE submitting it to the Chain Stripper. Maybe I was being too cautious, but since I wanted to get multiple uses out of my bottle of Chain Stripper, I removed my visibly grimy chain and doused it in ZEP degreaser first, then proceeded to the Chain Stripper stage of the game, then cleaned my cassette and chainring. While I was doing this, 500mg of Secret Chain Blend and one Endurance puck were melting into the bowl of my Instant Pot as it heated up to 90 degrees C.

This is nowhere near as mindlessly convenient as a bottle of Tri-Flow and a rag.

Okay, once everything is up to 90 degrees C, and it is important to get the temperature right (a little hotter may not be a problem, but at 130 degrees C the wax risks being burned and the lubricative material properties begin to degrade), it’s time to immerse the chain, and then agitate it around in the wax for five minutes. If the chain was wet from the rinse, the water will vaporize, and any air bubbles trapped in the links will also migrate out. Agitate away, gently. Think Mister Miyagi thoughts as you do this. Then, lower the wax temperature to 75 degrees C. Once the wax hits 75, pull the chain out and hang it to cool. If you remove the chain at a higher temperature, there will be less lubricant adhering to the pins and rollers. If you allow the temperature to fall below 75, you will begin to experience caking of the wax, and this can get messy and wasteful.

Let the chain cool, then massage it to get the links pliable again. It will be stiffer than a dead snake when you begin this step. Some people recommend a wooden dowel or something similar that the chain can be wrapped around and the pulled to free up the links. I had fun bending it into different shapes, and was careful to let any flakes fall back into the wax pot. The less lost wax, the more uses I will get out of this gig. At least that’s what I told myself. Once the chain is somewhat malleable again, reinstall it onto the cogs and chainring that you diligently cleaned while waiting for the wax to heat up (this bears repeating).

As far as cooking goes, temperature control is key. This next bit will be repetitive, for good reason: Too hot, and you can damage the wax. But even in controlled settings, if you take the chain out of the spa at too high a temp, the wax won’t adhere to the chain as well as at a lower temp, but if you let the temp drop too much, then you have a caked up mess that is a pain in the ass to deal with. Bathe at 90, remove at 75, This Is The Way. I used an Instant Pot and a canning thermometer. The sous vide method might be harder to control temps. The Silca cooker probably makes it all a lot easier and also avoids any domestic homicide potential should significant others find out what you’ve been doing in their crock pots…

How It Works

And then go ride.

For me, that first ride was a revelation. So quiet! So smooth! Such crisp but silent shifting! It felt like when you really douse a drivetrain with some sort of heavy lube, but instead of it flinging goo everywhere it’s this almost invisible layer of wax.

The second ride was as good as the first. So was the third.

By the end of the third ride, things were still very quiet and impressively smooth. My bike felt exceptionally quiet. The trails were dusty this whole time, and this photo here is of the chain at 9 hours; about 70 miles of riding. It’s so clean! At some point I will have to drip some of the Super Secret lube on it, but probably not for another 8-10 hours at least. As for repeating the crock pot ritual, I dunno. If Silca’s claims are true, a wax job with endurance chip should be good for 30-ish hours, but there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence out there in the gravelsphere of riders doing the hot dip once a season and then only applying the topical juice as needed.

What I am impressed by is how wonderfully quiet a freshly treated chain feels, and by how well the wax has been holding up – in DRY conditions. It attracts no dirt. Wax advocates have been saying this for years, so this is probably unsurprising to anyone but me.

Then there’s the ritual. I actually enjoyed it. This was a whole lot more enjoyable AND immediately gratifying than trying to wrestle a loose UST tire into airing up on a non-perfect rim. There’s something meditative, perhaps baptismal, about cleaning the chain, dipping it in the wax, stirring it until the bubbles stop, letting it cool, then reinstalling it super-clean onto the bike. It’s up there with new tires, in terms of how sweet that first ride feels.

I am going to give this a summer and see how it goes. I really like how it feels, and if I can get a solid 5-6 rides in a row with it consistently feeling like this, I will consider this worth every penny. The “work” aspect of application was nowhere near as unpleasant as I expected it would be. If the wax was something I needed to purchase new for each application, I would think this was an extravagant waste of time and money. But what if I can get 20 waxings out of the bag? Or 50? Users are reporting dramatically improved lifespans from their chains and cassettes. Given the eye-watering cost of new high-end cassettes, what if I can get my chains and cassettes to last twice as long, or four times as long?

That’s a lot of What If to speculate about for an experiment I am less than a dozen hours into. And there are caveats. I am not sure I would be trying this if I lived where the riding conditions more regularly resemble grinding paste. But here in the desert, my existential dread aside, I am bullishly optimistic and filled with hope. Lapsed no more, I welcome the ritual.