Quote:
Originally Posted by weiwentg
Adam Kerin is lab testing the drip lube now, and he says it’s looking very good. He completed the first of 5 blocks of testing. He just lubes a clean chain in block 1, lets it run, then measures the wear. Silca’s drip lube seems to be the lowest wear rate of all the drip lubes he’s tested. He adds contamination in the subsequent blocks. Anyway, I think he measured the chain at 2.9% worn in that block, which beats Ceramicspeed’s UFO stuff and Tru Tension.
His post did say that the lube tends to slide off the chain, and that’s been my experience also. I’ve had some trouble evenly applying lube on each roller. Josh did say to massage the lube into the chain, and I’m doing so.
I think that the immersion tub of lube would really help with the issue of lube sliding off. The thing is, by now, you really are almost all the way to hot melt wax.
If I went back in time, I think I’d just get MSW. It is half the price of Silca’s wax or so. Now, Kerin notes that Silca’s drip lube should be a great top up lube for molten wax. The drip lube’s alcohol base seems to help it penetrate the chain better than the water base that Squirt and Smoove use. |
So our lube IS water based and NOT alcohol based.. we just add a bit of alcohol to the final product to promote wicking into the chain and also to accelerate evaporation. Our testing showed that the full water based waxes could not be optimized to both penetrate and then stay in place long enough to harden. Using an alcohol as a viscosity modifier and evaporation accelerator seemed to be a solid solution to both problems allowing the lube to get in there, and also then start hardening more quickly, but the base of the emulsion is still water as you can't get wax to emulsify into alcohol.
Compared to 'dry lubes' like white lightning, we are using an simple alcohol which is environmentally safe, totally neutral to the wax and tungsten and gets a 'zero' on the SDS where many of them are using hexane or similar which is way less friendly, though is much faster evaporating.. Also, our lube is just a few % alcohol as we are using it to tweak these other characteristics out at the margins, whereas many of these other dry lubes are over 90% solvent.