In a matter of a few short years, hot melt chain waxing has grown from a niche old-school trick into an almost mainstream maintenance option.
It’s one of the most discussed things on Escape Collective’s member Discord and more recently on our Community Forum. In both places, you’ll find discussions about the best way to prep a chain, the best waxes, homemade brews, what top-up drip lubes are best, how to prolong the longevity, and plenty more. And within a lot of those individual conversations, there’s a constant debate: at what temperature you should pull the chain from the molten wax?
Suvi Loponen
Silca recently published a blog post stating that you can increase longevity between applications by letting the wax cool slightly prior to pulling the chain. However, a recent test from Zero Friction Cycling shows that the older advice and easier path of not stressing too much about the temperature is likely just as effective, while wasting less wax and leaving less mess.
What Silca claims
Silca’s blog post points to a basic test, where a chain is pulled out from the wax at 75 °C (167 °F), 95 °C (203 °F), and 125 °C (257 °F). By measuring weight before and after immersion, Silca found that the chain pulled at the lower 75 °C retained more wax than chains immersed at higher temperatures, and would therefore offer improved longevity. In this test, the chains were not ridden.
The theory here is a simple one. The steel of a bicycle chain is an effective heat conductor. The hotter the wax, the more heat the chain itself will take on. When you pull that chain from the wax, the cooler chain and wax allows the wax within to more rapidly cool and set, while a hot chain will promote more wax to drip off.
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