Table of Contents

• Endless Post
• 13. Cleaning
  • The Bike
  • Cleaning Products
  • Clamshell Cleaners
  • A Clean Chain
  • Bike & General detergents
• 14. Deep Cleaning
  • The Process
  • Solvent
• 15. Etc.
  • New Products
  • Cleaning a Waxed Chain

Endless Post

This is Part 5 of a series of 8 posts organized as a single article. individually published as posts on this blog. The series is organized into sections, numbered for reference in the table of contents for each post. In March 2024 I began to reorganize and revise the long article. The article is organized into sections, numbered for reference here and in the table 0f contents for each post.

Part	Link	S.	Topics
1	Chain Wear		My discovery of wear Issues
		1	Internet search, Bike knowledge sources
		2	Safety Bicycles — Variety — Manufactured Industrially — Bike Brands — Shops or Stores — Mechanics
		3	Bike Chains
2	Roller Chain	4	Chain Drive
3	Lubrication	5	Lubrication Theory
		6	Petroleum
4			Lubricants
		7	Fluids — Motor Oil — Drip Lubes — Engineered — Wet and Dry marketing — Additives
		8	People and Projects
		9	Efficiency Tests
		10	Wear tests – chains & lubricants
		11	Innovation 2022-24
		12	Consumers’ options
5	Cleaning	13	Cleaning
		14	Deep Cleaning with Solvents
		15	New Products
6	Durability	16	Modern Chains
		17	Durable Chain
7	Paraffin	18	Paraffin Wax
		19	Method
		20	Wax-compatible Drip Lubes
8	Learnings for Make Benefit		Assortment of Notes

13. Cleaning

The Bike

The solid surfaces of the bike frame and fork are protected with paint – like an automobile or motorcycle. The painted surfaces can be hosed off or gently scrubbed. Few would use a wire brush, sandpaper or metal scrapers on the bike frame.

When the bike is hosed the joints and the open parts, including the chain, are exposed to dirt, water, and detergents. Many products would not harm the painted finish of bicycle frame and fork. Some may splash or spray into vulnerable areas. Brake rotors may be contaminated by materials used to clean the frame or the chain.

Cleaning Products

Solvents and detergents can be used to clean a chain .

Solvents dilute and wash oils and grease off of surfaces. Water is a solvent, which can dilute oils but is not a good solvent to remove oil from metal surfaces. Most industrial solvents are the product of refining or processing petroleum oils. Some industrial solvents are used clean bicycle chains and components that contain bearings.

Detergents are surfactants or mixtures of surfactants with cleansing properties when in dilute solutions.

Surfactants are chemical compounds that decrease the surface tension or interfacial tension between two liquids, a liquid and a gas, or a liquid and a solid. The word “surfactant” is a blend of surface-active agent, coined c. 1950.
As they consist of a water-repellent and a water-attracting part, they
enable water and oil to mix; they can form foam and facilitate the
detachment of dirt.
Surfactants are among the most widespread and commercially
important chemicals. Private households as well as many industries use them in large quantities as detergents and cleaning agents, but also for example as emulsifiers, wetting agents, foaming agents, antistatic additives, or dispersants.
Surfactants occur naturally in traditional plant-based detergents, e.g. horse chestnuts or soap nuts; they can also be found in the secretions of some caterpillars. Today the most commonly used surfactants, above all anionic linear alkylbenzene sulfates (LAS), are produced from petroleum products. However, surfactants are (again) increasingly produced in whole or in part from renewable biomass, like sugar, fatty alcohol from vegetable oils, by-products of biofuel production, or other biogenic material.

Wikipedia entry, Surfactant

Some detergents may interact harmfully with bicycle chains. Some manufacturers of some chain cleaning products have suggested that some industrial detergents can be a cause of hydrogen embrittlement¹Josh Poertner of Silca Velo suggested this about Simple Green and any detergent that was not certified for use on metal parts in aviation.

Clamshell Cleaners

These are devices that can be attached to the lower span of a chain on a bicycle placed against a support, when the bike is not in motion. The chain is rotated through the device by pedalling backward as the user hold the device steady. The device has rollers with bristles that pentrate inside links and bend the chain into the lower compartment, which is usually filled with a chain detergent. The Park Tool CM-5.3 is one modern device.

These devices remove dirt sticking to the chain by rotating the chain in detergent that facilitates detaching dirt from the metal, and rubbing off the dirt. These devices remove dirt in the chain on the outside surfaces including the surfaces oriented inside such as link plates. This gets close to getting a chain clean enough to lubricate. The bristles and cleaning components of these devices do not reach inside the sleeves, around the pins, or in the spaces where link plates overlap with brushes or friction.

Clamshell devices hold tiny amounts of detergent which gets dirty, which leads a user to believe the chain was dirty – which was a given. These devices have to be emptied and refilled at short intervals. They clean the visible surfaces including most of surfaces of link plates and roller pretty quickly.

The detergent will penetrate the chain. It may take a long time to remove internal contaminants, which will also introduce more detergent and water. They only clean the “insides” of the chain to the extent that detergent gets in and out, and carries away contaminants. It is best to wait and let the detergent dry off before re-lubricating a chain. Wet detergent residue contaminates any new lubricant.

The information security consultant Bruce Schnier uses the term security theatre:

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.

Schnier on Security, Beyond Security Theater

A Clean Chain

Chains wear and have to be replaced to protect other drive train
components and ensure the proper operation of the gears. The point of
cleaning, and using using better chains and lubricants is to delay the replacement of the chain and to avoid damaging other components of the drive train.

Most chain cleaning removes visible material that interferes with the chain. Many pages, videos and podcasts discuss cleaning chains; for instance:

• The “How to clean your drivetrain” section in The complete guide to bike gears | Bicycle transmissions explained at BikeRadar

Many chain cleaning articles address:

• removing the visible dirt that sticks to the ouside and inside of link plates, on the chainwheels, in the derailleur pulleys and on or between the cassette cogs;
• cleaning chains that have been lubricated with motor oil, gear oil, and most of the proprietary bicycle chain drip fluid lubes.

It is essential to get the outside surface of a chain clean enough to be able to lubricate it. This is a dirty job

It is difficult to remove the microscopically small particles of grit that adhere to the rollers, link plates, pins and other load bearing surfaces Jobst Brandt, in a paper published in Bicycle Technical Information (Sheldon Brown site), described the problem (emphasis added):

Chain wear is caused almost exclusively by road grit that enters the chain when it is oiled. Grit adheres to the outside of chains in the ugly black stuff that can get on one’s leg, but external grime has little functional effect, being on the outside where it does the chain no harm.

The black stuff is oil colored by steel wear particles, nearly all of which come from pin and sleeve wear, the wear that causes pitch elongation. The rate of wear is dependent primarily on how clean the chain is internally rather than visible external cleanliness that gets the most attention.

Only when a dirty chain is oiled, or has excessive oil on it, can this grit move inside to cause damage. Commercial abrasive grinding paste is made of oil and silicon dioxide (sand) and silicon carbide (sand). You couldn’t do it better if you tried to destroy a chain, than to oil it when dirty.

….

… the chain should be cleaned of grit before oiling, and because this is practically impossible without submerging the chain in solvent (kerosene, commercial solvent, or paint thinner), it must be taken off the bicycle.

Jobst Brandt, Bicycle Technical Information, January 2002, Chain Care, Wear and Skipping; (Also see Jobst Brandt bio and index of Jobst Brandt’s BTI articles.)

The grit in a chain is partly the metal products of friction between steel surfaces, and between chain parts and grit in the lube. The grit includes dust suspended in air or accumulated on the road and suspended in water on the road.

Deep cleaning will be addressed in section 15, below. Deep cleaning of a new, unused chain is the most effective way to remove enough factory grease to let lubricants adhere to bare metal. It is recommended/required as a prelude to lubrication with:

• Immersion waxes by manufacturers of the paraffin wax products and the hot waxing advisers; and
• Modern fluid chain coating wax products by some of the manufacturers – e.g. Silca Super Secret Chain Coating

A deep cleaning may be necessary “to reset contamination” (as Adam Kerin of Zero Friction Cycling refers to this) if the hard wax on a chain had been contaminated by dirt, water and wear under adverse conditions. Deep cleaning can be used with chains that have been run with drip lubes. It can remove most contamination when a chain has been contaminated during a ride(s) under adverse conditions. It is not a common practice.

Deep cleaning involves removing the chain from the bike. Removing a chain required using a chain breaker to remove and installed a pin for chains without master links. Master links need to be replaced, although not necessarily after a single use.

Deep cleaning also involves soaking the chain in a solvent. The effective solvents have been harsh industrial chemicals which may require handling and disposal as hazardous waste. The detergents have to be flushed with water, and the chain has to be be dried!

The limits of deep cleaning were lllustrated by a parody in an April Fools Day (prank/humour) article “The ShelBroCo Bicycle Chain Cleaning System” in the Bicycle Technical Information (Sheldon Brown) pages. A complete cleaning of a chain could literally require dissassembly of links!

Bike & General detergents

Many users use general purpose cleaners. Some use cleaners marketed as bicycle chain cleaners or degreasers. A 2023 post or page The Best and Effective Degreasers in 2023 at the GeekyCyclist site listed products sold in bike shops including:

• Simple Green
• WD-40 Bike Degreaser
• Park Tool Bio Chainbrite
• Muc Off Bio Drivetrain Cleaner
• Pedro’s Oranj Peelz

In Canada, the cycling section of any Mountain Equipment Cooperative store sold the MEC store brand Bio-Cycle Chain Cleaner detergents.

Many bike and general detergents are easier and safer to handle than solvents but once used to remove grease or oil, may be subject to hazardous goods disposal rules for oil and grease.

Some users use a chain cleaner/degreaser detergent product to clean the chain. Some use the cleaner/degreaser with brushes or a clamshell cleaner. Some users used a cleaner/degreaser before removing a chain to deep clean it with solvents.

14. Deep Cleaning

The Process

Deep cleaning a new chain or a chain that is not worn is necessary, if the user wants to remove have factory grease, or lubricants applied by previous owners and users. Removal of factory grease and reside of lubrication applied by the seller is necessary before immersive waxing or the use of chain coating emulsion lubricants.

Deep clean of a chain that has been lubricated with an oil based fluid and used but not contaminated with dirt or water may be a choice or option.

A chain that that has been contaminated by exposure to dust and water, and by the products of chain wear (metal dust) may need to be deep cleaned before it is lubricated again.

A deep cleaning may may start before the chain is removed, but often involves removing the chain from the bike. It involves:

1. Removing visible contaminants and lubricants from the exterior surfaces of the chain and the drive train components that contact the chain – chainwheels, cassette cogs, derailleur pulleys. Some parts can be scraped or brushed. For other, rags can be used, or the strong blue disposable paper towel (e.g. Scott Paper Shop Towel). Some users use microfiber wipes and towels. Small amounts of detergent may be used.
2. Washing a contaminated chain with/in a detergent. This involves taking the chain off the bike. The methods include soaking, soaking and agitation, soaking and scrubbing any surface than can be reached with a scrubbing device. Some soaking is necessary to allow the detergent to contact the material to be cleaned off inward facing visible surfaces and visible on the edges of load bearing surfaces (edges of rollers and link plate). Some advice cautions against soaking a chain in detergents that may chemically interact with the chain steel, causing “hydrogen embrittlement”. Some advisors recommend automotive or aviation detergents to remove oil from metal without damaging the metal.
3. Washing the chain in solvents.

When a chain is immersed, it needs to be rinsed and dried before another substance is applied. A chain can be hung on a peg or a nail, in a dry place and left to dry. Users with the tools and time may blow compressed air through a chain.

Deep cleaning means, basically, washing the chain in solvents that remove grease and oil. Some advisers recommend soaking in the solvent before washing. The method is: immerse the chain in the solvent in a closed container, and shake it. The shaking caused turbulent flows of material in the container, including the movement of diluted grease out of the chain and clean solvent into the chain. The shaking or agitation of the chain in the container is shown in many videos on the web. (Many of the videos refer to this method a part of a program of applying paraffin by immersion.) Some use plastic bottles (bottles for Gatorade and similiar products, with wide mouths – not narrow mouthed soft drink bottles). The videos will suggest on attaching something to an end of the chain to extract the chain from the container. Removing factory grease take several rounds of immersion and agitation. It depends on what the chain manufacturer put on the chain, and on how much.

Solvent

The recommended solvent for deep cleaning is mineral spirits (“mineral terps” in Adam Kerin’s Australian English), or white spirits, a low viscocity combustible petrochemical product. Some white spirits are formulated, packaged and sold for specific applications: fuel, solvent, paint thinner or even as lubricant.

Mineral spirits, as opposed to paint thinner, are preferred for degreasing metal items. Turpentine is a paint thinner made from plant resin; it is not used for cleaning metal because it leaves residue.

In Canada, most retailers sell mineral spirits manufactured by Recochem Inc.²Business Wire: “Founded in 1951 in Montreal, Recochem has grown into a leading manufacturer and marketer of branded, private label and bulk automotive aftermarket and household fluids for consumers and industrial customers worldwide. The Company operates a global platform, with a network across North America, Europe, Australia, China, India and the Asia Pacific region. Recochem’s strong reputation in the markets it serves has earned the Company vendor appreciation awards from its customers and long-standing relationships with its suppliers and partners around the world. With innovation and agility built into its DNA, Recochem is poised to continue its expansion into global markets while maintaining its core values of exceptional customer service, consistent product quality and environmental stewardship.” in the H.I.G. Capital³Business Wire: “H.I.G. is a leading global private equity and alternative assets investment firm with $43 billion of equity capital under management. Based in Miami, and with offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta in the U.S., as well as international affiliate offices in London, Hamburg, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, H.I.G. specializes in providing both debt and equity capital to small and mid-sized companies, utilizing a flexible and operationally focused/ value-added approach. Since its founding in 1993, H.I.G. has invested in and managed more than 300 companies worldwide. The firm’s current portfolio includes more than 100 companies with combined sales in excess of $30 billion.” portfolio under the brand name Solvable. Recochem does not offer a Solvable brand odourless mineral spirit; Recochem makes an “odourless” mineral spirit sold as Varsol, usually as a paint thinner; Varsol is a trademark of Imperial Oil in Canada.

Adam Kerin of Zero Friction Cycling has deep cleaned many chains in the ZFC business and the ZFC tests. In Episode 6 “Chain Preparation FAQ” of the ZFC YouTube series, Adam Kerin notes the differences in the removing factory grease – some chains take 3 rounds of mineral spirits but SRAM chains take 4 or 5. This was a useful aside. Removing factory grease, and using wax or a high-reputation drip lubricant appears to make a SRAM chain run silently.

Mineral spirits cut the grease, but may leave microscopic amounts of water that cause some oxidation of the metal. It is also necessary to rinse the chain with a polar solvent that will carry off any water. Denatured alcohol (“methylated spirits”) is a polar solvent. It is mainly made of industrial ethyl alcohol or ethanol. Ethanol is the intoxicating chemical in potable beer, wine and spirits. In the US, the federal government mandated during Prohibition – the rule was never changed – that industrial ethyl alcohol must be “denatured” (poisoned) with methanol to deter people drinking it and bootleggers from selling it. It is a clear fluid – no food flavouring, colour or sugar. It evaporates quickly. It is cheaper than potable spirits (hard liquor). Using potable spirits to clean a bike chain is inefficient: potable spirits contain other substances that leave residue, and it is expensive. Solvable does not offer a denatured alcohol, but does distibute methyl hydrate or methanol. Some Canadian hardware stores sell the Klean Strip brand “Denatured alcohol clean burning fuel” in the blue metal container depicted in the image on the denatured alcohol Wikipedia page (link above).

Rinsing a chain cleaned in solvent in the polar solvent allows the user to dry the chain. Again, when a chain has been immersed in mineral spirits and alcohol, it needs to be dried before lubricants are applied. Generally, after an alcohol rinse, the alcohol evaporates quickly.

Used mineral spirits may or may not be subject to hazardous goods handling rules. The used spirits are contaminated with fine particles, factory grease residue, and petrochemical lubricant residue. Mineral spirits are petrochemicals. Rules vary.

15. Etc.

New Products

There are new detergents s available in early 2024 that can dissolve oil and be used to remove factory grease or to clean a dirty oiled chain.

• Ceramic Speed manufactures UFO Drivetrain Cleaner (and UFO Clean Bearings and UFO Bike Wash).
• Silca manufactures and distributes SILCA Chain Stripper, SILCA
  Bio Degreaser and Gear Cleaner, and a few kinds of wipes and micro-fiber
  cleaning cloths.

Cleaning a Waxed Chain

This is discussed in Part 7, on immersive waxing (immersion in heat paraffin) and chain coating fluids.

One approach is to remove dust from the exterior of a chain. Modern microfiber towels are resistant to the damage of being shredded in rubbing a chain and can be washed. Chains that have been ridden a few hundred Km. in dry conditions or only for short rides in mild wet conditions can be rubbed clean and dry and simply immersed in hot wax again. This is the Molten Speed Wax manufacturer recommendation for “training chains”. The wax will get mildly contaminated, but this method can be repeated many times before the wax needs to be is discarded. A variation on this approach for more serious contamination is swishing the chain in boiling water to wash off the contaminated wax, drying the chain and putting the chain in the hot wax. Zero Friction Cycling lists the boiling water method, with these comments, among other options:

… There is no tangible benefit to boiling water flush rinses after dry rides – especially road riding where extremely little contamination will get into your solid wax lube – but even for most offroad riding unless extremely dusty – just wipe outside. …. Don’t over complicate things – basically just re wax unless fully wet ride …. With waxing just even straight re-waxing will reset contamination in chain extremely well, and a brilliant job can be done with just some boiling water.

Zero Fiction Cycling, Waxing-FAQ.pdf

A badly contaminated chain may need a deep cleaning to reset the chain to a clean condition, and an immersion in clean wax.

Table of Contents

• Endless Post
• 17. Drive Systems
  • Modern Chain
  • Other Drive Systems
• 18. Durable Chains
  • Introduction
  • Data, Records
  • Tested Chains

Endless Post

This is Part 6 of a series of 8 posts organized as a single article. individually published as posts on this blog. The series is organized into sections, numbered for reference in the table of contents for each post. In March 2024 I began to reorganize and revise the long article. The article is organized into sections, numbered for reference here and in the table 0f contents for each post.

Part	Link	S.	Topics
1	Chain Wear		My discovery of wear Issues
		1	Internet search, Bike knowledge sources
		2	Safety Bicycles — Variety — Manufactured Industrially — Bike Brands — Shops or Stores — Mechanics
		3	Bike Chains
2	Roller Chain	4	Chain Drive
3	Lubrication	5	Lubrication Theory
		6	Petroleum
4			Lubricants
		7	Fluids — Motor Oil — Drip Lubes — Engineered — Wet and Dry marketing — Additives
		8	People and Projects
		9	Efficiency Tests
		10	Wear tests – chains & lubricants
		11	Innovation 2022-24
		12	Consumers’ options
5	Cleaning	13	Cleaning
		14	Deep Cleaning with Solvents
		15	New Products
6	Durability	16	Modern Chains
		17	Durable Chain
7	Paraffin	18	Paraffin Wax
		19	Method
		20	Wax-compatible Drip Lubes
8	Learnings for Make Benefit		Assortment of Notes

17. Drive Systems

Modern Chain

As of 2022-2024, chain manufacturers make many kinds of chains to supply the need for replacement chains:

• Most modern bikes on the market in Canada and the USA, other than e-bikes, children’s bikes and single gear bikes, have derailleurs and rear wheel cassettes with 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 or 13 cogs, and compatible laterally flexible bushingless chains;
• Some cargo bikes and e-bike manufacturers make bikes that have:
  • rear derailleurs, and flexible bushingless chains; or
  • purpose-designed chains, which may be bushed chains or wider bushingless chains than chains for road bikes, gravel bikes, mountain bikes and hybrids; and
• Older bikes requiring wider chains compatible with derailleur shifting with less cogs than modern bikes are in use.

Some chain manufacturers claim that e-bikes with the motor situated at the bottom bracket or chainwheel (as opposed to the drive wheel hub) put higher stresses on chains than chains for non-electric bikes can withstand.

Manufacturers will be making chains for years to come. The flexible bushingless roller chain is an established technology in wide use.

The bushingless, steel roller chain has a short life expectancy. To make chains thin, chains have short pins. To make chains light, link plates are thin; many chains have hollow pins. The chain is vulnerable to wear and breakage. Consumers have been “educated” by their experience with the actions and words of the bike industries to realize that some bike components have limited “service lives“, and to accept that the mean time before failure of a modern bike chain is only a few hundred hours of riding.

Adam Kerin of Zero Friction Cycling (“ZFC”) suggested in an interview by CyclingTips in 2019 that 11 & 12 speed chains are more durable, in terms of wear, than 8-9-10 speed chains due to technological innovation:

It’s commonly said that the wider chains of past drivetrains were more durable. Sure, older 8-, 9- and even 10-speed systems do offer wider cog widths which provide increased surface area with the chain, but does that actually mean the chains are more durable?

It’s a question I posed to Kerin after the previous testing was done, and he got the Zero Friction Cycling torture machine up and running again to find out. In this, he tested the top Shimano chains from each respective speed, and the results may surprise you.

…

It seems that with each gear added, durability has improved. And at least for Shimano chains, 10-speed saw a significant jump in durability from 9- and 8-speed, and Shimano’s latest 12-speed XTR mountain bike chain rules the roost as Shimano’s most durable offering.

The reasoning for this is less clear, but certain materials have improved, manufacturing processes have become refined, and new low-friction coatings have been added. Similarly, the chain designs themselves have changed, and where 8- and even 9-speed chains would see the inner links turn solely on the connecting pins, newer chains typically see these forces shared across the pins and specifically stamped plates, too.

Dave Rome, CyclingTips, 2019, Finding the Best Bicycle Chain ¹Note – defunct link

Other Drive Systems

Some internal hub systems, including planetary gear systems are in use or in development:

• Sturmey-Archer 3-speed AW internal gear hub system was used on Raleigh bicycles for many years. There are articles and resources at Bicycle Technical Information (“BTI” – the Sheldon Brown site), such as “Servicing Sturmey-Archer 3-Speed Hubs“, and other manuals and support resources. There is a BTI article on Internal-Gear Hubs.
• Shimano
  • had a 3 speed hub in the Nexus line, discussed in a 2017 article at BTI, “Shimano 3-speed Hubs“;
  • manufactured and supported the Nexus and Alfine internally geared hubs, discussed at BTI – Shimano Nexus/Alfine;
  • made an 11 speed Alfine hub (BTI). Some Alfine products/parts are still in the US market.
• Classified Cycling, situated in Antwerp (Belgium) and Eindhoven (Netherlands), introduced its Powershift system in 2023. It is available for Road, Gravel, MTB and Urban bikes by purchasing and installing new bikes or wheels with Powershift hubs and compatible cassettes. It is on some Ridley road and gravel bikes (Belgian bike brand, no dealers in Canada)

Some internal hub systems had or have a friction or coaster brake. Some are available on bikes or wheels for a disc rotor or metal rimmed wheel (for rim brakes). Most are available with a single gearwheel on the drive wheel for use with a single chainwheel gearwheel. Some recent Shimano Alfine models were also made for a belt drive.

The shaft drive and the belt drive have some history. The shaft drive appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, disappeared, and has been revived in 21st century prototypes: Ceramic Speed is raising funds for its Driven technology – a 99.2% efficient shiftable drive shaft. Belt drives reappeared late in the 20th century e.g. the Gates Carbon Belt Drive.

An alternative drive system may be an option for a home mechanic, or a shop option for an owner with the ability to pay for work and parts, if an owner can find a mechanic who can do the work.

18. Durable Chains

Introduction

Some modern laterally flexible bushingless chains on the market are durable. ZFC tested “top” Shimano 8-9-10 speed chains, and a top Shimano XTR 12 speed chain, and some other chains. In the CyclingTips NerdAlert podcast episode March 16, 2022 “Finding the best chain lube for your needs” Adam Kerin mentioned those chains, including the use of chrome in the manufacturing. The Outside Magazine sites, including its Velo (corresponding to the online verson of VeloNews) have depublished this material. Adam Kerin has discussed durable chains with other interviewers, but I have not located the interviews and passages. Adam Kerin has Chain Wear Test Results on the Chain Efficiency page. The chain wear result graph selected chains for “longevity” in terms of km in wear testing to the .05% wear mark .

ZFC initially planned tests of lubricants and tests of chains but has done more lubricant tests than chain tests. The initial 2018 document laying out the chain “longevity” (durability) testing is still online. The ZFC data chain durability is not as detailed as the material on lubricant testing. ZFC found that some chains were more durable than others in tests run with White Lightning Epic Ride dry-drip lube.

Chains by different manufacturers vary. Bike manufacturers and bike shops do not regard chain replacement as their responsibility, and do not have inventories of chains as spare parts for specific bikes. In modern commercial and economic thinking, chains are consumables. A bike shop can sell a new chain to replace a worn chain.

Not all chains by the same manufacturers are equally durable – it depends on plate, pin and roller, material, machining, metal treatment, coating, lubrication and conditions.

In an interview with Global Cycling Network tech journalist/presenter Alex Paton “They Don’t want your chain to last this long” in March 2024, Adam Kerin diffentiated some SRAM chains as better value than other chains on the basis of SRAM’s “hard chrome” treatment of chain components (which seems to be the use of chromium alloy steel plating on some chain surfaces) on those chains. Durable chains, compatible with modern drive trains and cassettes cost more.

Durable chains are not available from all manufacturers, or to all purchasers and riders in the markets of the world. Buyers and riders have lighter, thinner bushingless chains that are more vulnerable to wear. Light and thin can be cheap or expensive. Durable is more expensive. Modern chains have associated costs.

There were reports of counterfeit chains on the market during the pandemic. The elusive idea/hope buying an inexpensive durable branded chain on the internet has suffered more.

Data, Records

A rider should know when a chain was installed or lubed last, and the distances the bike has traveled. A cycling computer has a trip odometer. Keeping trip records in the device or an app requires tinkering with the device and the settings – and turning the device on. The rider may store trip data in an app that stores it in the cloud, or in spreadsheet or chart or table, or in a notebook.

Tested Chains

ZFC posted bar graphs of the durability test results in a “News” item in 2022. Some of the results are explained in CyclingTips Finding the Best Bicycle Chain article, which adds to the ZFC results:

• Some chains were retested;
• The ZFC “cost to run” results are graphed in $US.

ZFC also publishes a pdf version of a “consolidated” Chain-Efficiency-and-wear-life” results bar graph.

ZFC is attempting to measure some of the real world effects of chain construction, lubricants, and operating conditions in tests that represents the real world. Josh Poertner of Silca Velo has provided his explanatory gloss on Adam Kerin’s lubricant testing work in a couple of Silca Velo channel YouTube videos:

• Josh helps you crack the code of Zero Friction Cycling Lubricant Testing Data, August 2023;
• Josh explains more Zero Friction Cycling data set details, August 2023

In 12 speed chains, ZFC thought SRAM Eagle XX1 and X01 could run about 5,000 Km, and the Shimano XTR 9100 to about 4,000 Km., with the control lubricant a low quality “dry” drip lube, based on pure elongation results. The ZFC lubricant tests indicate that a high quality chain will last longer with paraffin lubrication. ZFC suggested, in an extrapolation calculation in the lubricant testing spreadsheets, that a few specific modern Shimano chains, immersion waxed, can be run for 25,000 Km. ZFC is not always consistent in predictions and estimates; its comments refer to specific chains, and not to manufacturers or brands.

Will what manufacturers of the tested durable chains have done be replicated in production lines of chains by any manufacturer?

The best 11 speed chains in the elongation tests, among those tested by ZFC, at over 3,000 Km., were SRAM XX1, Campagnolo Record, and YBN SLA-110. ZFC found, in its cost to run 10,000 KM. calculations, several chains at about $500 (Australian), or about $200 (US), making assumptions about chain replacement and other drive train component replacements. The cost to run numbers in US dollars are in in a bar graph. Several chains show at a price to buy $150-$200 US per 10,000 Km. Online or retail stores list economy and mid price bike chains under the SRAM and Shimano brands from $30 to $50.

ZFC sells the following chains, in bundled waxed chain sales, as of 2024 (not counting some chains for e-bikes²ZFC discloses the shipping costs to consumers outside Australia – more emphatically than most e-commerce sites. I have not matched the description in the ZFC store to the desciptions in the test charts):

10 speed	11 speed	12 speed	13 speed
			Campagnolo Ekar
	Campagnolo Record	Capagnolo Super Record – C-Link
	Shimano HG-901/XTR	Shimano M9100
		Shimano M8100
		SRAM AXS UFO
		SRAM AXS Road
		SRAM AXS Eagle
YBN-SLA 101	YBN SLA-110	YBN SLA Ti-N

Adam Kerin was cited by CyclingTips in”Finding the Best Bicycle Chain” (The Outside Magazine sites, including its Velo site, corresponding to the online verson of VeloNews,the owner have depublished this material) as regarding the Campagnolo Record and YBN SLA as “excellent choices”. Adam Kerin did not distinguish between YBN 11 speed SLA chains – SLA 110 and SLA 1100. YBN chains can be ordered from MSpeedwax in the USA and other regional dealers elsewhere, including ZFC in Australia. MSpeedwax lists the SLA-110 chains at about $70 US.

Adam Kerin stated, under the heading “How Long will waxing last?”, on the Waxing Instructions page:

Re-waxing by recommended 300 Km. mark, the average for a top quality chain like YBN to get to recommended wear replacement mark of .5% is 15,000 Km.

….

Erring on the earlier side. i.e. re-waxing in the 200 the 250 mark [range] brings a big jump in chain and drive train life span again. From 100 Km. post re-wax there is literally zero wear … From 100 to 200 Km., the friction and wear increase is minute.

Table of Contents

• Preliminary
  • Endless Post
  • Scope
• 5. Theory
  • Development of theory
  • Bicycle Chain Drive Train
    • Introduction
  • Plates and Pins
    • Chain Lubrication
    • Fluid Lubricants
  • Research
    • Materials
    • Professional organizations
    • Academic
    • Industrial
  • Basic terms
  • Penetration and distribution
  • Unsuitable
  • Factory Grease
  • Additives
• 6. Petroleum
  • Source & Refining
    • Motor Oil
    • Gear Oils
    • Limits and Constraints
  • Bike Drip Lubes
    • Wet and Dry
  • Solids
  • Paraffin Wax

Preliminary

Endless Post

This is Part 3 of a series of 8 posts organized as a single article. individually published as posts on this blog. The series is organized into sections, numbered for reference in the table of contents for each post. In March 2024 I began to reorganize and revise the long article. The article is organized into sections, numbered for reference here and in the table 0f contents for each post.

Part	Link	S.	Topics
1	Chain Wear		My discovery of wear Issues
		1	Internet search, Bike knowledge sources
		2	Safety Bicycles — Variety — Manufactured Industrially — Bike Brands — Shops or Stores — Mechanics
		3	Bike Chains
2	Roller Chain	4	Chain Drive
3	Lubrication	5	Lubrication Theory
		6	Petroleum
4			Lubricants
		7	Fluids — Motor Oil — Drip Lubes — Engineered — Wet and Dry marketing — Additives
		8	People and Projects
		9	Efficiency Tests
		10	Wear tests – chains & lubricants
		11	Innovation 2022-24
		12	Consumers’ options
5	Cleaning	13	Cleaning
		14	Deep Cleaning with Solvents
		15	New Products
6	Durability	16	Modern Chains
		17	Durable Chain
7	Paraffin	18	Paraffin Wax
		19	Method
		20	Wax-compatible Drip Lubes
8	Learnings for Make Benefit		Assortment of Notes

The project took several months. Since then, I have edited and revised further.

Scope

This Part:

• contains cumulative section 5. which addresses the lubrication of steel roller chains, and
• contains cumulative section 6, which addresses the history of the extraction and refining of petroleum oil and various kinds of lubrication products.

It discusses lubrication theory for bicycle roller chains from the start of the safety bicycle era (i.e. after 1888) to the early 21st century.

Part 4 of this series will consider consumer-led testing, data-driven assessment of lubricants. Parts 4, 5 and 7 will discuss and some early 21st innovations in chain lubricants and cleaning chemicals.

5. Theory

Development of theory

The idea of lubricating a steel roller chain with oil made was based on observation. Some lubricating fluids did not flow off the chain and were not flung off by the forces of motion. Some fluids adhered to the chain, and lubricated, for long enough, to allow the chain to move under “load” and serve a purpose. In industry, oilers, specialized employees, lubricated open bearings in various devices with lubricating “oils” in the 18th and 19th centuries. This continued into the 20th century in many industries.

The industrial view, historically, was that

• lubrication of the contact surfaces of machinery allowed parts to move and reduced the wear on metal parts; and
• generous lubrication with fluid lubricants was to be preferred to low lubrication.

People can see what happens when a chain is soaked in solvent. Dirty solvent to see that washes out of the chain. Bike people use mental models of what happens in a chain to explain opinions about what happens and how it works.

The model of how lubricants worked in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th included that lubricants reduced friction and broke down and washed out the products of corrosion (rust) and contamination (dirt, products of operation of a chain, or products of a machine or system, such as combustion).

Engineers and scientists worked out many principles and applications of organic chemistry and chemical engineering in the 19th century, before the modern theories of atomic bonding were established and before the periodic table of elements and other fundamental theories of physics and chemistry were articulated.

Bicycle Chain Drive Train

Introduction

The right way to lubricate a bike chain is contentious among cyclists and mechanics. The mechanic and pioneer cycling Web writer Sheldon Brown observed:

Chain maintenance is one of the most controversial aspects of bicycle mechanics. Chain durability is affected by riding style, gear choice, whether the bicycle is ridden in rain or snow, type of soil in the local terrain, type of lubricant, lubrication techniques, and the sizes and condition of the bicycle’s sprockets. Because there are so many variables, it has not been possible to do controlled experiments under real-world conditions. As a result, everybody’s advice about chain maintenance is based on anecdotal “evidence” and experience. Experts disagree on this subject, sometimes bitterly. This is sometimes considered a “religious” matter in the bicycle community, and much vituperative invective has been uttered in this regard between different schismatic cults.

This article is based on my personal and professional experience and my own theories. If you disagree with them, I won’t call you a fool or a villain, you may be right. I hope you will extend me the same courtesy.

Sheldon Brown. “A Religious Question”, Chain Maintenance section, Bicycle Technical Inf0 pages.

Plates and Pins

The bicycle roller chain is made of materials and components developed in 19th century. Inventors, engineers, manufacturers, and mechanics, unable to observe microscopic spaces inside the rollers of roller chain, relied on evidence other than direct observation, and draw inferences. While microscopes and electron microscopes can view surfaces at a nearly molecular scale, no one has observed the events on the surfaces inside a moving roller chain.

Some one of the inferences is that lubrication reduces friction but does not stop metal surfaces in contact “under load” (i.e. with force) from wearing. Some modern riders are not aware of wear, and regard it as a sinister excuse to service bikes and sell bike parts. The modern efforts to explain maintenance have led modern engineers to use new tools to prove that wear is real, and to explain what can be done to make bike chains work properly and last longer. Electronic magnifying glasses and microscopes can make still pictures and videos of chain links. Some social media producers are using these tools to explain and illustrate bike chain operations. 2024 videos by Silca Video

• April 11, 2024, Stop Wasting Your CHAIN LUBE! Know the BEST Way to Apply It! shows the effects of surface tension in moving liquids into the spaces of a bike chain, in slow motion;
• June 26, 2024, Chain QUICK LINKS: Are they keeping you from waxing? shows the fine parts of master link and paraffin wax on a hot-waxed chain.
• July 30, 2024, Microscopic Magic: Save Your Chain from Wearing Out!

Bicycle chains are manufactured on the assumption that the user/owner of the bike or a mechanic will maintain, clean and lubricate the chains at the expense of the user/owner

A bike chain has to bend at the pins several times every time the chain travels the loop from the chain wheel to the gears on the drive wheel. The chain bends around the pins as the chain goes around the chain wheel, the jockey pulleys and the gear on the driving wheel. There is metal to metal contact between:

• rollers and
  • the bushings of a bushed chain or the half bushings (on the inner surfaces of inner link plates) of unbushed chain, and
  • the inner sufaces of outer link plates;
• the pins and
  • inner link plates, and
  • outer link plates.

Most or all of these areas need lubrication.

The moving parts of bicycle chain are “open” bearings (i.e. not sealed).

Silca Velo (Josh Poertner or his team¹ discussed in post # 4 in this series) explained bike chain lubricants in a blog post Chain Friction Explained published in December 2021. The drawings in that post show plates, rollers and pins and the locations that fluid lubricants should be applied. Silca explains the theory that a lubricant forms a film that lubricates the metal surfaces, preventing the metal surfaces wearing each other down. (Wax penetrates at these points when the wax has been melted to a fluid and lubricates when the wax is solid after the chain has cooled, or the carrier fluid has evaporated).

Chain Lubrication

An article at the web site BikeGremlin in 1986, when it was a text based Web site, described the goals of engineers and mechanics, the science of lubricants and goals of chain lubricants:

5.1. Good rust protection and resistance to water wash off.

5.2. Good adhesion, i.e. remaining between the pins and the rollers, without leaking out, as long as possible. Keeping the chain well lubricated and running quietly.

5.3. Cleanliness, i.e. not sticking dirt to itself and thus making the chain dirty.

5.4. Low price – so that chain lubrication doesn’t cost more in the long run than replacing chains more often

https://bike.bikegremlin.com/1986/bicycle-chain-lubricants-explained/#5

However, that article like many written for cyclists, does not explain how lubricants were believed to operate.

Fluid Lubricants

Fluid lubricants applied to the joints between links of bike chains will penetrate the spaces between the moving metal surfaces. The lubricant is believed to form a film. The lubricant adheres to each surface and slips or sheers. A lubricating fluid for a roller chain needs to have properties of:

• viscosity (the resistance of a fluid to shearing flows) – low (thin) to flow (run), but enough to form a film, and
• adhesion – enough to stick to the metal and not be disrupted by the forces that are acting on the chain.

Adhesion requires a lubricant to adhere to metal and form a film. It is hard to prevent dirt adhering to a chain treated with some lubricants, and hard to prevent a chain from getting wet under some conditions.

BikeGremlin discusses achieving correct viscosity and water resistance in an oil based liquid lubricant:

[Water resistance] is practically independent of particular lubricant’s properties. For example, a lubricant that is resistant to water washout will be even more resistant if more viscous, and less resistant if “thinned”. It may still be better than another lubricant that isn’t resistant to water washout, but viscosity has a significant effect on a wet lubricant’s characteristics and performance, besides the lubricants inherent characteristics.

Another thing to consider is that viscosity changes with temperature change. The colder it is, the thicker a wet lubricant gets, while in summer heat viscosity (drastically) drops.

Because of all this, each must choose for themselves an optimal wet chain lubricant viscosity, based on riding conditions (temperature, rain, dirt, sand etc.) and how often they (want to) clean and lube the chain. Trade offs are given in table 3.

https://bike.bikegremlin.com/1986/bicycle-chain-lubricants-explained/#8

BikeGremlin suggests motor oil (the oil used in the crankcases of 4 cycle internal combustion engines) was and would be is an adequate chain lubricant, except for additives:

Monograde engine oils, with SAE 10W, or even SAE 30 viscosity, thinned down with diesel fuel (from 4:1, to highly thinned in 1:4 ratio), can be decent bicycle chain lubricants.

Engine oils of lower API grade class (API SF, or API SG), preferably monograde, for petrol (not diesel) engines, are the better choice than modern, higher API class engine oils, because they contain less detergents and other (needles, or harmful for bicycle chain lubrication) additives.  As was explained in chapter 6.1, in case of multigrade engine oils, the first mark (before the “W”) is relevant for determining viscosity for bicycle chains lubrication.

As far as viscosities go, SAE 30 is a decent summer candidate (“thinning” with diesel per one’s taste), while SAE 10W is OK for the winter (also with “thinning” if required).

Rough SAE viscosity recommendations for motor oils, for the summer: SAE 10W use straight SAE 30 thinned with diesel in ratio 3(oil):1(diesel) SAE 50 thinned with diesel in 1:1 ratio

….

Engine oils are designed to work within enclosed engine compartment. That is why they are not water washout resistance champions, while additives they have don’t help with bicycle chain lubrication, quite the contrary. However, these shortcomings are not severe enough to make (much) measurable difference from other oil types. Of course, as the following chapters will show, there are better options.

Ibid.

BikeGremlin said that light machine oil, for instance sewing machine oil, had the right viscosity to be used to lubricate bicycle chains.

Fluid lubricants that disperse and suspend in air as aerosols. Aerosols require fluid to be mixed with a gas and propelled to the point where the fluid is to be applied by a pump or pressurized source. Some aerosol lubricants are general purpose and some are for motorcycle drive chains, chain saws, or other chain drives.

Research

Materials

Materials used in manufacturing roller chain meet standards set by ASTM International, formerly known as American Society for Testing and Materials, an international standards organization that develops and publishes voluntary consensus technical standards for a materials, products, systems, and services. One relevant standard is ASTM-G77: Standard Test Method for Ranking Resistance of Materials to Sliding Wear Using Block-on-Ring Wear Test. The method “covers laboratory procedures for determining the resistance of materials to sliding wear. The test utilizes a block-on-ring friction and wear testing machine to rank pairs of materials according to their sliding wear characteristics under various conditions.” A testing machine is shown in a video published by Silca Velo ²a firm discussed in Part 4 in this series which promotes Silca Velo’s drip lubricant Synergetic and criticizes other specific brands of bicycle chain “drip lubes”.

Professional organizations

American lubrication engineers formed a learned society in 1944; lubrication engineering reformulated its parameters and boundaries and now calls it area of expertise “tribology“. It is not molecular nanotech, but it studies and explains the interactions of materials including nanomaterials on moving surfaces. The name of the American Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers was modified. Tribology is not a regulated profession – there is no law or process to prevent any person calling themself a tribologist.

Academic

There is proprietary industrial research, but the results are not published. A university may fund research, but academic researcher need funding, and need research to be sponsored or commissioned. In the neo-classical economics that dominates thinking about innovation, markets and consumption, an innovator can disrupt an industry and established manufacturers – if the invention can attract capital investment, which requires financial engineering.

Research published in academic and trade journals is usually published in the journals used in one of the subfields of the applied science of engineering. There is a good deal of published research on lubrication of industrial machines. Published academic research on bicycle drive trains was scarce for decades. People in business paid attention to published research and used it in developing and marketing products

Josh Poertner of Silca Velo discussed the development of Silca Synergetic, an oil based fluid chain lube, in his Marginal Gains podcast in November 2020 Lubes & Chains & Marginal Gains. His vision of the role of universities and industry in research was:

… it is 100% the job of the people doing the basic science to figure this [what is the reason this works] out … my place in the world is to turn this research into a product that people can get their hands on”

Marginal Gain Podcast: Lubes & Chains & Marginal Gains

Engineers believe that lubricating fluids can be designed and manufactured to flow while carrying particles of solids in suspension. The academic literature is largely gated or fenced behind publishers’ paywalls. For instance, a chapter on “Applications of Fluorinated Additives for Lubricants” on the 2012 book Fluoropolymer Additives, published by Elsevier, appears to discuss the use of PTFE (Teflon) and other additives in bike lubes.

The academic literature on bicycle chain lubrication was sparse until after 2001. A modern (paywalled/gated) paper by James B. Spicer, published in the Journal of Mechanical Design, in 2001, “Effects of Frictional Loss on Bicycle Chain Drive Efficiency” addressed lubrication. Subsequent published research by Prof. Spicer addresses drive trains for e-bikes. The abstract of the 2001 paper stated:

Chain drive efficiency has been studied to understand energy loss mechanisms in bicycle drive trains, primarily for derailleur-type systems. An analytical study of frictional energy loss mechanisms for chain drives is given along with a series of experimental measurements of chain drive efficiency under a range of power, speed and lubrication conditions. Measurements of mechanical efficiency are compared to infrared measurements indicating that frictional losses cannot account for the observed variations in efficiency. The results of this study indicate that chain tension and sprocket size primarily affect efficiency and that non-thermal loss mechanisms dominate overall chain drive efficiency.

James B. Spicer (of Johns Hopkins University) and others, Journal of Mechanical Design, Volume 123, p. 598 (2001)

In a press release by Johns Hopkins University, Prof. Spicer is quoted (emphasis added in this post):

The researchers found two factors that seemed to affect the bicycle chain drive’s efficiency. Surprisingly, lubrication was not one of them.

….

The Johns Hopkins engineers made another interesting discovery when they looked at the role of lubricants. The team purchased three popular products used to “grease” a bicycle chain: a wax-based lubricant, a synthetic oil and a “dry” lithium-based spray lubricant. In lab tests comparing the three products, there was no significant difference in energy efficiency. “Then we removed any lubricant from the chain and ran the test again,” Spicer recalls. “We were surprised to find that the efficiency was essentially the same as when it was lubricated.”

“The role of the lubricant, as far as we can tell, is to take up space so that dirt doesn’t get into the chain,” Spicer says. “The lubricant is essentially a clean substance that fills up the spaces so that dirt doesn’t get into the critical portions of the chain where the parts are very tightly meshed. But in lab conditions, where there is no dirt, it makes no difference. On the road, we believe the lubricant mostly assumes the role of keeping out dirt, which could very well affect friction in the drive train.”

John Hopkins University News Release, August 19, 1999

The stated speculation is why lubricants still work as real chains get dirty and are sprayed with water. The article and news release did not say which lubricants were best.

The researcher addresses efficiency in transmitting power. The researcher does not say that chain should not be lubricated. The researcher speculates that a bicycle lubricant may contribute to energy efficiency in the real world where bicycles are used. The Johns Hopkins tests were full Load Tests (see post # 4 in this series) which had a range of error of +/- 1 %.

Industrial

Industrial discoveries are guarded from imitation and distribution by employee loyalty and legal mechanisms to protect the advantages of existing manufacturers and of innovators. Lubrication engineers, tribologists, and other experts, whether employed by academic institutions or businesses developing and selling products, refer to standards to describe and measure things that are believed to happen according to physical laws.

Lubrication engineers working for private enterprise began to develop specialized “bicycle chain” lubricant fluids in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the early and middle parts of the 20th century, the lubrication and bearing industries developed tests and equipment. The Timken OK Load was a device manufactured and sold by the American manufacturer, the Timken Company. The test method was known as block and ring. ASTM International (formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials) sets standards. The ASTM standard for block and ring testing is ASTM G77,, as last revised in 2017. The paper that lays out the ASTM G77 process is paywalled. The process can be followed with small testing machines that applying known force (a weight on lever) to a sample block of metal against a metal ring turned by the energy of an electric motor at a known speed. These devices are used in industry to test or demonstrate the effects of lubricants in reducing friction. It would be remarkable if any cyclist had such a friction testing machine or the knowledge and skill to use it. ASTM developed a process that manufacturers of bearing and lubricants can follow, but does not certify the tests performed by manufacturers. I am not aware of any agency or body that tests lubricants and certifies that lubricants consistently meet standards. ASTM does not have, as far as I can tell, standards for bicycle chains and lubricants. Bike chain lubricant manufacturers do not to refer to ASTM G77 or any ASTM standards.

Racing was a dominant factor in promoting sales of bikes and parts in the bicycle industry in the affluent parts of the world in the 20th century. Manufacturers publicized their products based on the achievements of racing teams, team leaders and stars. The bicycles sold in parts of the world changed in the 1960s and 1970s. Some riders learned how to repair road bikes. Some riders began to modify and build bikes – this is the origin story of how the first mountain bikes were made, and of many companies selling goods and services to cyclists. The firms manufacturing drive train components developed product lines for road bikes, mountain bikes and for gravel bikes.

Basic terms

The article from BikeGremlin, above., explains lubricating oils, the concept of viscosity, US Society of Automotive Engineers (“SAE”) standards of viscosity of motor oil (SAE has a separate standard for gear oils), and the ISO VG standards. The SAE numbers are usually visible on a container. The ISO VG standard is not necessarily marked.

A couple more terms:

• Carrier fluid is a term used by engineers and other specialists who deal with the distillation of petroleum, and manufacturing and using lubricants. “Carrier fluid” was not a Wikipedia entry, as of January 2022, but is used in several entries. Carrier fluids have been used in industrial chemistry and manufacturing for over 60 years (as of 2022) to dissolve polymers and oligomers, and transport additives to surfaces where the additives lubricate the surfaces. Chemical firms manufacture and sell their own proprietary carrier fluids. Dow brands its carrier products as UCON. 3M has branded its carrier products and solvents as Novec. There are a number of published papers on carrier fluids and additives in industries.
• Base oils refers to refined petroleum or synthetic lubricating oils with lubricating properties.

Many carrier fluids dissipate or evaporate, in theory leaving a coat of lubricant(s). Some carrier fluids are highly volatile – they evaporate. Some are solvents. The online Encyclopedia Britannica has an entry on solvents and carrier liquids in the application of surface coatings. Journalists and tech writers at CyclingTips used the term carrier fluids as early as 2008. Lennard Zinn mentioned it in columns and articles in Velo News in 2013 and 2014.

Penetration and distribution

A fluid film can be displaced, disrupted, or diluted by the operation of the device or the introduction of foreign liquids such as water. The mains ideas about chain lube were/are that it should be thin enough to penetrate into the spaces where metal surfaces are in contact, and viscous enough to maintain a film, and it should adhere to the metal parts and form a film coating the metal parts it is protecting. A bicycle chain only needs a few drops of an effective lubricant to form a film or deposit a coating in the spaces between the moving metal surfaces that bear on each other in bike chains. John Allen at Bicycle Technical Information (“BTI” or Sheldon Brown’s pages), noted:

There are three points where a chain needs lubrication. First, and most importantly, the link pins need to be lubricated where they move inside the inner links as the chain bends and straightens. Second, the insides of the rollers need lubrication to let them revolve freely around the bushings as they engage and disengage the sprocket teeth. If the rollers don’t roll, they slide along the sprocket teeth, causing accelerated sprocket wear. Third, the surface where the outer side plates overlap the inner side plates can benefit from lubrication as well, although this contact surface is much more lightly loaded than the first two.

When a conventional [bushed] chain is oiled, before oil can reach inside of the bushings to lubricate the link pins, it has to pass between the inner side plates and the outer side plates. With usual oiling techniques, such as sprays, the oil tries to get into both ends of the bushing at once. Air bubbles can get trapped in the space between the link pins and the bushings, and with oil at both ends of the bushings there is no place for the air bubbles to escape. In addition, the cracks between the inner and outer side plates are highly exposed to road dirt, and are often quite grungy. Thus, even if you are able to get oil into the bushing, it is likely to be contaminated.

The air bubble problem may also exist with lubricant flow into the inside of the roller to let it turn freely around the bushing, but the shorter length and larger diameter of the roller, compared to the inside of the bushing, probably make this a non-issue. The contamination problem here is also probably less severe, because the sprockets tend to clean the rollers automatically.

With bushingless chains, the lubricant flow is entirely different. If oil is applied to the rollers, it can easily flow into both sides of the rollers, because air (and oil) can flow through the gap between the “half bushings”. If a bushingless chain is oiled only on the rollers, for instance by a narrow-spout oil can, the oil is able to flow into both sides of the rollers, through the gap and onto the middles of the link pins. The oil then flows out along the link pins to the side-plate junctions. Since the side plates are oiled from the inside, there is a natural self-flushing action that brings dirt and sand out of the chain instead of into it.

The outside of the rollers is cleaned by contact with the sprockets.

Sheldon Brown & John Allen, BTI, on Chain Maintenance

John Allen noted:

… the Sunbeam oil-bath full chain case solved the problem in 1908.

Brown & Allen, BTI, Chain Maintenance

David V. Herlily’s Bicycle – the History (2004) said that an oil bath was designed by the English innovator John Marston, of Sunbeam Cycles, Wolverhampton, U.K. and featured in the Golden Sunbeam model. Versions of the Golden Seabeam were manufactured for several years after 1896. Oil baths has been developed for use with roller chains in industrial settings.

Many driving chains … operate in clean environments, and thus the wearing surfaces (that is, the pins and bushings) are safe from precipitation and airborne grit, many even in a sealed environment such as an oil bath.

Wikipedia, Roller Chain#Lubrication

Oil baths were featured on some motorcycles. Many modern motorcycle drive trains have sealed bearings. However oil baths and sealed bearing have not been accepted by bike designed and riders.

An uncovered chain needs to be cleaned and lubricated. Generally cleaning should precede lubrication. Sheldon Brown, published material by the California engineer and cyclist Jobst Brandt in the BTI pages:

… the chain should be cleaned of grit before oiling, and because this is practically impossible without submerging the chain in solvent (kerosene, commercial solvent, or paint thinner), it must be taken off the bicycle. Devices with rotating brushes that can be clamped on the chain while on the bicycle, do a fair job but are messy and do not prevent fine grit from becoming suspended in the solvent. External brushing or wiping moves grit out of sight, but mainly into the openings in the chain where subsequent oiling will carry it inside.

Jobst Brandt, Bicycle Technical Information, January 10, 2002, revised November 23, 2004, Chain Care, Wear and Skipping

Regarding lubricants and contaminants in bushingless chains:

Pins inside full bushings … are well protected against lubricant depletion because both ends were covered by closely fitting side plates. Some motorcycle chains have O-ring seals at each end. In the swaged bushing design there is no continuous tube because the side plates are formed to support the roller and pin on a collar with a substantial central gap. In the wet, lubricant is quickly washed out of pin and roller and the smaller bearing area of the swaged bushing for the pin and roller easily gall and bind when lubrication fails. Although this is not a problem for this type of chain when dry it has feet of clay in the wet.

Jobst Brandt, Chain Care, Wear and Skipping, at Bicycle Technical Information, January 10, 2002, revised November 23, 2004

That was not the way that most users maintained bicycles, or the way most mechanics had been doing things at that time. It showed some riders and mechanics the benefits of cleaning chains separately from lubricating chains, and keeping chains clean.

Unsuitable

BikeGremlin pointed out that several fluid lubricants may achieve the goals of chain lubrication in its post or article Comparative overview of bicycle chain lubricants, but also that several fluids are unsuitable. Solvents and multi-use household mineral oils are not suitable for use as bicycle chain lubricants. In the BTI pages, Sheldon Brown & John Allen listed lubricants not to be used on bicycle chains:

Automotive motor oil contains detergent, to wash away combustion products, and is made to be renewed constantly under pressure from the motor’s oil pump. I [John Allen] rode once with someone who had used it the day before, and her chain was already squeaking.

“Household” oil, such as 3 in 1, lacks extreme-pressure additives and is acidic. It tends to gum up. (It’s really bad news inside internal hub gears, too…)

WD-40 and other thin sprays are intended more as solvents than lubricants. They evaporate quickly.

Brown & Allen, Bicycle Technical Information (Sheldon Brown pages) Chain maintenance

Many lubricating fluids can transport substances that adhere or bond to the metal and create a lubricating coating. In the language of tribology, a chain lubricant might form a tribofilm if the lubricant chemically reacts to the metal. Some drip lubes are marketed as made of enhanced lubricants or as containing cleaning agents and lubrication enhancing substances:

• waxes,
• PTFE (Teflon),
• carbon tubes,
• zinc dialkyl dithiphosphates (ZDDP), molybdenum disulfide, tungsten disulfide and other metallic additives; and
• nanoparticles or other substances.

Mixing additives into oils (refined or synthetic) is accepted in the petroleum and chemical industries. “Detergent” additives detract from the usefulness of automobile motor oil as a bicycle chain lubricant.

The idea of mixing detergents and oils tempts marketers to advertise bike lubes as both lubricating and cleaning. This is a difficult combination for bicycle chain oils. It is tempting to slather new oil on a chain, wipe off the muck and believe that the new lube has replaced or diluted the dirty oil in the chain.

Factory Grease

All bicycle chains are covered in “factory grease” when shipped from the factory. Many bike owners believe it is,or similar to, cosmoline, an anti-corrosive coating developed to ship metal products across the oceans in the 1930s and 1940s, and used to ship US military materials across ocean during WW II. Cosmoline is not a lubricating grease, but chain manufacturers do not disclose that they are using and how it was installed. Some chain manufacturers – e.g. Shimano – claim their factory grease is a lubricant.

Factory grease holds dirt because any dust in the air adheres to this grease. Factory grease on the outside of the link plates should be wiped off. Factory grease adheres to metal surfaces and interferes with the application of clean lubricants to surfaces that should be lubricated. Removing the chain and cleaning with solvents or special products to remove factory grease is necessary to lubricate a chain by immersion in melted paraffin. It is considered by many to be helpful in cleaning chains that have been used with most or all fluid lubricants.

Almost or all bike shops install the manufacturer’s chain, with factory grease, on new bikes. The assumption is that the buyer or a mechanic will start to apply a lubricant to the chain. Some shops may apply some bike chain lube to make the chain sound more quiet and perform when a test rider shifts gears. Bike shops will not strip factory grease unless the buyer asks for the service, pays for the added labour, and assumes the risk. Removing factory grease takes intensive cleaning, which involves removing the chain, and soaking the chain in solvent. Removing the chain, even with master links, is a task. The use of solvents to remove factory grease or to clean a chain raises a logistic and application problems.

Additives

Manufacturers claim that lubes can deliver additives that would form films or tribofilms on the bearing surfaces. This claim has been made for other lubricant products – greases enhanced with particles of “molybdenum” – actually molybdenum disulfide are popular in industry and wth home mechanics. Many bicycle chain lubricants on the market, including most dry lubes, do not demonstrate the results suggested by manufacturers. Efficiency data could be interpreted as demonstrating that drip lubes could reduce friction , or that drip lubes reduced friction for a short period after being dripped into a chain.

The author of Bicycle Chain Lubricants Explained at the web site BikeGremlin discusses the use of additives in “dry” drip (fluid) lubes.

Polytetrafluoroethylene (“PTFE), better known as Teflon, is a low friction substance, as a solid. Teflon is known as an ingredient of the coatings of frying pans, woks and other cookware. The challenges of getting a non-stick coating to stick to metal surfaces are nearly obvious. No bicycle chains are coated with PTFE, or any soft coating, when manufactured. Teflon has been a popular additive for household lubrication products and for chain lubes. The benefits of PTFE coating applied in carrier fluid drippers, in theory, would be substantial. Dry-drip lubes with PTFE include or included at one time:

• Finish Line Dry Teflon. Finish Line still advertised Dry Teflon bike lube in 2022. It was scarce in some markets in 2021 & 2022; the price has been going it up. Finish Line at times maintained the Dry Teflon product has been replaced by another Finish Line product – an aerosol spray for motorcycle chain. Some consumers maintain in cycling forums that Dupont Multi-Purpose Lubricant with Teflon, manufactured by Finish Line. is an effective replacement for Finish Line Dry Teflon bike lube;
• Dupont Teflon Bike Lube and
• Rock ‘n Roll Pro-Gold and Absolute Dry.

Efficiency tests³See discussion in Part 4 of the series of PTFE enhanced products were favourable to some products, but the interpretation was not clear. PTFE has been identified as a “forever’ chemical and has been avoided in many applications.

WS₂ (Tungsten disulfide) and ZDDP(dialkyldithiophosphates) have been added to some products. Efficiency and wear testing have been favourable. The theoretical model is that these additive combine to coat load bearing surfaces with a lubricating tribofilm.

Several products are said to have microscopic or submicroscopically small (“nano”) lubricating particles, of durable material (Ceramic?, graphene, carbon) of some particular shape (spherical? to resemble ball bearings?). It is hard to sort out conceptual models from marketing metaphors, hype and puffery without testing and data. Drip lubes with nano particles have performed poorly in wear testing by Zero Friction Cycling. The new Finish Line paraffin lubricant with Tungsten nano spheres has been astonishingly bad in the first block of the ZFC lubricant wear tests ⁴ZFC and wear testing are discussed in Part 4 in this series.

In the video Microscopic Magic: Save Your Chain from Wearing Out! on Silca Velo’s YouTube channel July 30, 2024 Silca Velo is discussed in Part 4 of this series, Josh Poertner suggested that in a model of lubrication of the rotation of the roller of roller chain around the pin and bushing, particles of some additives interfere with lubrication. He suggested that fluid or waxes should form a film and additives should coat the metal parts of the chain to promote lubrication.

6. Petroleum

Source & Refining

Industry relied on natural oils and fats – vegetable oils and animal fats (including by-products of whaling) as lubricants until after development of the industrial refining of petroleum began in the 1840s and 1850s. Most natural oils and lubricants, according to modern science, are based on esters.

Petroleum is the remnants of ancient plants and animals, trapped in rock, that can be brought to the surface, “refined” (distilled,) and processed (cooked) into more pure useful substances that serve purposes. The refining process separated combustible “spirits” from heavier oils. Petroleum was referred to as a “mineral” oil because it was extracted from deep below the surface of the earth. The history of the geological oils is addressed in works on geology, industry and ecology. Some works have focused on the uses of the combustible spirits as fossil fuels, or as direct energy sources. For instance, Vaclav Smil’s 2010 Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects.

Engineers, scientists and inventors worked systematically and scientifically with coal tar, coal oil, petroleum, and other raw or processed material to get fuels, dyes, detergents, solvents, lubricants and pharmaceuticals.

The fluid lubricants used in industry and with motor vehicles have been manufactured products made with refined petroleum oils since the late 19th century. Refined and chemically engineered petroleum is used to manufacture many modern products:

• combustible fuel (gasoline or petrol, kerosene);
• lubricants (motor oil and other lubricating and “mineral” oils);
• mineral spirits: solvents, paint thinners and cleaning products;
• paraffin;
• plastics; and
• modern synthetic oils.

Most modern lubricants are made of refined petroleum products. Some lubricants have been lightly refined. Some have been chemically engineered.

Motor Oil

Through most of the 20th century automotive engine oil (motor oil) made of refined petroleum oil was widely available and inexpensive. Low viscosity motor oil was easily dripped or trickled onto bicycle drive chains with small oil cans. Oil could penetrate. It could loosen oxidized metal (rust), and withstood some of the rigors of use as a chain lubricant. Motor oil in internal combustion engines needs to be filtered and regularly replaced. (Fuel and air are also filtered. Fuel has to be stored and managed to avoid contamination with water, dirt or the products of corrosion in the storage vessels.)

Motor oil is made by refining crude oil to with a base stock that must be capable of flowing and adhering to metal surfaces. The refined oil is engineered further to turn it into motor oil. There are differences between refining oil and manufacturing chemicals, but only a chemical engineer could understand it.

The production of automotive lubrication oils became specialized. The oil industry changed the way it makes and sells motor oil. Among other things, Oil industry engineers developed Polyalphaolefin and other “synthetic” base stocks for motor oil for racing, and other premium motor oils.

Chemical engineers also developed some lubricants and additives manufactured with polymers including chemical that are believed to coat metal with lubricating polymers. Such lubricants, like motor oil and other fluids, adhere to dust and grit and to metal dust produced by metal on metal wear. In the video Microscopic Magic: Save Your Chain from Wearing Out! on Silca Velo’s YouTube channel July 30, 2024 Josh Poertner suggested (at about 4 to 5 minutes in the video) that polymer lubricants (he gave Dumonde Tech as an example, referring apparently to Dumonde Tech Original Bike Chain Lube; he alluded to similar products made by Finish Line) trapped particles that contribute to chain wear and dried to form a plastic film on a chain. His video showed a 10 speed chain, heavily worn after 2200 miles of use (and very little cleaning and maintenance)

Motor oil is more viscous that other lubricating oils to operate in the hot conditions of internal combustion engines. Motor oil was widely used to lubricate motorcycle and bicycle drive chains, but is no longer the preferred chain lube. Modern motor oil has additives to help remove the residue of combustion. The additives can chemically affect the surface of metal; few of the additives in motor oil improve oil as a lubricant for bike chains. Many lubrication engineers maintain that these additives interfere with lubricating roller chains. Several factors explain the shift:

• the price of oil changes;
• refineries have changed the way oil stocks are allocated;
• motor oil was a thick or heavy oil and had the drawbacks of “wet” lubes.
• Removing dirty oil from a chain could require the removal of the chain and the use of solvents. Without master links and other chain removal tech this was a major task, and it still not a minor task;
• environmental factors made it harder to deal with waste material – excess oil and solvent.

Gear Oils

The lubricant refiners and chemical companies manufacture gear oils which many cyclists and mechanics regard as suitable for lubricating bike chains. Some cyclists and mechanics believed that light (low viscosity) machine oils including sewing machine oil were the most suitable.

Limits and Constraints

The limits of fluid lubrication as understood in 1990s were discussed in a paper published online, cited by Sheldon Brown and John Allen at BTI:

There are industrial chains of similar construction and loading to bike chains. When they are run in a clean oil bath, they can have service lives that corresponds to hundreds of thousands of kilometres of cycling. In contrast, five-part derailleur chains rarely give more than 20,000 kilometres of service; four-part derailleur chains rarely give more than about 10,000 kilometres of service. In dirty use, chains can wear in less than 1,000 kilometres.

Chain wear is caused by grit and poor lubrication. For bicycles, grit is often the most severe problem, as grit can pierce protective lubricant films.

Grit is a problem because the bike chain is continually dirtied by grit, dust, and mud. Even in dry conditions, the chain is exposed to a stream of dirt thrown up by the front tire. In wet conditions a greater stream is kicked up and it provides a liquid to carry the grit in to the chain and also wash out lubricant.

Road dirt can be very abrasive: consider that silicon carbide and silicon dioxide are the primary ingredients in both common sand and grinding compound, and that the other major ingredient in grinding compound is oil

Dirt sticks easily to a heavily-oiled chain. Flexing the chain then carries the dirt in to the bushings. The hard particles break through the lubricant that separates the pin from the bushing, gouging out metal and causing wear. The wear particles are also abrasive, causing more wear.

A lightly-oiled chain also attracts grit, but the light lubrication does not act as a wick to move the grit in to the bearing surfaces.

Lubricating a chain with dirt on the surface will carry the dirt in to the load bearing surfaces. Thus, for best drivetrain life and efficiency, the chain should be cleaned before it is lubricated, and the surface should be cleaned again after lubrication to remove surface oil which can attract and hold dirt.

Thorough cleaning is done with the chain off the bike, as the chain must be immersed in solvent and then flexed in order to float out the wear particles. “On-bike” chain cleaning tools lack sufficient solvent volume and soaking time to dissolve and float out the inner dirt.

Since dirt is the primary cause of chain wear, most lubricants do a good job, except those which attract and wick in grit at a high rate.

….

Some lubricants are wax in a solvent suspension. The goal is that the wax does not attract dirt, and the solvent suspension allows frequent reapplication with the chain still on the bicycle (without removing the chain and washing it). These lubricants tend to be expensive to use compared to ordinary oil or conventional waxing, because the lubricant cost is high compared to oil or wax, and because they must be reapplied frequently. However, the drivetrain tends to remain relatively clean, which is an advantage where an oiled chain otherwise gets clothes and other items dirty, and in dry conditions users often report good chain life, albeit with the inconvenience of frequent lubricant reapplication.

Some lubricants are washed off easily by water, and most lubricants are washed off easily by mud. Water serves as a good lubricant while the chain is wet, and even mud can be a slight lubricant. However, upon drying the chain may have no remaining lubrication, and the chain will typically be dirty inside as well.

Author not named, published at Pardo.net, section on Chain lubrication

Bike Drip Lubes

Wet and Dry

Dripper bottles had been used for decades as dispenser/containers for household lubricant liquids. A drip bottle is a small bottle, which can dispense a few drops or a thin stream of fluid. Aerosol and other sprays are used to dispense industrial, motorcycle and household multi-purpose solvents and lubricants.

Bike chain drip lubes – fluids – sold in smaller dripper bottles – became dominant in the 1980s. Drip lubes sold for use on bicycle chains are conventionally labelled wet or dry. Some manufacturers market “wet” and “dry” versions of fluid products. The wet/dry label does not disclose how lubricant is made. It is possible to discuss the composition of a drip lube as involving a base oil and a carrier fluid.

Drip lubes need to be periodically reapplied, on reasonably clean chains. Drip lubes degrade when water gets onto and into a chain.

Wet lubricants are marketed as useful in protecting a chain from water. But:

• Wet lubes need time to penetrate the pin/bush/roller “sleeve” and link plate spaces;
• Even higher viscosity lubes will be propelled out of those spaces;
• Wet lubes pick up dust and contamination.
• Oily lubes are not waterproof. Oil does not dissolve in water. Small droplets can become suspended in water and dissipated by water. A heavy oil will last longer than a thin oil when the bike is used in the rain or on a wet surface (the tires pick up water and spray it up onto the bike).

“Wet” lubes have higher viscosity, and greater adhesive properties – most are as viscous as motor oil or gear oil. They look and feel oily. Wet lubes, in theory, are thin enough to run and thick (viscous and adhesive) enough to stick.

Dry lubes are lower viscosity, or runny, and made with more carrier fluid, and additives. The carrier fluid reduces viscosity to enhance the the lube’s ability to flow into the chain’s spaces.

The main weaknesses of dry drip lubes are that:

• tcarrier fluid is not a lubricant. It evaporates, and lubricates poorly and temporarily;
• any lubricating oils in the blend are thin; and
• the additives in most of the dry lubes on the market are much less effective in protecting the chain from wear than advertised;
• quality control and testing are performed by the manufacturer. The user has no assurances of quality except the reputation of the “brand”;
• they are comparatively ineffective in protecting from wear – some are nearly useless. Durability or chain wear testing, which started in 2017, demonstrated that many drip lubricants, particularly dry drip lubes, are not effective to resist chain wear.

The 2013 & 2014 VeloNews articles (links in Part 4 of this series) interpeted the Friction Facts results of “dry” lubes and additives:

The lubes containing a significant amount of“carrier,” designed to evaporate quickly after application, were by far the worst of the bunch. The aerosols, which are mostly carrier, were all clumped in the last quarter, and the slowest by a large margin was White Lightning’s Epic Ride Light Lube, which is also mostly carrier.

….

Rock ‘n Roll Absolute Dry drops the oil and ups the carrier, but also ups the PTFE even further, keeping it near the top of the list. The lubes with lower PTFE or wax-to-carrier ratios always performed worse — in fact, the bottom quarter of the efficiency test is chock full of them.

The oil industry sold/sells petroleum products, including lubricants, to manufacturers who package and sell bicycle chain lubricant fluids. The relevant industries depends on sales of millions of small bottles. Manufacturers do not describe ingredients or the process with precision. Lubricant manufacturers use the languages of lubrication engineering and manufacturing in marketing their products.

The origin stories of the inventors and manufacturers of drip lubes often appear on an “About” page on a commercial web site. The stories are, to a degree, written to market a brand used by a business entity. Such stories are seldom candid stories about invention and process. The origin story of the entity including the American firm “Finish Line USA” that brands bike drip lubes as “Finish Line” asserts that the firm was founded in 1988, by an engineer who had been employed by the petroleum firm Mobil but does not explain what firms design and manufacture the products – Dupont?

The author of the article “Bicycle Chain Lubricants Explained” at BikeGremlin says:

Dry lubricants are most often made based on paraffin wax, or PTFE (“Teflon”) lubricants. Sometimes as a mixture of both. The dry lubricants are usually suspended in some sort of liquid, or solvent, that allows them to flow between the chain pins and rollers. Liquid then evaporates rather quickly, usually after 2 to 4 hours, leaving a dry (or almost completely dry) film of lubricant. So dry lubricants are still dripped, or sprayed on the chain.

Main advantage of dry lubes is that they attract less dirt – they aren’t as sticky as wet lubes. That is why they are good for dry weather use, especially if there’s lots of sand, or dust. They are also good for riding in the mud – less mud sticks to the chain, so it works better.

Main disadvantage of dry lubes is they are rather easily washed off with water. So they are not good for rainy riding conditions. Even in dry they generally need to be applied more often than most “wet” (oil based) lubes, not lasting as long. Chain needs to be clean of any dirt or other lubricants, before applying them, so they can stick to it well and prevent dirt from sticking to it. When applied, 2 to 4 hours is needed for the solvent to dry, leaving just layer of dry lubricant. If a bicycle is ridden just after applying dry lube, the lube will fall off the chain more quickly and attract more dirt – beating the purpose of using a dry lubricant in the first place. This can be impractical if a chain needs re-lubing, but one needs to go riding immediately.

Another disadvantage of dry lubricants is they can’t replentish the lubed area after they are pushed aside – they don’t flow back like wet lubes. This especially affects multi chainring (multi-speed) drivetrains where cross chaining often happens. If there’s more load on the pedals when cross-chained (like riding up a hill), the problem is more pronounced.

BikeGremlin, Bicycle Chain Lubricants Explained, 2016, updated 2021, 7. Dry Lubricants for Bicycle Chains

Some retail chemicals have solvent and lubricant properties – e.g. WD-40. WD-40 makes the retail household product WD-40 and a “dry” and “wet”bike lubes. The name and labelling imply that the bike lubes are formulated differently from household WD-40. which uses a petroleum based lubricating oil mixed with isoparaffin and other alkanes. The oil is a penetrating carrier, which disperses water repellant alkanes and removes corrosion.

Solids

Greases are made by blending petroleum lubricant oils with material that thickens the fluid into a semi-solid jelly or cream. Lithium stearate is a thickener for lithium and white lithium greases. Greases are used to lubricate bearings in bicycle components – e.g. the bottom bracket, the headset, the wheel hubs. In most applications on bicycles, greases are retained and protected from contamination and dilution by seals.

Waxes have fairly low melting points – they turn to liquid at relatively low temperatures. Some waxes have lubricant properties. It is difficult to apply grease to a roller chain in a way that properly gets lubricant into the spaces between metal surfaces inside the joints. Waxes have to be melted to a liquid to be applied to a chain – usually a chain removed from a bike and immersed in the wax. Waxes have limitations:

Some poor lubricants give surpisingly good service life. For example, solid lubricants such as wax do not move under surface tension. Thus, once load has pushed the wax out from the bushing surface, it does not flow back in, and the chain runs unlubricated. In compensation, however, dry lubricants typically do not attract dirt. Thus, a waxed chain fails due to poor lubrication, but in compensation, wear is not further aggrevated by dirt. Chain life with wax is typically worse than with oil, but is surpisingly good considering that wax is a poor lubricant, and in dry (not rainy/muddy) service, some riders report better chain life using wax than using liquid lubricants.

Author not named, published at Pardo.net, section on Chain lubrication

Paraffin Wax

The science and history, and the methods, of paraffin immersion are discussed in Bike Chains, Part 7 in this series.

Table of Contents

• Preliminary
  • Revised
  • Scope
• 4. Chain Drive
  • Industrial chain drives
  • Bushed Roller Chain
  • Material & Manufacturing
  • Bushingless Chains
  • Chain Sizes
  • Directions
  • Chain Gauges
  • Wear
    • How/Why
    • Consumables
  • Master Links
    • Importance & Origins
    • Removal and Locking

Preliminary

Revised

This is Part 2 of a series of 8 posts organized as a single article. individually published as posts on this blog. The series is organized into sections, numbered for reference in the table of contents for each post. In March 2024 I began to reorganize and revise the long article. The article is organized into sections, numbered for reference here and in the table 0f contents for each post.

Part	Link	S.	Topics
1	Chain Wear		My discovery of wear Issues
		1	Internet search, Bike knowledge sources
		2	Safety Bicycles — Variety — Manufactured Industrially — Bike Brands — Shops or Stores — Mechanics
		3	Bike Chains
2	Roller Chain	4	Chain Drive
3	Lubrication	5	Lubrication Theory
		6	Petroleum
4			Lubricants
		7	Fluids — Motor Oil — Drip Lubes — Engineered — Wet and Dry marketing — Additives
		8	People and Projects
		9	Efficiency Tests
		10	Wear tests – chains & lubricants
		11	Innovation 2022-24
		12	Consumers’ options
5	Cleaning	13	Cleaning
		14	Deep Cleaning with Solvents
		15	New Products
6	Durability	16	Modern Chains
		17	Durable Chain
7	Paraffin	18	Paraffin Wax
		19	Method
		20	Wax-compatible Drip Lubes
8	Learnings for Make Benefit		Assortment of Notes

The project took several months. Since then, I have edited and revised further.

Scope

This post mainly discusses the bicycle chain, an adaptation of industrial roller chain technology, usually made of steel ¹an alloy of iron and small amounts of carbon and of other metals, made by melting mineral ores in furnaces.

The chain is a part of a group of components called the drive train, which takes force from the rider’s effort pushing down on the pedals, and turns it into force driving the drive wheel to rotate which pushes the bike. The drive train includes the pedals, the crank arms, the chain wheels, the chain, the rear hub, the cassette of gear wheels on the drive wheel (normally the rear wheel) and the derailleur mechanisms. The drive train must be aligned properly, maintained, cleaned and lubricated to operate efficiently.

Chains are vulnerable to wear if and when they allow contaminated oil and water to carry microscopic abrasive particles into spaces that are supposed to be clean and lubricated. Chain wear elongates a chain, which affects performance and causes damage to other drive train components. Lack of lubrication or contamination of bearings in other drive train components (e.g. hubs, jockey pulleys) can affect performance.

A few new or modern bikes have bushed chain. Many new bikes have flexible bushingless chains. Bushingless chains may be more prone to this than bushed chains, and chains that maintain a direct chainline.

Bicycle chains can break. Usually this happens when a chain comes off the cogs – commonly during shifts with derailleurs – and is caught between components. In this situation the chain is seized, and the rider is applying force to links that are not traveling in the normal direction of travel.

4. Chain Drive

Industrial chain drives

The manufacturing and maintenance of roller chains, bicycles and lubricants was based on trial and error, experimentation and the concepts used by artisans, mechanics, engineers and riders. Chain drives were used in industrial machines before they were adopted by the bike industry late in the 19th century. Chain drives are designed for classes of machine, in some instances, for individual machines. A bicycle chain is made of links connected by pins in a continuous loop. The links must pivot rapidly at the pins as the links move in the loop.

Until modern optics and electronics provided better tools, people affected by wear had theories or mental models for what happens in a lubricated roller chain. With modern optics and electronics it is possible to view components of stationary disassembled chains. Josh Poertner of Silca Velo ²noted in the post Part 4 in this series discusses chain wear as the cause of elongation in the video on the Silca Velo YouTube channel Microscopic Magic: Save Your Chain from Wearing Out! (July 30, 2024).

Bushed Roller Chain

The links in a bicycle chain drive overlap, alternating as inner and outer. Links are made of plates and “pins”. Plates form alternating outer and inner links. Pins attached to the outside plates; the pins also fit into holes in adjacent inner links. Hollow pins made of tubular steel are common. The pins are riveted to the outer plates. The pins connect the links to adjacent links; the links pivot on the pins. On modern chains these are tubular rivets flared at each end, installed as flush rivets. Tubular “bushings” between the inner link plates keep the inner links of a bushed chain separate. The half bushings of a bushingless chain (see below) have the same effect.

Rollers were a late 19th century industrial innovation, adopted by bicycle and component builders when chain drives were adapted for bicycles. Rollers contact the cogs (teeth”) of the gears from which and to which force is transmitted. Rollers are the journals of plain bearings. (the bushing and/or the pins rotate inside the rollers. A chain drive has several dozen open plain bearings. In a bushed chain, rollers revolve on bushings around the “pins” holding the sides of the roller chain together. On a bushingless chain, the bushings are stamped shapes on the inner plates. Most bicycle drive trains from the late 1890s until the 1970s or 1980s were have been chain drives using “bushed” roller chains. Wikipedia notes:

There are … many chains that have to operate in dirty conditions,
and for size or operational reasons cannot be sealed. Examples include chains on farm equipment, bicycles, and chain saws. These chains will necessarily have relatively high rates of wear.

Many oil-based lubricants attract dirt and other particles, eventually forming an abrasive paste that will compound wear on chains. This problem can be reduced by use of a “dry” PTFE spray, which forms a solid film after application and repels both particles and moisture

Wikipedia, Roller Chain

Bushed bicycle roller chain, invented by the Swiss-English entrepreneur Hans Renold in 1880, was common on the bicycles made in the late 19th century, and on single speed and utility bicycles manufactured and sold in the first several decades of the 20th century. The invention of bush roller chain has been attibuted to others:

… the Nevoigt brothers, of the German Diamant Bicycle Company, designed the roller chain in 1898 which uses bushings.

There are two types of links alternating in the bush roller chain. The first type is inner links, having two inner plates held together by two sleeves or bushings upon which rotate two rollers. Inner links alternate with the second type, the outer links, consisting of two outer plates held together by pins passing through the bushings of the inner links. The “bushingless” roller chain is similar in operation though not in construction; instead of separate bushings or sleeves holding the inner plates together, the plate has a tube stamped into it protruding from the hole which serves the same purpose. This has the advantage of removing one step in assembly of the chain.

The roller chain design reduces friction compared to simpler designs, resulting in higher efficiency and less wear. The original power transmission chain varieties lacked rollers and bushings, with both the inner and outer plates held by pins which directly contacted the sprocket teeth; however this configuration exhibited extremely rapid wear of both the sprocket teeth, and the plates where they pivoted on the pins. This problem was partially solved by the development of bushed chains, with the pins holding the outer plates passing through bushings or sleeves connecting the inner plates. This distributed the wear over a greater area; however the teeth of the sprockets still wore more rapidly than is desirable, from the sliding friction against the bushings. The addition of rollers surrounding the bushing sleeves of the chain and provided rolling contact with the teeth of the sprockets resulting in excellent resistance to wear of both sprockets and chain as well. There is even very low friction, as long as the chain is sufficiently lubricated. Continuous, clean, lubrication of roller chains is of primary importance for efficient operation as well as correct tensioning.

Wikipedia on Roller chain, July 2021

Bushed chain is being used for some e-bikes, and some mass-produced bikes without derailleurs, as of 2021-24. On a bushed roller chain the rollers rotate on bushings around pins.

Plain bearings need lubrication, according to the experience and opinions of builders, engineers, and mechanics and riders/users. Lubrication reduces the co-efficient of friction when steel surfaces in contact with each other:

Lubrication is required for correct operation of mechanical systems such as pistons, pumps, cams, bearings, turbines, gears, roller chains, cutting tools etc. where without lubrication the pressure between the surfaces in close proximity would generate enough heat for rapid surface damage … .

Wikipedia on Lubrication

If lubrication is applied often enough, and if the chain is properly cleaned and maintained, rotational friction and chain wear are reduced. On a bicycle chain, the lubrication is directed at reducing the friction of the rotation of the rollers on the bushings, and the bushing on the pins. When the lubrication fails, the rotation fails, and the direction of friction become intermittently linear which produces audible squeaks as the chain metal of the bushing and the pin wears.

“Factory lubrication” of bike chains by the chain manufacturers seems to have become a common practice when bushed roller chains were common.

Parts 3 and 4 this series, on lubrication, lubricants, and testing, will discuss the researched and tested fact that oil based lubricants work by creating a film across metal surfaces, and how lubricants behave when contaminated with water and dirt.

Material & Manufacturing

Chain link plates for modern bike chains are punched out of steel sheet metal made with carbon steel. Steel is an alloy of iron, carbon, and other elements. Carbon steel is more susceptible to oxidation (rust), corrosion and wear than other steels. Chromium makes steel harder and more resistant to oxidation and wear. Alloys harder or more resistant to corrosion than carbon steel would cost more and would require retooling by the chain manufacturers. On some chains link plates and other chain parts are plated with metal less susceptible to corrosion, or case hardened.

Adam Kerin of Zero Friction Cycling provides ³mentioned and discussed in Part # 4 in this series an overview of materials at pp. 9-11 of his chain longevity testing brief:

The most common hardness ratings are Rockwell D and Vickers.

… the Vickers hardness test is generally regarded as the most suitable. Mild steel/stainless steel will typically have a Vickers hardness rating of around 150 to 200. Quality hardened steel will be 200 to 400, or even 500, and the highest level tool steels / high speed steels can be up to 700.

However – the harder you make steel, the less ductile and more brittle it becomes. Steel can be made with very high “toughness” – combination of hardness and ductility – but this is very expensive requiring alloying with multiple other metals plus quite exacting heating/cooling cycles. For bicycle chains … different manufacturers use a different level or grade of steel. Campagnolo for instance claim their chains are made of “special steel”. What grade of steel is used is unlikely to be advertised or even disclosed by manufacturers. But in summary for bicycle chains, you can expect the steel will be hardened for wear longevity but there is limit as to how hard they can make this steel without the chain becoming too brittle and snapping on the first poor shift – especially the more economical grade of steel that is used.

Adam Kerin, Zero Friction Cycling site, Chain longevity testing brief, 2018

There is no industry standard for the necessary hardness and tensile strength of the steel. Chain manufacturers order sheet steel by thickness – they trust the steel mills to supply steel that meets the chain maker’s specified standards. Chain manufacturers will market some chains as having been hardened more and better, or coated. Some chains are better than others. Bike manufacturers and bike shops disclose the name of the chain manufacturer; a high value chain may be a marketing point. Even cheap chains work for hundreds of hours.

Modern chains are as light as feasible. Some materials and manufacturing methods make some chains last longer than others in a perceptible way. Some of the issues will be discussed in Part 6 in this series, on durability

Bicycle manufacturers acquire chains (supplied with new bikes) from specialty manufacturers including Renold, Campagnolo, Rohloff, Wipperman, Shimano, YBN, KMC, SRAM and others. Some chains are still manufactured by German, French, English and Italian firms. A few chains are made in Japan. Bike chain manufacturing in 2022 (and 2023 and 2024) is largely an Asian industry. The manufacturers all make chains out of the same raw stocks, but have different suppliers, machinery and workforces. Some chain manufacturers subcontract to each other. A few chains are made in Europe and the US. (The packages of chain sold by the US brand SRAM indicates those chains are manufactured, or at least assembled and packaged, in Portugal).

The Japanese firm Shimano is a dominant force in manufacturing bicycle components, including cranks, derailleurs, and chains. It outsources a portion of production of its branded chains to manufacturers in Asia, e.g. KMC of Taiwan or YBN, a Taiwanese firm that makes chains in a plant in Vietnam. SRAM brand chains are manufactured in Portugal. Many European manufacturers have subcontracted to Asian firms or built Asian plants.As of the early years of the 2020s, most chains are manufactured in Asia.

Many chains are made in Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China and other Asian countries with steel, and other industrial supplies and with manufacturing capabilities. The steel in chains machined in Asia will normally have been sourced from Asian foundries – it will have been smelted and forged from iron ore and carbon, rather than from recycled steel. Pins are steel too. The pins are fabricated from steel stock according to the methods used by manufacturers. The steel mills decide how to forge, roll and process the steel. The chain manufacturer can choose the thickness and some of the performance characteristics of the steel. The options depend on what the steel manufacturers are selling, and price. The shortage or unavailability of chains for purchase in 2020. 2021 and 2022 was attributed to delays in production and transportation of materials.

Bushingless Chains

The bushingless chain was developed by Sachs under the Sedis brand and introduced in 1981. It was adopted by SRAM, which was a mountain bike component manufacturer at that time. The innovation was widely adopted by other designers and manufacturers:

More recently, the “bushingless roller chain” design has superseded the bushed chain. This design incorporates the bearing surface of the bushing into the inner side plate, with each plate creating half of the bushing. This reduces the number of parts needed to assemble the chain and reduces cost. The chain is also more flexible sideways, which is needed for modern derailleur gearing, because the chainline is not always straight in all gear selections.

Wikipedia article on Bicycle Chain

The holes in outer link plates are smaller than the holes in inner link plates. The holes in inner link plates are punched to create the protruding shoulders which serve as partial or “half” bushings. The lateral flexibility of chains (necessary for shifting to different gear wheels or cogs) was engineered by swaging (shaping the pins into barrels rather than perfect cylinders).

The side plates of the inner links are formed into half bushings or shoulders. The roller rides on the half bushings. The pins go through holes in the outer side plates and the half bushings and hold the links together. The outer plates overlap and turn against the inner plates. The plates turn on the pins where the pins go through the plates. My photo of an outer and inner link (left over after I had shortened my new bushingless SRAM chain for installation) shows these features. The hollow pins used in this chain connect the outer links – an outer link on the left. The pin on the left is still partially displaced by the chain breaker tool (there is no roller on that pin – the roller stayed in inner link which was used to close the chain with a master link). The inner link on the right has been pried open to release its roller and show the bevels. The (small) magnification of my smart phone camera shows what the surface, which appears to be perfectly smooth and shiny, are actually rougher. The roughness does not affect the travel of the chain over the cogs. Lubrication is supposed to affect the articulation of the plates, rollers and pins at the ends of the links.

Modern bushingless chain is more vulnerable to wear than other designs:

The inner side plates of a bushingless chain are three-dimensional. Instead of having a simple hole at each end with a bushing pressed through it, each inner side plate hole has a protruding shoulder that amounts to half of a bushing. Since the side plates have an inside and an outside determined by the existence of the shoulders, they can also have bevels on the inside edges without further complicating the manufacturing process. These bevels permit the chain to run more smoothly when it is not perfectly lined up with the sprocket than a conventional chain with flat inner plates. They probably also improve shifting performance.

Since the “bushing” of a bushingless chain is made up of two halves that don’t connect directly with each other, this type of chain is more flexible sideways than a conventional chain. This is because the two halves of the “bushing” have a bit of “wiggle room” with respect to each other.

BTI (Sheldon Brown site), Chain Maintenance

The bushingless chain is more vulnerable to some kinds of failure. Sheldon Brown and John Allen said:

The lightweight chain of a bicycle with derailleur gears can snap (or rather, come apart at the side-plates, since it is normal for the “riveting” to fail first) because the pins inside are not cylindrical, they are barrel-shaped. Contact between the pin and the bushing is not the regular line, but a point which allows the chain’s pins to work its way through the bushing, and finally the roller, ultimately causing the chain to snap. This form of construction is necessary because the gear-changing action of this form of transmission requires the chain to both bend sideways and to twist, but this can occur with the flexibility of such a narrow chain and relatively large free lengths on a bicycle.

Chain failure is much less of a problem on hub-geared systems (e.g. Bendix 2-speed, Sturmey-Archer AW) since the parallel pins have a much bigger wearing surface in contact with the bush. The hub-gear system also allows complete enclosure, a great aid to lubrication and protection from grit.

Wikipedia on Roller chain, July 2021

Bushingless chains have tiny internal voids around the middles of pins where the half rollers on each side end. Lubricants applied to the outside of a bushingless chain flow differently than lubricants applied to bushed chains. The lateral flexibility of bushingless chains, and the effects of lateral movement on fluid on the chain appear in a video on YouTube posted in the Silca Velo channel ⁴See Part 4 for information on Silca Velo in April 2024 called Stop Wasting Your CHAIN LUBE! Know the BEST Way to Apply It. The wiggling action is shown in a segment about 8 minutes long, starting about 7 minutes after the beginning.

Chain Sizes

Pitch is the length of any link, outer or inner; pitch (length) is the distance between pins, measured from the centers of pins. It can be expressed as an ANSI number, or a fraction of an inch, or in millimeters. See:

• Wikipedia, Bicycle Chain: Sizes;
• Wikipedia, Roller Chain: Chain Standards;
• Bicycle Technical Information, Glossary, Chain/Sprocket pitch;
• Bike Radar, Bicycle chains explained;
• Bike Gremlin, Bicycle Drive Chain Standard Dimensions.

The standard pitch for modern bicycle chains is ANSI 40 (designating 4/8 inch) = 1/2 inch = 12.7 mm. On the assumption that all links are counted (as opposed to counting pairs of inner and outer links) , a chain will normally be more than 100 links long. A road chain may have 108 links or more. A gravel or mountain bike chain will be longer. A chain for a compact road crankset with a 46 tooth large ring and a cassette with a 36 tooth large cog will be about 112 or 114 links long. Chain length depends on the length of the chain stays and the diameters of the largest chain rings and cogs.

The chain must be long enough to go around the largest front ring, around the derailleur pulleys, and around the largest cog on the cassette. The derailleur must be left in a position to shift the chain effectively. On measuring a chain, see:

• BTI (Sheldon Brown site): (Rear) Derailer Adjustment; Chain Length;
• YouTube video Alex Ramon at BikeRide.com, 2019, How to Calculate chain length;
• YouTube video, Global Cycling Network channel, 2016, How To Calculate The Correct Chain Length (Road Bike)
• YouTube video, Park Tool channel, How to Size a Bicycle Chain.

The BTI method of sizing a chain is to break a chain (remove links with a chain breaker tool) to fit the largest rings. A chain breaker tool pushes pins (the rivets that hold the chain together) out. Another key measurement considers how the chain is tensioned when the chain is on the smallest gear wheels on cassette of drive wheel. This makes sure the chain does not fold and rub on itself.

The rear derailleur, which is found on almost all geared bicycles, imposes a total system limit, which affects the length of the chain. Adam Kerin of Zero Friction Cycling discusses the system limit in his video, on the ZFC YouTube channel March, 2023, “When 1X goes wrong“. The system limit can be calculated as the sum of the number of teeth on the front ring (or the largest front ring) and the largest cog on the drive wheel (usually the rear wheel) cassette. The system limit varies. Rear derailleurs for road (and gravel) bikes have a limit of about 84 teeth. If the front ring is 50 teeth, the largest rear cog must be under 34 teeth. “Compact” front rings on many road and gravel bikes are from 48 teeth, down to 36 teeth. The system limit for some rear derailleurs for mountain bikes is about 90 teeth – they will run a 45 tooth cog with a front ring of 45 teeth or less.

A 108 link chain is 1371.6 mm long; elongation by .5% is a fraction more than 6.8 mm. A drop-in chain checker gauge measuring about 170 to 199 mm. is used to indicate if the elongation in a span exceeds .5%. In a span of 1/8 of the length of chain, the gauge has to detect the difference in that span to a tolerance of .5 mm.

Pitch is standardized. The width of chain links varies. It is generally proportional to the number of cogs on the cassette on the drive wheel. The spaces between cogs in modern systems are so narrow that shifting is only feasible carefully adjusted rear derailleurs. Bike component makers have claimed the benefit of indexed shifters which are the components on almost all new bikes, and bikes made in the last 40 years. (Some riders still prefer friction shifters).

Cleaning the paste of lube and dirt out from between cogs requires narrow tools. Older tools for cleaning a cassette may not fit. It isn’t necessary to resort to butchers twine to floss debris out of the spaces. The changing number of cogs has made wider tools obsolete.

Bicycle chains for derailleur systems with 11 or 12 cogs on the cassette, measured by internal or external width:

• internal – 11/128 inches = 2.2 mm;
• external
  • 11 cog – 7/32 inches; 5.5 to 5.62 mm;
  • 12 cog – 13/64 inches = 5.3 mm.

Bike manufacturers buy chains and install the chains on new bikes. Even where the bike manufacturer uses a Shimano or other brand name drive train component set (crank arms, chain rings, derailleurs, rear cassette), the chain may be by another manufacturer. Bike manufacturers have begun to change their “current” models almost annually.

Most chains have standard dimensions. Some chains have specific features and limitations, requiring that the gears have specific dimensions and features. Component manufacturers and bike shops may suggest a chain should be made by the same brand as the rest of the drive train. This seems to be a myth.

Directions

Some chains are supposed to be installed to run in one direction. The “flat” side of a SRAM flat top chain is on the outside of the chain as it passes over the the teeth of the cogwheels of the cassette and of the chainwheel.

If a chain’s links are etched or stamped on one side, that side should be installed so that the arrow or text is visible and/or the arrow points forward as the link goes forward on the top side of the loop on the side of the bike from which the chain is accessible – the side:

• with the cassette and the chain rings and
• the chain passes over the chainstay moving from the driving wheel to the chainwheel.

Many chains are not etched or stamped. Some mechanics maintain that there are other ways that can determine which side of the chain should face the persons installing a chain.

Chain Gauges

The bike chain and bike tool industries developed tools to measure wear, called chain gauges (or chain checkers). Articles by the Australian cycling tech writer Dave Rome on checking for wear, based on discussions with Adam Kerin of Zero Friction Cycling (“ZFC”), and on other sources):

• Dave Rome at Bike Radar, 2016, How to know when it’s time to replace your bicycle chain;
• Dave Rome at CyclingTips, August 2019 How to check for chain wear: The easy way, the best way, and why (no longer on line – Outside has dropped it as of late 2023 and early 2024) The ZFC measurement methods were explained in this article). (Dave Rome left CyclingTips in 2022. He contributes to the EscapeCollective media as of 2023 and early 2024).

There are videos on chain gauges and other chain tools, and online instructions on using them. There are several inexpensive drop-in checkers by previously unknown vendors for sale online; several claim to be laser cut. Adam Kerin of ZFC has published articles and videos on checking chains. There are videos and podcasts of his interviews. Adam Kerin’s advice on chain gauges, and some of his related advice on maintaining chains, can be summarized:

• get a simple drop-in gauge;
• make sure it is an accurate one;
• know how to use your chain checker and use it regularly;
• lubricate the chain regularly and clean it frequently. The cleaning will depend on conditions and which lubricant has been used;
• consider checking chains on long rides and the possibility of replacement along the route;

For his ZFC chain wear (elongation) tests, discussed in Part 4, Adam Kerin used the (expensive) KMC digital caliper chain checker. Adam Kerin says a drop-in metal gauge is a sufficient tool for the rider/home mechanic, but”

• cautions that drop-in gauges must be precisely made in video episode 5 of the ZFC YouTube series;
• recommended the Shimano TL-CN42 because it is cut to the exact tolerance, and reliably free of manufacturing errors. The tool was not on Shimano’s US sites in early 2022 (or in 2023). Some dealers advertised at that time. It was out of stock at ZFC as of February, March and April 2022 but in stock at ZFC in late 2023 and early 2024. It was selling for nearly $90 (Canadian) on Amazon at times 2023-24.
• said that many drop-in gauges are cast and finished poorly, and do not measure the short span to the tolerance required.

In his YouTube Video of February 2, 2024 on his ZFC channel, he discussed the drop in gauges which were known to accurate enough, without any reports of varying measurements between individual products of the same model.

He published his findings in a chain wear checker table. He said a few of the drop in gauges were accurate:

• Shimano TL-CN42
• Park Tools CC-4
• Pedro’s
• Abbey Bike Tools LL Chain Wear Tool ⁵Abbey Tools in advertising this tool in 2024 says “Most chain wear tools currently on the market are laser cut metal. This is a pretty cool process that’s great for making sheet metal parts, problem is the accuracy of this process isn’t great at +/-.010″ (.254mm). If you add the error of the tool itself to the roller variable it’s possible to double the error of the tool”.

Adam Kerin did not recommend the KMC digital caliper chain checker, on the basis that it is not a drop-in gauge, and is not inexpensive.

Dave Rome, the CyclingTips tech editor and correspondent in Australia described the subject of measuring chain wear as “murky” on the Ask the Mechanic segment in the NerdAlert podcast episode recorded February 21, 2022 ⁶no longer on line – owner of the Outside family of content unpublished it as of late 2023. He noted the Park Tool CC-2 gauge is capable of some precision but is vulnerable to bending of the pins affecting the accuracy of measurement. He thought the Park Tool CC-3.2 drop-in gauge was reliable for most chains except some SRAM 12 speed chains. But Adam Kerin had reservations about it.

I had a ParkTool CC-3.2. It sold for about $12 US from US online bicycle supply stores (and for $18 or $35 from vendors in the Amazon market jungle) in 2022. I had no context or background on how often to use this or any chain checker. In 2022, I was wondering if it was accurate. I had a new chain available. My kludge to confirm my gauge was good enough: I tried it on a new chain (making sure the chain was taut). The tip did not drop in, and the tip did not pass the midline of the pin inside the roller the tip was touching.

The CC-3.2 measures total elongation – it does not “isolate” the rollers. It has hooks at one end, on each side, to fit against a roller. One side is machined to detect .75% wear. One side is machined to detect .50% wear in chains for 11 and 12 speed cassettes.

Side	Chain	Distance Hook to Tip
.75%	7-8-9-10 speed	≪172 mm
.50%	11-12 speed	≅171 mm

The manufacturer’s instructions recommend dropping a hook end into an inside link. The user should ensure the chain is taut and the hook is held against the roller. Park Tool says the device can be used at the top or the bottom of the loop (between chain ring and rear cog) – the derailleur spring should be pushing the chain taut at the bottom. This gauge spans nearly 14 pins; the tip can touch or fall short of the 14th roller. A chain is elongated when the tip falls does not rest on the roller at the other end (it is falling short) and drops into the inside of the link. The Park Tool CC-3.2 chain gauge measures a span just over 170 mm. to indicate if the elongation in a span exceeds .50%. In a span of 1/8 of the length of the chain the gauge has to detect the difference to a tolerance of .5 mm.

I started to use a Park Tool CC-4 and the Abbey Tools device in 2024.

Wear

How/Why

Open bearings are vulnerable to contamination. Roller chains have to be cleaned and re-lubricated. Even well maintained roller bearings will wear. A metal roller chain wears. This makes chain get longer. The plates and pins do not stretch, compress or deform.

The cause of elongation is believed by some riders to be “stretching” of the chain. Josh Poertner of Silca Velo 7noted in Part 4 of this series discusses wear as the cause of elongation, using a digital microscope device, to produce the video Microscopic Magic: Save Your Chain from Wearing Out! (July 30, 2024) to look at a badly worn chain (a SRAM PC 1051)

Some count 1 link as a set of 1 inner half-link and 1 outer half-link; others count all links.

Microscopic wear on individual links adds up. One of the consequences of wear is elongation. An elongated chain fails to fit the gears (cog wheels) – the chain wheel and the toothed wheel on the cassette on the rear wheel, cause wear on the gears.

With modern 11 and 12 speed bushingless chains, elongation of .5% (half of one percent) of the length of the chain leads to replacement. A chain may show almost no elongation wear for several hundred Km., and then wear rapidly. Chain wear is not linear.

Consumables

Bike, component and chain manufacturers expect consumers to accept chains which have limited durability. Purchasers of new bikes may have to replace or upgrade the chain frequently. The bike, component and chain manufacturing industries expect bike chains have have a short service life, which is defined as a short mean time before failure. Failure can mean breaking but it usually means elongation by wear.

They sell bikes with chains they expect to fail within a few thousand Km. of use.Whether bike and component manufacturers follow a strategy of planned obsolescence might be debated. The inspection and replacement methods used for industrial machines and motor vehicles – e.g. days or hours of operation or distance – do not work for most bikes and chains.

Few modern chains are good for more than a few thousand Km before becoming measurably worn – durability varies with chain material, riding conditions, lubrication and cleaning practices. Bike manufacturers trust the chain manufacturers. Consumers trust the manufacturers and the market.

Master Links

Importance & Origins

Master links, devices that replace a single outer link, were noted in the BTI (Sheldon Brown) glossary. Master links for chains for single speed drive train chains were once rare. A few custom metal fabricators made and sold universal master links for derailleur shifting chains by any manufacturer on the market by the 1990’s – e.g. the Craig Super Link. Before master links, removing a chain involved pushing a pin out with a chain breaker tool, Installing a chain involve peening⁸some chainbreaker tools have peening anvils, and are capable a pin with a tool.

The master link makes removing a chain for cleaning, maintenance and replacement easier. Chain manufacturers developed proprietary master links for some of their chains. One of Shimano’s systems secured the master link with a special pin. Some manufacturers had three part links – 2 link plates and a spring plate to slide over the pins and clip the links. Connex/Wipperman still sells this kind of link. A few other universal links came on the market. The manufacturers were small or fabricated the devices in limited quantities. Some non-proprietary or univeral links are on market or in use. Some master links can be used by any chain of a given size, by any manufacturer. Master links can be used on chains are built to the standards of the pitch and width for compatibility with the number of cogs on the cassette on the drive wheel (i.e. links are machine to work on “11 speed” chains exclusively). Some manufacturers market links as compatible with other manufacturers’ chains of the same size – e.g. YBN. Others insist on branded links for their branded chains.

Many master links involve two parts. Each part is one link plate with one solid pin riveted to the plate. The pins are machined with a groove or slot at the free end that fits into a machined slot and hole in the opposite plate. Connex Wipperman uses curved slots for some models, and straight slots for others. Many manufacturers have one straight slot model in each size. For instance see the YBN product. Two part systems depend on getting both pins into the opposite slots and locking the link. Two part master links are made by Shimano, SRAM, YBN, KMC and others. The manufacturers’ names for their master links may cause some confusion.

Most two part master links are sold as “single use”. YBN’s 2 part master links, labelled Safe Sections and QRS (Quick Release-Safety) are sold by YBN and by vendors who (re)sell them as safe for five uses.

Josh Poertner, of Silca Velo shows how two part master links work in the June 26, 2024 Silca Velo video Chain QUICK LINKS: Are they keeping you from waxing?

Removal and Locking

Riders commonly reuse master links. Some users only remove a master link to replace a chain.

A master link may fail. The finely machined slots are vulnerable to microscopic, nearly invisible wear, fatigue and stress. The risk of the failure is real.Often failure is caused by improper installation. It is sometimes caused by wear of the finely machined slots in the pins and plates – which can be caused by removing and locking the link too often or damaging the locking slots.

Needle nosed pliers are too wide to close or open a master link on modern narrow chains. There are special pliers that can open and/or lock a link. Locking the master link without a locking tool depends getting the pins into the slots, holding the bike steady and stepping on a pedal.

A master link can be removed with master link pliers, like the Park Tool MLP-1.2, which is sold in bike shops and online for about $17 to $25 US. The Park Tool pliers can be used to lock or remove a master link, and can fit a chain as narrow as a 12 speed chain. There are other master link pliers on the market. Most are bulky or heavy enough that they will not fit in a seat pack. Light compact travel tools are available. Some of the compact tools store replacement links. The parts of a master link can be easily lost.

Master links are durable but vulnerable to wear and stress in places – the slots that hold and lock the pins. Immersive waxing requires removing the chain at intervals of a few hundred Km.

A user trying to remove a link from a chain on a bike will need to address the tension in the chain caused by the rear derailleur spring. When the link is released and pins are clear of the slots, the chain can snap, flinging the parts into space. Putting the chain on the smallest rear cog and the smallest chain ring (in 2x or 3x systems) reduces the tension. The user has to keep a grip on the chain which may be dirty and greasy. Some chain breaker tools have a wire accessory – the thickness of spoke – bent just less than 90 degrees at each end. This can be detached from the tool body and slipped over rollers of links beyond the master link. Some users make such an item with a piece of scrap spoke (a coat hanger may fit into outer plate links but not inner plate links in 10 speed or narrower chains). Some will shift to the smallest chain wheel and the smallest cogwheel on the cassette and manual take the chain off the chainwheel to remove the tension.

Table of Contents

• Preliminary
  • Revised
  • Scope
  • Finding Chain Wear
  • Selling and Maintaining Bikes
• 1. The History of the Bicycle
  • Safety Bicycle
  • Features
    • Drive and Frames
    • Wheels
    • Bearings
    • Drive Trains
  • Variety
    • Examples
    • Single Speed Bicycles
    • Racing
    • Off-road
  • Industry
    • Motor Vehicles
    • Infrastructure (paved roads and bridges)
    • Globalized Bicycle Industry
  • Bike Manufacturing and Sales
    • Factories
    • Bike Brand Shops
  • Mechanics
• 2. Knowledge about Bicycles
  • Opinions, Science and Facts
    • Memory, common sense, consensus, evidence
    • “Wise Crowds”
    • Experts
  • Published Information
  • The Internet
    • Origins and Limitations
    • Search Engines
    • Wikipedia
    • Large Platforms
    • Web Sites
      • Introduction
      • Sheldon Brown/BTI
    • Jobst Brandt
      • Favorites
• 3. Chains
  • Introduction
  • Chain Line and the Bike Frame
  • Material and Wear
  • Specifications, Standards and Gauges
  • Master Links
  • Friction & Lubrication

Preliminary

Revised

This is part 1 of a series of 8 posts organized as a single article. individually published as posts on this blog. The series is organized into sections, numbered for reference in the table of contents for each post. In March 2024 I began to reorganize and revise the long article. The article is organized into sections, numbered for reference here and in the table of contents for each post.

Part	Link	S.	Topics
1	Chain Wear		My discovery of wear Issues
		1	Internet search, Bike knowledge sources
		2	Safety Bicycles — Variety — Manufactured Industrially — Bike Brands — Shops or Stores — Mechanics
		3	Bike Chains
2	Roller Chain	4	Chain Drive
3	Lubrication	5	Lubrication Theory
		6	Petroleum
4			Lubricants
		7	Fluids — Motor Oil — Drip Lubes — Engineered — Wet and Dry marketing — Additives
		8	People and Projects
		9	Efficiency Tests
		10	Wear tests – chains & lubricants
		11	Innovation 2022-24
		12	Consumers’ options
5	Cleaning	13	Cleaning
		14	Deep Cleaning with Solvents
		15	New Products
6	Durability	16	Modern Chains
		17	Durable Chain
7	Paraffin	18	Paraffin Wax
		19	Method
		20	Wax-compatible Drip Lubes
8	Learnings for Make Benefit		Assortment of Notes

The project took several months. Since then, I have edited and revised further.

Scope

I am not an engineer or mechanic. I have done basic home maintenance on my bikes. Until 2021, I had not read any information resources about chain wear online, or in any cycling magazines or books. My knowledge of bike tech was out of date, and my knowledge of maintenance was low.

This post explains:

• when and how I became interested in bicycle drive chains,
• the limitations of internet search as a tool for understanding a subject,
• the safety bicycle,
• basics of the roller chain drive train.

Finding Chain Wear

In April 2021, I thought I had less than 2,000 Km on the KMC X11 (11 speed) chain on my Cannondale Topstone gravel bike since August 2019 ¹ It was over 4,000 Km. I made changes to the drive train in 2021 during the Covid-19 lockdown:

• Swapped the factory FSA crankset on the bike when I bought it in 2019, including the chain wheels (172.5 mm crank arms on the FSA crankset on a “medium” sized Topstone) for an FSA crankset with 165 mm crank arms, and
• Had the Shimano rear cassette replaced with a SRAM cassette with some bigger cogwheels (“low gears”).

I had been washing the chain every two or three weeks in a clamshell tool – a Park Tools CM-5.3 Cyclone chain cleaner – with a few ounces of Mountain Equipment Cooperative’s Bio-Cycle liquid cleaner. Immediately after the wash, I applied clean, (unused) drip lubes. I lubricated with brand name bicycle chain drip lube products: ProGold Pro-Link (a “wet” drip lube) and Muc-Off’s retail “dry” drip lube product.

KMC X1 chains ( KMC X1 TT and KMC X1 SL) were tested by Adam Kerin at Zero Friction Cycling (“ZFC”) in “chain longevity” tests. I will mention ZFC again in Part 4 and elsewhere. The ZFC test results and methods are public and available on the Internet without the expense of a subscription with a publisher. ZFC tested chains using the same fluid drip lubricant – White Lightning Epic Ride -as an experimental “control”. In the longevity tests, ZFC found the KMC x1 model tested wore out after a little less than 3,000 km. (Which was good in that test. In ZFC’s comparative lubricant tests White Lightning Epic Ride, a mediocre fluid drip lubricant, was inferior to immersive paraffin and paraffin emulsions.)

In April 2021, I had problems: the chain did not respond to shifts, or skipped, or rubbed the front derailleur cage. I had assumed when I bought the bike that a KMC X11 chain was a durable product, although I did not consult ZFC. Indeed it was a relatively durable chain. At that time, I did not understand that bike and component manufacturers, and bike mechanics, regard chains as consumable. I had not known the industry standard for 11 speed chain elongation wear and chain replacement. I had a chain checker but I did not use it much or know if it was reliable. In April 2021 my Park Tool CC-3.2 chain checker was reading that the chain was worn and should be replaced.

I located a SRAM PC 1130 chain and a supply of SRAM Powerlinks (SRAM proprietary master links). SRAM’s Canadian web site describes the PC 1130 chain as “an affordable, lightweight and precise option for all 11-speed groupsets” and the PC 1170 with these comments: “features more heavily chamfered outer plates for improved shifting and quieter running. The chrome hardened pin construction provides longer chain life.” SRAM and the store did not say anything about the steel used to make the chain, and did not claim that the model of chain was plated or treated with SRAM’s hard chromium steel.

I tried various lubrication products in 2021. I found by early 2022 that the SRAM PC 1130 chain was wearing fast too. SRAM made (and still makes) some high quality durable chains with the hard chromium treatment or plating. The SRAM PC1130 was a relatively inexpensive retail product, and not particularly durable.

Selling and Maintaining Bikes

Bikes have become expensive and more complicated.

The modern manufacturer is a brand manager and a distributor, and may play a role in designing the bike and control the manufacturing of frames and some components. Bikes built by “manufacturers” are sold through bike shops. Manufacturers use name brand components and in fact subcontract the manufacturing of many of the components.

One of the modern manufacturer’s main risks is not getting paid, which the modern manager manages by demanding adequate security for orders. Another risk is not selling bikes. The modern manager manages that risk by marketing the brand and the model to the public (while actually wholesaling the bikes to bike shops). Bike shops depend on manufacturers to publicize a bike model, and are subject to controls on pricing – subject to the competition laws (called anti-trust in the USA), in the countries where the bikes are offered for sale. Some brands have built or rented brand stores, or acquired and started to operate local bike stores. Bike stores depend on selling bikes for much of their income.

Bike shops and mechanics are not necessarily supported by bike and component manufacturers. The brand managers do not set service schedules and do not enforce them, unless they provide warranty programs. Bike shops charge customers for mechanics’ services and for repair parts. Bike shops, by the early 21st century, were setting rates and suggesting that customers bring bikes in for regular tune-ups. Customers familiar with the practices of automotive service industries are suspicious of advice about maintenance of bikes that seem to have been working fine for years. The amount of service provided in a regular tune-up beyond some cleaning or “detailing” – may be minimal. Also:

• It has become difficult for mechanics to get parts from bike and component firms, and
• Mechanics may not be familiar with the right practices to repair some bikes and components.

It is not possible to ignore return on investment, shareholder value, corporate governance, planned obsolescence, marketing, consumerism and other aspects of asset management and financial management practices by the managers of bicycle manufacturing firms. However, it not useful for me to use moral words like “avarice”. Things that are not manufactured cannot be bought or used. Bikes, parts, components, accessories and other products are consumer products, built to standards of functionality, durability, cost and other economic factors. Bikes require attention of mechanics and maintenance that most bike owners do not have the knowledge or experience to provide.

I have wondered about:

• What is “quality” in a bicycle chain?
• What is a good lubricant?
• How much knowledge does a user need about cleaning and maintenance?
• What amount of time and effort should go into
  • bike maintenance,
  • drive train maintenance,
  • chain lubrication, cleaning and maintenance?

1. The History of the Bicycle

Safety Bicycle

Early 19th century wooden-framed draisines and “velocipedes” which lacked drive trains, were precursors of the safety bicycle. A rider sat on a wheeled frame, propelled by the rider’s pushing against the ground. When such vehicles was introduced to cities on the eastern coast of the USA, they were banned in New York City in 1819²The ban is discussed by Evan Friss in his 2019 book On Bicycles. Examples of these device:

• the Laufmaschine designed by Karl von Drais, patented in Germany in 1818.
• the pedestrian curricle patented in England by Denis Johnson.)

Metal bicycles, propelled by pedals attached by some mechanism to the hub of the driving wheel, also called velocipedes, were manufactured in France in the 1850s and ’60s. Most of the middle 19th century “Boneshaker” velocipedes were made of wrought iron. These did not, generally, have chain drives. Several American businesses were making metal velocipedes by the end of the 1860’s³Evan Friss addressed this in his book, noted above. Thomas Pickering had an American patent for a velocipede in 1869. The high mount bicycles (e.g. the pennyfarthing) of the 1880s were powered with pedals connected to crankshaft arms converting linear force on the pedals to rotate a driving wheel, which converted rotational force to linear forward force on the bicycle.

There are some drawings and images of such early bicycles online. There are bicycle museums with samples. The Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax California, a museum of mountain bicycles, has some in its collection. The museum catalogue, exhibit notes and catalogue are not online but bike mechanic Andy Quant posted a video of his tour on his BikeFarmer You Tube channel in January 2024.

The use of a drive chain to connect pedals revolving in one location to the driving wheel was introduced by Harry John Lawson in England in the 1870s. Most other features of the safety bicycle were present in John Kemp Starley’s Rover, which was introduced in England in 1886, and regarded as the first safety bicycle. The features of the Rover, and other innovations (pneumatic tires, roller chains) were copied by European and American manufacturers. The safety bicycle was developed in the United States and in Europe by inventors, mechanics and industrial manufacturers in late 19th century. It is the “original” bicycle. It was developed in spite of the fact that most roads were suited to horses and horse-drawn carriages, and few roads were paved. The safety bicycle was a product of industry of the late 19th century, made of steel tubes, steel components and rubber. It has become common. Most bicycles manufactured since 1890 are variations of the safety bicycle, industrial products, manufactured from manufactured components. The complexity can be understated. The safety bicycle involves several elements assembled into a single vehicle:

• two wheels, in line, each with hubs allowing the wheels to rotate in the direction the bike is moving, usually a power wheel in the back and a steering wheel in the front;
• a frame to hold the wheels, support the rider, and allow the rider to push the pedals down, to rotate a driving wheel. Safety bicycles mainly had steel frames in the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century. By 1890 hollow steel tubes were available. Other materials become available;
• a drive train – pedals pushed vertically by the rider attached to a revolving revolving driving gear(s)s – a chain wheel(s) powering a drive device, usually a chain comprised of link plates and bushing acting as bearings) powering a driven gear(s) attached to the drive wheel;
• an assembly attaching the steering wheel to the frame;
• a steering device (handlebar) with devices to control brakes outside the wheel and, for many bikes, to shift the drive chain between gears.
• the use of many bearings (to allow the wheels, the pedals and the crank arms to revolve and to allow the steering wheel to be turned);
• pneumatic tires;
• brakes, either inside the wheel hubs (coaster brakes), or on the outside of the wheel (rim brakes and disc brakes).

The frame, wheels and most components other than tires, were made of steel forged using the methods known at the time. Steel is an industrial product made of iron and other mineral ores and carbon. Wikipedia pages for an overview:

• Steel;
• Steelmaking.

In the second half of the 19th century steel was used to build railroads, bridges, pipes, reinforced concrete, roads, and buildings. Steel alloys could be made hard or corrosion resistant for specific uses – e.g. tools, cookware.

The safety bicycle was possible only after the development of ways of producing materials – i.e. after industries developed efficient methods for steelmaking and the machining of steel into the necessary materials to to build bicycles:

• tubes,
• bearings,
• sheets,
• pins and
• shaped forms of thin steel (e.g. wire spokes, the rims of wire wheels, bolts, screws and threaded fittings)

The “invention”, development and manufacturing of the first safety bicycles is discussed in several Wikipedia articles:

• Safety bicycle;
• History of the bicycle;
• Bicycle frame, including frame materials;
• Lugged steel frame construction;
• Bicycle fork;
• Bicycle wheels, (an instance of wire wheels);
• Pneumatic Tires;
• Bicycle chain;
• Bicycle gearing;
• Derailleurs.

Orville and Wilbur Wright had a bike shop in Dayton Ohio and manufactured bicycles from 1896 until invented airplanes. See:

• https://www.wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Facts/Bicycles/Wright_Van_Cleve_Bicycle.htm
• https://transportationhistory.org/2018/04/24/today-in-transportation-history-1896-before-flying-the-wright-bros-were-up-to-something-else/

The American bicycle boom of the 1890s ended for several reasons:

• the inexpensive, durable single speed utility bicycle lacked other marketable selling qualities;
• the lower demand for bicycles and lower prices of industrially mass produced bicycles affected bike shops;
• lack of roads and infrastructure;
• the planning of transportation infrastructure around the automobile, and the lack of resources for bike paths, bike lanes and bike trails;
• the limitations on cycling as means of commuting to work, traveling to shop and transporting purchased goods.

Cycling fell out of fashion among inhabitants of the large American cities.

Features

Drive and Frames

The process for making seamless steel tubes was first patented in Germany in the 1880s. The thin walled steel tube was an important component in building the frames the safety bicycle in the 1890s and the first several decades of 20th century. Later, frames have been made with

• wood and bamboo,
• other metals – aluminum and titanium,
• plastics and carbon fiber (a form of fiberglass, a plastic composite).

Wheels

Bicycle wheels, since the safety bicycle, have mainly been wire wheels, although to solid wheels have been used on some track and time trial racing bikes. Wire wheels were invented in 1808 by George Cayley. The rims have been steel but other materials are used. The spokes have been steel, but other materials have been used. The majority of hubs have been steel, but other materials have been used.

The drive wheel of most bicycles has a mechanism known as a freewheel that allows the rider to propel the bike by pressing the pedals down and rotating the pedals forward and to coast by not pedaling. (With derailleurs and external gears the rider can also pedal backward; with coaster brakes pedaling backwards engages the brakes.) The pedals are attached to crank arms attached to a spindle held by an assembly of bearings in the bottom bracket, at the bottom of the frame at the middle of the bike.

Bearings

The original safety bicycle had hundreds of individual bearings in several assemblies:

• in the the hubs, bearings allowing the wheels to rotate;
• in the bottom bracket, bearings for the rotation of the crankarms;
• in the headset, bearing for the rotation of the handlebars and the steering.

A 21st century bicycle’s bearing sets are discussed in an article in BikeRadar dated in 2018.

Drive Trains

The drive train involves:

• The rider who provides work, pushing on pedals;
• Pedals revolve at the ends of crankshafts (crank arms) that rotate around a spindle in a bearing (the bottom bracket) in a structure in the frame of the bicycle (the bottom bracket shell);
• A driving gear called a chainwheel on a bicycle;
• A roller chain which fits between the cogs (i.e. the teeth) of the driving gear wheel and the cogs of the driven gear wheel(s);
• Driven gear(s) on the drive wheel.

The drive train is a feature of single-speed bikes, utility bikes, most “road”, “mountain”, “hybrid”, “gravel”. “all-road” and other kinds of bikes. Chain drives became and remain the main kind of drive train used by manufacturers. There has been a Wikipedia article on bicycle drivetrain systems since 2010.

A toothed wheel is called a sprocket (technically, a gear or gear wheel that meshes with a chain and not directly with another gear). The sprockets stacked on a cassette on the drive wheel of a bicycle are often called cogs (technically the cogs are the teeth).

Variety

Examples

The safety bicycle has been incrementally redesigned. An article in Bicycle Times in 2017 ⁴online in 2024 without illustrations in Bicycling, an online publication or “magazine service” operated or owned by Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. or its affiliates was illustrated with images of 25 “influential” bicycle designs, including 19th century proto-bicycles, a couple of high mounts, Lawson’s design with a chain drive, the Rover (an English design believed to be the most successful early safety bicycle), a few other historical styles including the 1897 Spalding ⁵which then made bikes, as well as balls and other sporting gear Military (used by the US Army 25th Bicycle Infantry Corps; the article states incorrectly it was a 1986 design) and several 20th century styles. The article includes some single speed utility bikes but does not include:

• designs since about 1993, except a 2005 fat tire bike;
• cargo bikes;
• rickshaws;
• recumbent bicycles and tricycles;
• tricycles;
• tandems; and
• e-bikes.

Single Speed Bicycles

Utility bicycles and other single speed bicycles were popular in Europe and North America until the 1970s. Such bicycles were inexpensive durable vehicles for transportation over short distances. These bicycles typically had bushed roller chain drive trains.

Racing

Bicycle racing on tracks, in velodromes and on roads became a popular entertainment in the United States and Europe. It became the source of innovations in bicycle design, components, the organization of racing events and the organization of sports. Some track racing bikes had a single gear, and did not have freewheels or brakes. Road racing led to the developments such as the derailleur mechanism for shifting gears, which influenced design and manufacturing of drive chains. There is a misconception (I have seen in a video on Global Cycling Networks YouTube channel in 2024) that derailleurs were invented by Campagnolo about 1940. Derailleurs used in since the early 20th century when road racing on racing bicycles in Europe became popular.

The parallelogram rear derailleur was developed in the 1930s and adopted by road racing teams. Gentullio Campagnolo (who had invented the quick-release skewer in 1930), the Cambia Corsa rear derailleur in 1933. There was competition by other manufacturers:

Derailleurs did not become common road racing equipment until 1938 when Simplex introduced a cable-shifted derailleur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derailleur#History

Campagnolo introduced the Gran Sport parallelogram rear derailleur in 1949.

There are hundreds of regional annual road racing events contested by teams of professional cyclists, including the 3 western European Grand Tours (Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Vuelta a España). Other events for specialized racing bicycles:

• Cyclo-cross races on variants of road racing bikes with special tires on unpaved courses.
• Completing a long course in a fixed time, riding at night, and using unpaved roads (e.g. in Randonneuring).

Off-road

Mountain Bicycles for off-road use were developed in the 1970s in the USA and were immediately put to use in racing events. The mountain bike brought many innovations in how bicycles were designed and built. New entrepreneurs began to manufacture new bikes and components and accessories. The derailleur was adopted as the preferred gear changing system for mountain bikes

Industry

Motor Vehicles

The motor vehicle industries were more successful in attracting financial resources, technical resources, consumer interest and political support than bicycle manufacturers, dealers, and shops. Motor vehicle manufacturing produced complex expensive machines and supported research on materials, tools and products.

Infrastructure (paved roads and bridges)

Motor vehicle use affected infrastructure in ways that improved public resources and affected the safety of cyclists. There were many paved roads in some parts of the world in the late 19th century. Many roads were paved or graded and surfaced with gravel to support the use of motor vehicles in the transportation of passengers and freight. Many roads are not safe for cyclists.

Globalized Bicycle Industry

Information on the development of bicycle manufacturing is not a popular Internet topic. At one time, after World War II, Americans imported many bicycles from Europe. There are fragments of information about the competition between French and Italian manufacturers in selling bikes to American distributors that discuss currency and trade issues before parts of Europe adopted common currency and before European and American manufacturers outsourced manufacturing to Asian factories. Italian bicycles, manufactured in Italy were attractive to American wholesale distributors because of the comparative currencies, and the impression of some Americans that Italian products were high value luxury products making Italian bicycles look like bargains.

David Edgerton counted bicycles as an old technology that was adapted in Asia in his 2007 book The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900. There is not a great deal of information about bicycle production in Asia on the Web. Bike manufacturing in Asia up to the 1970s was mainly devoted making bicycles for riders in Asia. The manufacturing capacity of Asian countries increased as American and European bike brands, then Asian component brands globalized (i.e. off-shored) their production. Several countries in Asia became manufacturing locations. Part of the Asian production was commissioned by bike manufacturers elsewhere in the world. Asian manufacturers became proficient in producing new bicycles and components for the world market. The ownership of bicycles increased in Asia as Asian production increased in the 1970s.

Shifts in consumer tastes in Europe and North America spread to other parts of the world. Consumers in Asia began to purchase bicycles similar to bicycles popular in other parts of the world. As they have become more affluent, Asian consumers have purchased more motor vehicles.

Bike Manufacturing and Sales

Factories

In the late 19th century bikes were made in shops. The bike shop was, in that era, in a transition blacksmith shops where metal metal was worked for horse-powered transport. The problems solved by the artisans and mechanics who built safety bicycles in 19th century bike shops may have been recorded by journalists and published in newspapers and magazines, but the information is not easily located on the internet. For several decades in the 20th century, bike shops were machine shops with the machinery and mechanics to weld, cut and drill metal. Some shops evolved into manufacturers of bike tools or supplies – e.g. Park Tool of St. Paul Minnesota.

Journalists have visited some of the American, European and Japanese makers of customer bicycles and reviewed the way bikes were being manufactured at points in the 20th century. Jan Heine, the publisher of Bicycle Quarterly magazine, has studied, written and published on

1. steel framed bicycles made in France in the 1940s and 1950s,
2. steel framed bicycles made by Japanese artisans for
   • racing events held in Japan, and
     • to ride into accessible mountain passes (“pass hunting”).

Bike Brand Shops

The industrial production of bicycles requires access to manufactured materials, energy, labor and knowledge. Investors want a return on investment. Bike brands developed networks for distributing and selling bikes as the industry evolved.The modern bike brand generates profit by reducing the costs of “raw” materials and labor, and by selling new bikes. A few bike brands manufacture and sell inexpensive, often poor quality, “department store bikes” to general retail stores. Such stores generally do not provide repair services, or employ mechanics.

Many bike brands sell bikes to affiliated bike shops on credit at “wholesale” price, and make sure dealers pay for bikes delivered on time, and try to hold shops to selling bikes at the brand’s list prices. Affiliated bike shops have become sales outlets for bike brands – bike stores. Some brands tried to reduce cost and risks by opening brand stores. Locally, in Victoria BC, Trek bought an existing store and made it a Trek store, and Giant opened a downtown brand store.

Mechanics

The Wikipedia page about bike mechanics notes that this trade is sometimes recognized as a profession, or a skilled trade. In some areas of the world, a bike mechanic must be licensed and trained. In the USA and Canada, there is no licencing. Some bike mechanics have taken a formal course offered by a tool manufacturer (Park Tools, for example, offers some courses in person and many online resources such as YouTube videos. Most bike mechanics learn by serving a sort of apprenticeship. Many mechanics work for bike shops. A successful mechanic may expect to work for a successful competitive team’s sponsors and investors.

Wikipedia pages about mechanics mainly discuss mainly the trade or profession of repairing and maintaining automobiles, trucks, “heavy” construction and farming machines, marine engines, and industrial machines. Mechanics built and maintained the industrial machines of the industrial revolution. Many machines must be operated by trained and skilled machinists.

Bike shops are expected to find ways to sell repair and upgrade services on a sustainable basis – which means selling bundles of annual or periodic “tune-ups”. Consumers familiar with the predatory practices of automobile service shops are unable to tell when mechanics are recommending necessary service or sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt about the conditions of bicycles.

2. Knowledge about Bicycles

Opinions, Science and Facts

Memory, common sense, consensus, evidence

Most people are aware of a particular cultural consensus reality which is based in part on observation and other sensory experience as recalled in memory and partly on the words of other people as recited in oral and written evidence, and in stories about the causes of things and events.

Many people are aware that some kinds of facts are based on evidence of things that few or no human beings have experienced or perceived without tools. The British Royal Society’s motto, adopted in the 17th century, Nullius in Verba, The society’s motto, Nullius in verba, is Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it”.⁶ It comes from the Roman historian Horace’s Epistles where he compares himself to a gladiator who, having retired, is free from control. reflecting the view of 17th century pioneers in science that common sense, common knowledge, religious belief and other ways of evaluating evidence were inferior to the most reliable physical evidence.

There has been an ongoing discussion in philosophy about what science can prove or disprove. According to Karl Popper (1934) a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinized with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism. According to Thomas Kuhn (1962) scientific fields undergo periodic “paradigm shifts” rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community.

There has been tension between the ideas of science and knowledge and political and social ideas about freedom and democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries. This has played out in real conflicts about decisions about science – the 21st century attacks by populists on “elitists” over vaccinations and other measures to control the transmission of the Covid-19 viruses are an example. In 2024 the effects of the internet were discussed in a public-facing article by Brian Leiter, “Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority” in the journal Daedelus.

Some expressions became popular with American workers and journalists, and many consumers:

• there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (“TANSTAFL”) ⁷later adopted by the economist Milton Friedman as a libertarian and anarcho-capitalist slogan implying “you get what you pay for” as discussed at the Quote Investigator’s site’s page 2016/08/27 was said by working people about bars that offer a free lunch to patrons who buy alcohol (as remembered by the Speculative Fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, and cyclists who read mid-20th century SF). It is useful to understand TANSTAFL to mean “it is what it is“, and
• kludge.

“Wise Crowds”

Professional and competitive riders, working people who use bikes, commuters, people who ride for physical exercise, recreational riders, mechanics, business people, engineers, chemists and physicists have different ideas about what is good or useful.

The concept of a “wise crowd” is a statistical fact, but it does not mean that the opinions of a majority of people with opinions can be condensed to a crowd view of the facts about a technical idea. Is there a scientific consensus about bicycle chains? People who sell, fix, buy or ride bicycles do not assess facts the same way. Can a consensus be found using internet searching? Published material on the internet on the subject disagrees about a lot.

Experts

In commenting on material on the Internet, Tom Nichols, in his book, The Death of Expertise ⁸witty and quotable, but limited. And not a book about cycling.. Tom Nichols refers to SF writer Ted Sturgeon’s 1956 Law, “ninety percent of everything is crap” to make a point about search services:

The sheer size and volume of the Internet, and the inability to separate meaningful knowledge from random noise, means that good information will always be swamped by lousy data and weird detours. Worse, there’s no way of keeping up with it all …

….

… finding [good] information means plowing through a blizzard of useless or misleading information posted by everyone from …

Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017, at pp. 107-108

Nichols complained that the internet undermines the epistemic authority of persons who have expertise, but does not discuss analyze why the internet has facilitated the publication of falsehoods and unfounded beliefs.

Nichols was complaining about the “death” of deference expertise. He was addressing deference to his field of expertise – international relations – a specialized and unruly area, and to populist resistance to the opinions of experts and other “elites”.

Published Information

The bicycle was marketed and maintained in cultures with established methods of publishing information in print on paper. Information about materials, designs, mass production and marketing was not necessarily written down, or published. The knowledge, skills and resources to write or create content and to publish and distribute newspapers, magazines, books, web pages and videos were governed by technical and economic factors. Some papers and books about the history and uses of bicycles have been written by historians, social scientist and engineers. These can be found in the archives of academic journals and in academic libraries, with effort

Some books about bicycle repair and maintenance were published and available from book stores and libraries. Some were written by mechanics or journalists who had established themselves in cycling magazines. Many books went out of print; few were added to library collections and many were removed from library collections. Few were digitized and published online.

Only a fraction of the knowledge of designers, makers, mechanics, professional riders, cycling fans and non-professional riders was published. Much that was published was published by journalists in periodicals. Much was transient information, of little use even within days. Journalism recorded some knowledge about building and maintaining bicycles.

Jan Heine, the proprietor of René Herse Cycles (formerly Compass Cycles) and Bicycle Quarterly is a has studied and written about French bikes made 1935-1970. He regarded French bikes including Rene Herse bikes as good examples of all-road bicycles. He has published several books on 20th century bike building in France and Japan, most recently, The All-Road Bicycle Revolution (2021) which discusses, according to its blurb:

“how all-road bikes work and what is important when choosing one. A must-read for cyclists interested in the technology of their bikes, and for every cyclist contemplating his or her next bike purchase.”

That book discussed elements of 20th century bike building techniques, and ideas about bikes. It notes that mid-20th century French randonneuse bikes demonstrate that the most recent technology is not necessary to make an efficient bicycle. Jan Heine also writes about modern bikes and gear. His company produces and sells modern tires and repair parts.

Some journalists and writers have produced books about cycling that may circulate in public library collections. For instance, in 2019 Evan Friss’s On Bicycles, A 200 Year History of Cycling in New York City was published by the Columbia University Press.

Some printed books and e-books about maintenance are available. In some instances, the book accompanies or summarizes advice delivered in other media. Examples:

• Lennard Zinn, an experienced mechanic and journalist wrote successful books that are reasonably current, summarizing advice delivered in magazine columns:
  • Zinn and the Art of Road Bike Maintenance (VeloPress, 4th edition), was published in 2013. The 5th edition was published October 2023 (distributed by Simon and Schuster). The 6th edition is expected to be published in June 2024;
  • The 6th edition, (2018) of Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance is the most recent edition of that book;
• Park Tools, the manufacturer of bike tools, publishes The Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair. The 4th edition was published in 2019. It is available (2024) as a print book from on line bookstores and bicycle supply stores, and as an ebook for the Amazon Kindle device;
• The producers of the Global Cycling Network web products published GCN’s Essential Road Bike Maintenance in 2024 (sold by direct Web sales from GCN sites).

The Internet

Origins and Limitations

The internet (including the Web) came into being near the end of the 20th century, a century after mass production of safety bicycles and components began. The information about bicycle drive trains published on the internet reflects the knowledge and interests of cyclists and mechanics from 1980 to the early 2020s.

In the early days of the Internet, text had to be typed in to be published online. How much information was ever digitized? What publications were scanned or subjected to OCR with good character recognition? Were copyright issues negotiated? Much scientific and engineering material on internet and the web on materials like steel and lubricants has been copyrighted or is protected by some form of Intellectual Property laws; on the internet it may be gated or pay-walled.

The internet does not “know” about things that no one has tried to publish on the internet. The Internet shares some of the limitations of the publishing industry. Tom Nichols, in his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise, applied Sturgeon’s Law ⁹SF writer Ted Sturgeon, 1956 “90% of everything is crap” to journalism in 2017:

… many people do not seeks information as much as confirmation, and when they receive information they do not like, they will gravitate to sources they prefer … Today, hundreds of media outlets cater to even the narrowest agendas and biases.

This mindset and the market that services it, creates … a combination of groundless confidence and deep cynicism …

Americans increasingly don’t trust anyone anymore. They view all institutions, including the media, with disdain.

Nichols, The Death of Expertise, cited below, pp. 157-158

In terms of communication theory:

….

The early, idealistic view of the Internet proved an illusion. The system went out of balance almost immediately, its spatial reach subverting its temporal depth. Far from alleviating our present-mindedness, the net magnified it.

Innis would not have been surprised. Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data.

The net was a communication system of unprecedented scope: a world wide web that could transmit huge amounts of information across the planet. But unlike traditional broadcast networks, it was also a storage medium of unprecedented depth. It promised to contain, and provide easy access to, the entirety of cultural history …

….

The medium’s technical characteristics have been shaped by commercial interests. The evolution of the Google search engine, for the last quarter century humankind’s most valued epistemic tool, tells the tale. For several years after it was founded in 1998, Google, inspired by the rigor of what its two grad-student founders called “the academic realm,” pursued a simple goal: to find the highest-quality sources of information on any given topic.

….

… In 2010, Google rolled out a revamped search system … that placed enormous new emphasis on the recency, or “freshness,” of the results it delivered. …

The company had come to realize that information, when served up as a commodity for instant consumption, loses value quickly. It gets stale; it rots. The past is far less engaging, and hence monetizable, than the present. To use Google today is to enter not an archive but a bazaar.

The social media companies that began to emerge around the same time as Google were aggressively space-biased from the start. Bringing Innis’s worst fears to pass, they sought to capitalize on “network effects” to build empires of information and establish monopolies of communication.

Nicholas Carr, “The Tyranny of Now”, The New Atlantis (magazine), Winter 2025 issue.

Search Engines

A web search engine sifts content looking for text strings. Searches depend on searchable lines of text, an item title, or the organization of the resource (the identity of an author or publisher, channels, tags, indices etc.). Searches generate lists of links. Some search engine hits are still (in 2024) predominantly text or text with static images. Many pages and videos:

• are direct advertisements for products, or endorsements;
• are low value “reviews”.

Search engines can, with luck or careful queries, find articles that illustrate or explain the history of a technical idea, or adoption of technology by designers, manufacturers, investors, journalists and people who can afford to buy bicycles (and high speed internet), but cannot construct the history.

Search engines may show hits for videos, including YouTube videos but usually not podcasts. For podcasts, a user needs to search for podcast in an podcast index. After getting a good hit, a user needs luck and time to find the moments when a subject will be explained. Searches often miss recorded audio and video material (podcasts, YouTube) .

Reviews can be useful in finding products, but have limited value in evaluating products. It is not possible to find out how the author or publisher has influenced, or has preconceptions. Many reviews reflect personal experience in conditions that are not clearly explained, or quick reactions. The comparisons are between the products which the author or publisher mentions i.e. are limited to as to what is available or known to the writer. The testing, if any, is not scientific and does not assess the actual conditions of use. Many reviews or overviews are catalogues of methods, sometimes narrow, sometimes overly broad. Many make improbable claims about products.

When an internet source or a published book or magazine mentions a person, a company, a product or an idea, internet search can lead to material that can be read and followed up on. This can be an effective way of researching.

Wikipedia

There are criticisms about whether and when Wikipedia provides accurate information on all topics. Wikipedia, notwithstanding many valid criticisms, has an editorial and review process. Wikipedia Articles on bicycles may miss or overlook some details, or lack context, but are basically sound. Wikipedia is reasonably fulsome on several relevant topics.

The Wikipedia page for bicycle chain notes that chain cleaning and lubrication are complicated and controversial:

How best to lubricate a bicycle chain is a commonly debated question among cyclists. Liquid lubricants penetrate to the inside of the links and are not easily displaced, but quickly attract dirt. “Dry” lubricants, often containing wax or Teflon, are transported by an evaporating solvent, and stay cleaner in use. The cardinal rule for long chain life is never to lubricate a dirty chain, as this washes abrasive particles into the rollers. Chains should be cleaned before lubrication. The chain should be wiped dry after the lubricant has had enough time to penetrate the links. An alternative approach is to change the (relatively cheap) chain very frequently; then proper care is less important. Some utility bicycles have fully enclosing chain guards, which virtually eliminate chain wear and maintenance. On recumbent bicycles the chain is often run through tubes to prevent it from picking up dirt, and to keep the cyclist’s leg free from oil and dirt.

Wikipedia (October 2021) on Bicycle Chain

There are many resources reflecting many opinions. Comments in forums often reflect experience, but the amount of experience with the products is not clear. Some comments reflect frustration that the bike industry keeps selling more expensive new bikes and components while bikes are harder to maintain without tools, supplies and knowledge.

Large Platforms

Cory Doctorow writes some SF, and some non-fiction about the internet, information technology and business. He has written about the business practices of the large tech companies including The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023) and Chokepoint Capitalism (2022). He identifies Google search as a leading example of a business strategy, which he names in an unflattering way:

… let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die

Cory Doctorow, ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything, Financial Times, February 7, 2024

Google Search was once the best Web search service. Once upon a time users believed the Google company when it said it was against evil. The modern Google search tool is full of advertising. Google Search returns now promote “sponsored” content (and recent content). Cory Doctorow on Google search:

Google’s search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google …

But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren’t hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They’re the SEO [search engine optimization] equivalent of script kiddies, and they’re running circles around Google …

Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query …

….

… Google’s algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete …

You’ve doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for “Best ______ 2024” and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference. For example, when Google instituted a policy that reviewers should “discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research,” sites that had previously regurgitated the same lists of the same top ten Amazon bestsellers “peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look.”

But … grandiose claims … result in zero in-depth reviews and no published data. Moreover, these claims to rigorous testing materialized within a few days of Google changing its search ranking and said that high rankings would be reserved for sites that did testing.

Cory Doctorow, Pluralisic Blog, February 21,2024

Bruce Schneier and Judith Donath made a similiar point discussing search using “AI” tools built with Large-Language Model (“LLM”) technology:

… [publishing’s] core task is to connect writers to an audience. Publishers work as gatekeepers, filtering candidates and then amplifying the chosen ones. Hoping to be selected, writers shape their work in various ways. This article might be written very differently in an academic publication, for example, and publishing it here entailed pitching an editor, revising multiple drafts for style and focus, and so on.

The internet initially promised to change this process. Anyone could publish anything! But so much was published that finding anything useful grew challenging. It quickly became apparent that the deluge of media made many of the functions that traditional publishers supplied even more necessary.

Technology companies developed automated models to take on this massive task of filtering content, ushering in the era of the algorithmic publisher. The most familiar, and powerful, of these publishers is Google. Its search algorithm is now the web’s omnipotent filter and its most influential amplifier, able to bring millions of eyes to pages it ranks highly, and dooming to obscurity those it ranks low.

In response, a multibillion-dollar industry—search-engine optimization, or SEO—has emerged to cater to Google’s shifting preferences, strategizing new ways for websites to rank higher on search-results pages and thus attain more traffic and lucrative ad impressions.

Unlike human publishers, Google cannot read. It uses proxies, such as incoming links or relevant keywords, to assess the meaning and quality of the billions of pages it indexes. Ideally, Google’s interests align with those of human creators and audiences: People want to find high-quality, relevant material, and the tech giant wants its search engine to be the go-to destination for finding such material. Yet SEO is also used by bad actors who manipulate the system to place undeserving material—often spammy or deceptive—high in search-result rankings. Early search engines relied on keywords; soon, scammers figured out how to invisibly stuff deceptive ones into content, causing their undesirable sites to surface in seemingly unrelated searches. Then Google developed PageRank, which assesses websites based on the number and quality of other sites that link to it. In response, scammers built link farms and spammed comment sections, falsely presenting their trashy pages as authoritative.

Google’s ever-evolving solutions to filter out these deceptions have sometimes warped the style and substance of even legitimate writing. When it was rumored that time spent on a page was a factor in the algorithm’s assessment, writers responded by padding their material, forcing readers to click multiple times to reach the information they wanted. This may be one reason every online recipe seems to feature pages of meandering reminiscences before arriving at the ingredient list.

The arrival of generative-AI tools has introduced a voracious new consumer of writing. Large language models, or LLMs, are trained on massive troves of material—nearly the entire internet in some cases. They digest these data into an immeasurably complex network of probabilities, which enables them to synthesize seemingly new and intelligently created material; to write code, summarize documents, and answer direct questions in ways that can appear human.

These LLMs have begun to disrupt the traditional relationship between writer and reader. Type how to fix broken headlight into a search engine, and it returns a list of links to websites and videos that explain the process. Ask an LLM the same thing and it will just tell you how to do it. Some consumers may see this as an improvement: Why wade through the process of following multiple links to find the answer you seek, when an LLM will neatly summarize the various relevant answers to your query? Tech companies have proposed that these conversational, personalized answers are the future of information-seeking. But this supposed convenience will ultimately come at a huge cost for all of us web users.

Bruce Schneier, Judith Donath, The Rise of Large-Language Model Optimization, April 25, 2024, Schneier on Security

Another factor has been a change in Google’s vision of the scope of its mission in response to the use of AI generated content. An SEO consultant complained in 2024:

You’re facing a future where AI can generate infinite amounts of human-like content. What do you do?

Google’s response was twofold:

1. Promote the vague concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). In practice, this translates to favoring well-known brands and established websites.
2. Abandon the mission of indexing everything. Instead, become selective. Very selective.

… Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. … it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn’t about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. … it’s a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine.

… Google now seems to operate on a “default to not index” basis. It only includes content in its index when it perceives a genuine need. This decision appears to be based on various factors:

• Extreme content uniqueness: It’s not enough to write about something that isn’t extensively covered. Google seems to require content to be genuinely novel or fill a significant gap in its index.
• Perceived authority: Sites that Google considers highly authoritative in their niche may have more content indexed, but even then, it’s not guaranteed.
• Brand recognition: Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.
• Temporary indexing and de-indexing: In practice, Google often indexes new content quite quickly, likely to avoid missing out on breaking news or important updates. Soon after, Google may de-index the content, and it remains de-indexed thereafter. So getting initially indexed isn’t necessarily a sign that Google considers your content valuable.

Vincent Schmalbach, July 15, 2024 Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content

This was noted by other commentators:

If this is indeed what Google is up to, then you have to wonder what its leaders have been smoking. Among other things, they’re proposing to build machines that can sensibly assess qualities such as expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in an online world where just about anything goes. Could someone please take them aside and remind them that a tech company tried something like this way back in 1995 and came unstuck. It was called Yahoo! Remember it?

John Naughton, The Guardian (Observer magazine), Joly 20, 2024, Google’s wrong answer to the threat of AI – stop indexing content

Other Google “services” e.g. YouTube, and most other commercial search platforms share the problems.

Web Sites

Introduction

Web sites discuss aspects of cycling, bicycle maintenance etc. Many have articles or pages on maintaining drive chains. For instance: BikeRadar, June 26, 2022 , Bicycle chains explained.

Sheldon Brown/BTI

Sheldon Brown, a bike mechanic in Boston, and a modern polymath, started writing on the Web by the early 1990s. He had contacts among local riders and shops, and participated in Usenet news groups and other online forums on cycling. Sheldon Brown and his original contributors wrote extensively and collected internet material. The Bicycle Technical Information pages (“BTI”) were a leading online source of information about bicycle repair and bicycles. The pages captured parts of the histories of bicycles and components, manufacturing, repair, touring and riding.

The BTI ages on cycling were hosted by his employer, Harris Cyclery, until it closed in 2021. The BTI pages have been updated since his death in 2008, and continued to be published after Harris Cyclery closed in June 2021 by a community of friends and fans; some topics have been updated or added.

Sheldon Brown admired and promoted Sutherlands Handbook for Bicycle Mechanics by Howard Sutherland, (the 6th and 7th editions are available as of 2022-2024 from Sutherland’s Bicycle Shop Aids in California), and published articles by several authors on technical bicycle repair and maintenance matters.

The BTI pages that mention chains, lubrication and maintenance include:

• an entry on chain in the bicycle glossary;
• a major article on chain maintenance;
• other articles on gears & chains, including the 2002 article Chain Care, Wear and Skipping by the late Jobst Brandt.

Some of the contributors to the BTI pages were engineers and mechanics. Some read speculative (science) fiction, and used folk sayings that had been used in SF (e.g. TANSTAFL, kludge) to describe the experience the realities of riding and fixing bicycles and the results of the financial, organizational and decision making processes of bicycle manufacturers, politicians and traffic engineers.

The BTI pages reflect a perspective on innovations in the bicycle building and selling industries in the 1990s. Some comments on maintaining and lubricating chains on the BTI pages do not hold up (for instance, that riders should not try to remove factory grease from a chain). The BTI pages do not address many maintenance issues arising from innovations, since then, although some pages have been updated. Some scientific research and publications are summarized in Bike Chains, Part 3 in this series, under the headings and subheadings Lubricants: Scientists, Lubricants: Paraffin, and Lubricating a Chain: Academic Research.

Sheldon Brown participated in Usenet Newsgroups including rec.bicycles.tech. He linked to the Frequently Asked Question (“FAQ”) paged.

The BTI site has maintained a link to the Bicycles FAQ page(s) at FAQ.org. (FAQ.org has not migrated to HTTPS, which may affect your attempt to follow the link in the preceding sentence.)

The BTI site has maintained a link to Bicycles, the index page of an archive of Usenet cycling newsgroup posts privately collected,indexed and maintained by Norman Yarvin on his yarchive.net pages.

Jobst Brandt

Jobst Brandt was prolific writer about cycling in Usenet groups. That kind of writing is not being read because it was written in a medium that was largely ephemeral. His Wikipedia entry does not mention:

• Jobst Brandt Ride Bike! by Max Leonard et al. published by Isola Press in 2015, a biography and history of the origins of mountain bike riding in Marin County in northern California;
• The routes and trails out of Redwood City near Palo Alto where Brandt rode bikes and taught mountain bike technique shown in Andy Quant’s video of his visit in early 2025 “Palo Alto | Alpine Dirt | Jobst Ride | La Honda | Bicycle Adventures | Flat Tires | Redwoods |“.

The BTI page Frequently Asked Questions about Bicycles and Bicycling collected and republished information posted by Jobst Brandt.

Favorites

CyclingTips was an online cycling magazine with strong technical coverage. It covered chain maintenance, cleaning, lubrication, chain wear and interviews with modern pioneers of testing lubricants and chains in text articles and audio media. Most CyclingTips text material was removed from the Internet – when the new publisher (the hedge fund that controlled the “Outside” family of magazines and online content) made changes in 2022 .

CyclingTips published some “endless FAQ” articles (detailed articles, periodically revised) on some components and issues of maintaining modern bicycle, but these are not online after the new publisher deleted content:

Title, or Component or issue	Date	Endless, Revised
Seeking the holy grail: A fast chain lube that saves you money	March 2018
Disc Brakes	May 2018	August 2019
Tubeless Tires	2019	October 2021
Finding the best bicycle chain: What over 3,000 hours of testing revealed	December 2019
Waxing Chains	August 2020	March 2021

CyclingTips NerdAlert podcast discussed technical and repair issues. The panelists often mentioned the cycling industry’s history of selling products that have drawbacks and flaws. Most of this content, also, was unpublished under the new management; or move behind the “Outside” app paywall. Discussions of chain maintenance:

• The podcast in Nerd Alert series in August 2021 on chain lube testing, Updated; March 16, 2022, “Finding the best chain lube for your needs”.

Escape Collective began to produce content in March 2023. Many CyclingTipswriters and podcast panelists joined Escape Collective.

Discussions of chain wear on the internet often address readers and viewers interested in other issues:

• speed in races
  • on different kinds of bicycles
  • under different conditions, and
• durability and value of bicycles and components.

3. Chains

Introduction

The basics of drive chain are alternating inner and outer links, pins holding the links, and the ability to bend at the ends of links. Rollers and bushings over the pins have been used since the first decades after safety bicycles appeared. Gearing and gear shifting are important factors. There have been other gear and shifting systems, including gear systems installed inside the hub of the drive wheel. The chain drive with external gears and derailleur shifting has dominated.

The discussion of roller chain will be continued in Part 2 of this series. Part 7 will discuss the durability of the modern steel bushingless chain required for effective shifting of gears with derailleur mechanisms. In the early 21st century, the focus has been on elongation wear.

Chain Line and the Bike Frame

The most efficient line from the chain wheel to the gear on the drive wheel for single speed bicycles was parallel to the bicycle.

The chain almost always has to run over and under a chain stay – usually on the right side of a conventional two wheeled safety bicycle. The chain stays are welded or attached to the bottom of seat tube near the bottom bracket shell, and to the seat stay. The chain stay is one side of a closed triangle. It was necessary to use a chain “breaker” tool to displace a pin to remove the chain before the development of master links. By the early 20th century the bike industry used bushed steel roller chain on most bicycles.

Competitive riders and bicycle designers favored systems that allowed the rider to shift gears to use power effectively and respond to changes in conditions and the goals of rider – e.g. going faster with the same effort. Road racing brought the development of derailleurs to shift the chain onto other gears – and a flexible chain that could operate at a slight deviation from a straight chainline. Chains are designed to flex to displace far enough to change gears when pushed by the pulleys (jockey wheels) of a derailleur. Innovators altered the design of chains to get lighter, more efficient chains. At the end of the 1970s, a road bike might have 5 or even 6 cogs on a rear cassette. Mountain bikes adopted derailleurs, flexing roller chain, and other technology from road racing. Mountain biking became competitive and mountain bikes became popular. For a time, drive train components were specialized: road or mountain/hybrid. Some innovations made in road chains or mountain bike chains became common or dominant in chain manufacturing. time.

Chains do not move laterally on single speed bikes, or on gear systems inside the hub.

The laterally flexible bushingless chain became the dominant design by the end of the 20th century. By 2021, many, perhaps most new bikes, other than e-bikes, sold in Canada and the USA had rear wheel gear cassettes with 11 or 12 gears, and laterally flexible bushingless chains.

The laterally flexible bushingless chain with derailleur shifting is capable of “dropping” the chain while the chain is being shifted between gear wheels and while the chain is being powered. The chain can be jammed by the crank arms or other moving parts against the frame. A chain stressed when the power ceases to be applied in the primary direction can fail:

• chain link plates may fracture,
• rivets may fracture, and
• rivets may pull out of the plates.

Material and Wear

Steel has the tensile strength for the purpose of transmitting human effort to drive a bicycle, and could be produced with smooth surfaces when the safety bicycle became common. Manufacturers have used various steels; 0ther metals have been considered. Few are strong without becoming brittle. Manufacturers use other metals to make alloys to coat or plate over roller chain components.

The parts that connect the links are made with tight tolerances, for transmission of force. There are microscopic gaps between pins and rollers and/or bushings, which allow the links to pivot to rotate on the chain rings and the cogs of the driving wheel transmission apparatus.

Bicycle roller chains become longer by a small amount as the chain is used. Microscopic wear on individual links adds up. The elongation of chain by wear being wear is well known to bicycle mechanics and to engineers:

Cyclists often speak of chain “stretch”, as if the side plates of an old chain were pulled out of shape by the repeated stresses of pedaling. This is not actually how chains elongate. The major cause of chain “stretch” is wearing away of the metal where the link pin rotates inside of the bushing (or the “bushing” part of the inside plate) as the chain goes onto and off of the sprockets. If you take apart an old, worn-out chain, you can easily see the little notches worn into the sides of the link pins by the inside edges of the bushings, or the formed side plates of a bushingless chain.

Bicycle Technical Information, Chain and Sprocket Wear, see section “How Chains Elongate”

The experience of many industries with steel bearings demonstrates that steel wears, even when lubricated. Riders assume, correctly, that steel is a very durable material. But chains, even when lubricated well and maintained, wear. An elongated worn chain does not fit the gears – the chain wheels and cassette cogwheels – and abrades those components of the drive train.

Some chains with hard steel plating and good maintenance and lubrication resist longitudinal wear and elongation.

Specifications, Standards and Gauges

Elongation of 11 and 12 speed bushingless chains by .5 – one half of one percent – of the length of a chain is the replacement point. It is implicit in the design of chain gauges (chain checker tools), and has been known to the employees of bike shops and to some some users for decades. 11 speed chains and rear cassettes were introduced by Campagnolo in 2008, and by Shimano in 2013. 11 speed cassettes and chains became a common feature of new bikes. By 2024, some drive trains for 13 gears on the rear cassette are being made and marketed

The length of a chain varies, depending on the length of the chain stays, the sizes of the largest chain ring and the largest rear gear, and the rear derailleur shape and size. A chain may have 55 to 59 links (counting a pair of 1 Outer link plus 1 Inner as 1 link) which can also be counted as 110 to 118 links. A chain may be 1397 mm. to 1473 mm. long

Chain gauges checking for elongation started to be distributed and sold in the 1980s. They were noted:

There … also special tools made to measure chain wear; these are a bit more convenient, though by no means necessary, and most — except for the Shimano TL-CN40 and TL-CN41 — are inaccurate

Gauges are more important than BTI said. The problem of the accuracy of most gauges is still present in 2024. A chain gauge checks for elongation in a span of 12-14 links. The gauge has to precisely cut (machined) and precisely used to detect elongation of .5 mm. It is useful to put the gauge on different places on the chain to look for wear.

Sheldon Brown & John S. Allen, about 1990, Bicycle Technical Information pages, Measuring Chain Wear section in Chain and Sprocket Wear

The existence and marketing of chain gauges suggests the modern cycling component, tool, and maintenance industries regard chains as consumable,and expect riders to replace chains.

Many mechanics support replacing chains that shift badly, and posit the concept of lateral wear as the cause of poor shifting. In 2024 a new tool was marketed to measure elongation wear more precisely, and also to quantify the lateral flexibility of bushingless drive trains. There are opinions, there is no data and there are no standards on when laterally worn chains should be replaced.

Master Links

Master links, devices that replace a single outer link, became common in the 1980s and 1990s. Master links make it easier to remove a chain for cleaning, maintenance and replacement. They were noted in the BTI glossary (see Sheldon Brown and BTI under Cycling Knowledge, below). Even with master links, removing a chain is an operation which many cyclists do not have the time, tools or knowledge to attempt.

Friction & Lubrication

Lubricants are materials that are applied to the surfaces of other materials to reduce friction when force applied to the materials and the surfaces move against each other. A lubricant reduces kinetic friction by changing static friction to lubricated friction, allowing metal surfaces to slide or turn without getting hot and making noise.

For much of the 20th century, most bike chains were lubricated with oils manufactured by refining petroleum and processing the refined product into useful material. Motor oil was and is a product to lubricate parts of an internal combustion engine. At the end of the 19th century, industry settled on the internal combustion engine as the device that could be used to power passenger cars, motorcycles, transport trucks, farm machinery and industrial machines. Motor oil was commonly available in the places bikes were used, and it was a popular lubricant for decades.

Safety bicycles were once almost inconsequential for the use of energy, or as a means of transportation.

Academics and industry researched and developed many specialized lubricants. Bike chain lube has become a specialty market. Bike shops sell what they can get from suppliers; bike owners/users have limited help in finding and choosing the best lubricants. Manufacturers and distributors will make all kinds of claims for their products. The best chain lubricants are not easily found and applied. Many are not effective at avoiding chain wear.

There is more on chains in Bike Chains, Part 2 and on lubrication in Bike Chains, Part 3 .

Active outdoors through another year of the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21.

I moved to Victoria West in November 2020. I had a few months transition before I vacated the house in James Bay. I was busy moving in the early months of 2021.

I learned the most efficient routes to places to meet Mike or make local trips in Vic West and Esquimalt. I retired effective April. I rode through the heat dome in the summer by riding early in the day. I was able to ride into the fall and winter by finding dry days or mornings between days of drizzle and rain, until a week of cold temperature with several days when snow fell, at the end of the year.

My ride were on my Cannondale Topstone. I logged 4,373.8 Km.

I became interested in chain life and lubrication.. I considered how to maintain cycling as my main exercise and recreational activity.

Table of Contents

• Replacement
• Platform or Clipless
• Shimamo SPD
• HT T1
• Oops

Replacement

My old pedals were worn and had been damaged by corrosion after an incident in storage last winter

Platform or Clipless

Bike pedals have been flat (platform) pedals since safety bicycles began to be made and sold. Many bikes are sold with flat pedals, which riders will replace.

Bikeradar did a large survey or review early in 2021. Outdoor Gear Labs did another. Both identified several clipless cleat systems, along with Shimano’s, as choices. Cleats may be attached to the shoes with three bolts or two:

• Three bolt cleats are large, thick, and stiff. They fit a retention mechanism on one side of a corresponding pedal. The large 3 hole “delta” cleat has dominated the market for road cleats since the Look Delta design, which Shimano emulated with its SPD-DL pedals. Shimano uses 13.5 mm M5 bolts to secure its SPD-SL 3 hole cleats to the shoes. 3 hole cleats fit fit below the sole , and only fit into one side of pedal. Most of the pedals in the Shimano Dura-Ace, Ultegra and 105 road bike product lines are 3 hole models.
• Two hole cleats are smaller. Typically two hole cleats, including the popular Shimano SPD, cleats are used with pedals with retention mechanisms on two opposite sides of the pedal. Shimano uses 11.5 mm M5 bolts to secure SPD cleats to shoes. The cleat engagement uses a spring, adjustable by rotating a bolt in the medal. The pedal is marked to confirm the direction to turn the bolt; there is no tension marking or gauge on the pedal, (The SPD system is a mountain bike system and is marketed by Shimano for those uses.)
• M5 bolts are the standard device to fix or secure cleants to shoes. There are “cleat nut” shoe plates that fit in soles of two bolt shoes. They are tapped for M5 bolts.

Some flat pedals, made and sold for mountain bikes, have small metal pins for grip – these depend on a shoe that will grip the pins and will not shred.

Shimamo SPD

Shimano SPD cleats support several Shimano pedals and are compatible with some OEM pedals. The SPD system has two slightly different cleats. The (black) SM-SH51 is “single direction” release. The direction is a rotation away for the crank, in the plane of the pedal – when the rider’s anke is at a normal angle to the leg, perpedicular as if the rider were walking, The (silver) SM-SH56 is “multi-directional” release which is not compatible with a few Shimano pedals.

I used a pair of Shimano PD-324 clipless pedals on a Giant hardtail mountain bike and on a Trek FX 7.4 mountain bike hybrid. The PD-M324 as originally a Deore line mountain bike “trekking” pedal. Shimano’s mountain bike product lines are complex. Deore was a line of touring components which crossed over when Shimano launched the Deore XT line in 1983. Deore is now the 4th Shimano mountain bike component tier after XTR, Deore XT, and SLX. A pair weighed over 500 g. The PD-M324 and cleat retention on one side, and a platform on the other. It was flat on both sides. I changed to Shimano PD-A530 pedals, which are similiar to the Shimano PD-A600. Both the PD-A530 and PD-A600 are Tiagra series pedals in the 4th tier of the Shimano road series. Pedals are not part of component groupsets, but Shimano identies some components as groups of related components within Shimano’s system of using product lines to market components.

Both pedals support(ed) the Shimano two hole SPD cleats on one side. The SPD is a “step in” system. Riders clip in by locking cleats on the soles of the shoes into a fitting on the pedals. The PD-A530 was lighter than the M324 at 383 grams per pair. The PD-A530 had an SPD fitting on one side and a flat ribbed surface on the opposite side of the pedal. The PD-A530 is “concave” (? convex) on the the side with the cleat fitting. The cleat lock is over spindle. This emulated the action of other cleats – it let the rider concentrate power on the central axis of the pedal at the ends of the crank arms. This required the rider to have the fitting side of the pedal facing up and get the front of the cleat into the centimeter of space ahead of the spindle. The shoe did not otherwise make other contact with peddle. The PD-A600 was a one sided pedal which differed from the PD-A530 this way “recessed SPD shoe compatible allows off the bike walking”. Jan Heine, writing in Bicycling Quarterly (Spring 2021, No. 75, at p. 108), praised the PD-A600 for these features:

• ” .. excellent bearings
• ” … support the rider’s feet on the pedal body … feet do not rock as you pedal”.

The PD-A600 was not on the market when I acquired the PD-A530 pedals. The PD-A600 was lighter at 286 grams per pair, and different than the PD-A530. It was no longer on the market in 2021 when I decided to replace the pedals. Shimano had discontinued the PD-A600 and moved the spd cleat into the Ultegra road bike line with the PD-ES600 in 2020. The PS-ES600 has the recessed fitting,and calling this an Ultegra product meant a price increase (to $140 a pair in Canada in the summer of 2021). Jan Heine noted some disadvantages of the PD-ES600:

• ” … the [back] of the cage has been eliminated … means they are no longer weighted to facilitate clipping in.
• “At the end of the ride, the cleats are sometimes hard to disengage.

Jan Heine’s comments identify:

• the benefits of having a pedal as a platform for the foot and having a cleat recessed in the sole of the shoe that lets the shoe contact the pedal.
• a problem that can occur with a one sided pedals. The rider has little grip on the second side if any, and a rider can lose speed before flipping the pedal and making a connection with the cleat.

Jan Heine thought the Shimano XTR line PD-M9000 mountain bike pedal worked better for his styles of riding (CX and all road, I think) than the Ultegra PD-ES-600. While the XTR is a spindle with engagement mechanisms on opposite side of the spindle – it lacks any platform, Jan Heine thought the XTR was easy to engage and disengage. He noted the that the fronts of the retention mechanisms had a a “depession that guides the cleat. The XTR pedal is considerablly more expensive than other 2 hole cleat mountain bike pedals, including other Shimano MTB pedals, and hard to find in 2021. It is built to a different standard. I wasn’t able to find one to examine. It has shallow concave scallop in the fronts of the retentions. This appears to be done by grinding. The scallop is present in Shimano MTB pedals models in the XTR grade 9000 and 9100, but other Shimano MTB pedals lack this feature.

His comparison asks questions:

• why not use a small 2 hole cleat on an all road bike or a gravel bike?
• is a double sided 2 hole system better than a one sided pedal fitting to a 2 hole cleat?

HT T1

Ourdoor Gear reviewed the HT T1 enduro pedal favourably and identified it as editor’s choice for a clipless system. The HT T1 was available online. It uses a proprietary cleat which does not work with Shimano SPD system cleats. (The HT X type cleats are thicker than SPD cleats, among other things). It uses a large spring which can be set much tighter than the springs in Shimano pedals. This is popular with MTB riders. See:

1. https://nsmb.com/forum/forum/gear-4/topic/need-more-clipless-pedal-tension-129864/,
2. https://mbaction.com/ht-t1-enduro-pedals-test/,
3. https://bikeco.com/ht-t1-pedal-review-setup-tips/ .

The cleats are multi-directional. Twist your foot in any plane to release.

The spring is thicker and strong than the spring in a Shimano SPD pedal. Some online sources suggest that 50% on the HT indicator is equivalent to the highest tension on a Shimano SPD retention spring. The gauge in the mechanism that indicates how tight the spring is tensioned. The gauges each track the position of a threaded plate that secures the end of the bolt that tensions the spring. The gauge is a series of 8 lines along a slot in which the plate is visible.

The HT cleat retention sytem is identified as “spring binder” by LakeShoes, which offers advice about how the cleat should line up with sole of the shoe. Lake Shoes provides advice on how highly torqued the bolts holding the cleat onto the sole should be set for some pedal systems, but not the torque for the HT T1. HT has the numbers – 5 to 8 newton meters – in the product manual. HT supplied two sets of bolts to hold the cleats to the shoes. Both seem to be M5 bolts. I later threaded them into a thread checker at hardware store to confirm. Both sets were flat headed & countersunk (tapered on the back of the head). They are specialty bolts with have an opening for a 4 mm Allan Key, like cap screws. One set were ≧11.5 mm long, the standard for SPD cleats. The second set were 13 mm long, providing an extra 1.5 mm. of threaded bolt to engage with the tapped “nut plates” in the sole of the shoe. Longer bolts will project through the tapped cleat nut plate, and abrade the insole. The extra length will be required when the rider deploys shims (as shown in the Lake shoes drawings). It is almost necessary to deal thread into the cleat nut plates through the HT X type cleats.

Oops

On the return trip from the West Shore, I saw an incident when some 2 of 4 or 5 persons oncoming on road bikes lost control on the E&N in View Royal. They were riding in a group, in single file but slowed down to pass some pedestrians walking side by side, which affected riders coming from both directions and caused a momentary traffic jam. Two riders in the group went into the ditch. Bruises and road rash, and contact with the West coast rain forest underbruch. They went into the ditch on their right and did not cross into my path. I stopped and assisted, stopping and unclipping. I knew one of the riders, who used to work in the same branch of the same Ministry. This kind of incident is a risk on Victoria’s “multi-use” trails which are not set up for fast cycling, for wide vehicles, or for pedestrians who crowd or cross the centre lines of the trails.

I initially set the spring tension at 50% of maximum, which is more tension than I was used to. Within a few Km of starting my first test ride, I stopped and dialed the springs down . The cleats work like a Shimano multi direction SPD cleat but some motions work better.

I had a problem unclipping the left shoe a few Km later where the E&N trail crosses the rail line at the end of Hallowell (west and south of the Admiral’s Walk shopping centre). I was able to unclip, and continued to the Canadian Forces base gate on Admirals Road at the end of Colville. I crossed the tracks at the gate, went up Colville, turned onto Intervale and turned on the E&N from Intervale. I had unclipped and clipped a few more times. I was getting uneasy and began to looking for a place to stop. I thought I could get off on the shoulder of the next crossing street, Hutchinson. I slowed down but could not unclip my left foot. I was able to get some support from the chain link fence which is immediately beside the trail – on the left. I was able to, unclip my right foot for support and mobility, undo my left shoe and get the bike off the trail. I was not able to get at the bolts holding the cleat. I undid the bolt that pre-tensions the retaining spring, release my left shoe, and remove the cleat from the shoe – without losing any more parts. One of the two cleat retaining bolts had worked loose and had disappeared. I was able to put the shoe on and ride home, using the left pedal as a platform pedal. The GPS stopped recording when I stopped. The walk off the trail was too slow to restart recording until I was on the trail and pedalling. The gap shows my move to the wrong side of the trail but is otherwise nearly invisible in my GPS track of the ride. Later, I reassembled the cleat retaining spring; and

• confirmed, with the thread checker in a hardware store that the bolts are standard pitch M5 bolts;
• found standard pitch M5 bolts 16 mm long at 2 hardware stores. Both stores had M5 zinc (plated) steel bolts, flatheaded and countersunk, with slot or Phillips heads. Either would work. There are shortages of all sorts of things (the economy has been disrupted by Covid and the other shocks of 2020-21) and having the bolts in hand provides options,Phillips heads have some advantages but come with the risk that the bolt head strips and rounds when torqued. With some enquiry and looking around, I located M5 stainless steel bolts, flatheaded and countersunk, with Phillips heads. Still vulnerable to rounding, but a bit stronger. I cut them down to ≤13 mm with a Dremel tool, and reinstalled the cleat.

The cleat retaining bolts should be fully engaged and torqued to the manufacturer’s specification to avoid the risk of losing a bolt, which will probably lead to being unable to unclip. Jan Heine describes voming to a stop with your foot stuck in the pedal as one of the worst nightmares of any cycist. I agree. I was lucky in not crashing, and in finding the repair parts. I fixed the problem and reinstalled the cleats properly.

This system signals cleat engagment with a firm click that I can feel and hear. The pedal provides a platform for pedalling unclipped. It has 2 pins at the front which allows me pedal and make a second try to find the front of the spring and clip in if I miss on getting the front of the cleat into the front of the spring.

Table of Contents

• A new feature and experience
• Clinchers
• The tire and the rim
• Mounting and inflating
• Presta Valve
• Tire Pressure

A new feature and experience

This started with my discovering the difficulties of dismounting tubeless ready tires from my gravel bike in the fall of 2019 and the spring of 2020. Changing a tire is not supposed to be a job requiring shop time. Tires, in principle, can be repaired and replaced by a user.

Clinchers

The pneumatic bicycle tire was one of the technologies that made the safety bicycle successful. It evolved by innovations in wheels, wheel rims, tires and inner tubes into the clincher used on most bikes, including the utility bikes common in 20th century. The tire casing is a laminate of fabric and rubber. The tread is hardened rubber laminated onto the casing.

The Bicycle Technical Information (“BTI” ie Sheldon Brown) tires page discusses the kinds of tires, including the tubular tire used in racing. The dominant technology uses clincher tires and inner tubes. The BTI page on flat tires summarizes. This illustration (from a Wikipedia page) shows a tire, tire bead, inner tube, bead channel and hook, in a cross-section view. The diagrams and pictures at Bike Gremlin, Bike Touring News and Cycling Tips (below) also illustrate.

1. rim;
2. rim tape, in a central well or valley (in a tubeless ready wheel);
3. rim braking surface (on a wheel for a bike with rim brakes);
4. bead, laminated to tire casing, engaged by the bead hook in the bead channel;
5. inner tube;
6. casing;
7. tread.

Pneumatic tires became the dominant technology for automobiles and motorcycles. The tire industry developed tubeless tires and rims for motorized vehicles and for lightweight carts and appliances.

Tubeless bicycle tires were developed for mountain bikes and gradually acccepted for use on other bikes. Tubeless tires are supposed to recover from minor punctures during a ride and repaired later. Tubeless tires are used at lower pressure than the same tire with an inner tube, which is desireable in many kinds of riding. Tubeless ready rims and wheels have become, arguably, the standard equipment for new bikes in many price and quality classes. A tubeless ready tire is a tubeless tire without the sealants and the tubeless valve. It is basically a clincher, and requires an inner tube. Some tubeless ready wheels have rim tape, but not all of them. The rim tape may extend over the shelves of the bead channel. Many riders carry an inner tube to repair a tubeless tire in the field.

Cycling Tips, an online publication, published a guide to tubeless tires, An Endless FAQ, in 2019 and updated it in 2021 [updated October 2021].

The tire and the rim

The normal process for detaching (unmounting) a clincher tire and replacing an inner tube is shown in this Park Tool video. A clincher normally disengages from the rim easily when the tire is deflated. After disengaging the bead, it may be necessary to use tire levers to get the bead off the rim. Hydraulic, pneumatic and manual bead breaker devices are available and basically necessary for agricultural, industrial, truck, automobile and motorcycle tires, but such devices are not used in bike shops and almost never available for a roadside repair.

It is harder to unmount a tubeless tire than an ordinary clincher. Tubeless tires fit tightly. Friction between the tire casing over the bead, and the bead channel in the wheel rim is a major factor. The bead channel may be machined to wrap around and hook over the bead. If the tire was mounted with sealant for tubeless use, the sealant may a factor. When the tire has been deflated, the bead has to be pushed off the shelf into the valley in the middle of the rim. It is necessary to unhook the bead and push it into that valley. This takes some force, but can be done without tools or extreme measures. It may be necessary to work around the rim and push in at several places and find the best place to gets the bead out of the channel and continue around the rim and get it out of the channel before pushing it into the valley. It may be necessary to do this on each side. I found videos of methods for extreme instances on YouTube:

• The Brighter Cyclist, using tongue and groove (aka pump) pliers, April 2017
• Bike Teacher, using a vise, July 2017;
• Double Tap, February 2020;
• The Biking Viking, another vise, August 2020.

Some sources advise riders to practise the skills of dismounting a tire and installing or changing a tire in order to reduce time lost on a ride. This skill involves tactile feedback and muscles that may not have been worked that intensively for some time. It is worth learning.

Mounting and inflating

It is easy to press one bead into the rim. The user may want to align a marking on the sidewalls with the valve hole at this stage. The inner tube can be pressed into the tire when one side of the tire has been pressed into the wheel. The inner tube should be empty or nearly empty. The valve stem should be pressed through the hole in rim, and the inner tube positioned with the stem perfectly perpendicular to the rim.

Getting the remaining (second) bead into the rim can be done by hand if the beads are kept down in the rim channel. It is better to run fingers along the sidewall of the side that is already on the rim to make sure it is in the well. The remaining side can be pressed into the rim, starting some distance from the valve. It may be best to start opposite the valve. About half of the remaining side will fit easily, but the rest will also yield. It can be worked in short sections. It may be necessary to pinch both walls to make sure the first side is still in the well. It may be necessary to hold the bead down in one place with one hand while working the bead that is still outside along the rim with the other hand. Eventually, the section still outside the rim will be short enough that it can be be pulled into the rim. It can be done by hand. Using tire levers to pry the tire over the rim presents the risk of catching the inner tube and creating a pinch flat.

It is advisable to work the fingers of one or both hands along the sidewalls to find any places the tube may protruding outside the edge of the sidewall or caught, and press the sidewalls back to release the inner tube. The sidewall can be rubbed and pulled up into the bead channel. A tubeless rider will follow a similiar process, but will need to take extra steps to get a preliminary seal.

Presta Valve

If the valve is a threaded Presta valve – which is common on modern bikes, the captive nut (which threads on the thin rod that fits inside the stem) should be tightened down. This locks the valve core in the closed or sealed position. The BTI glossary entry on the Presta valve and several articles by Jobst Brandt are informative. The presta valve has an internal stem that seals the valve, which is locked by a tiny nut threaded on a thin brass rod. A Presta valve does not have an internal spring. The stem rod can be easily bent or damaged! It is worth a little preventative care, and some caution in use. The external cap that threads onto the exterior of the stem does not have retain air, but provides some protection against impacts on the stem cap rod.

The stem cap rod is brass, and bends. One risk it that a pump hose, a pump or a pressure gauge can bend the stem cap rod while the device is being attached to or removed from the valve stem. The threads cut on the outside of a Presta stem can in theory be used to screw on a pump hose but that is rare – many chucks friction fit over the end of a stem or are locked with a lever.

If the tube seems to be leaking from the valve core, and core is a removable threaded core, it is worth tightening the core with a tool (that can grasp the part of the core above the end of the valve stem).

When both beads appear to be in place, start pumping. The beads of a tubeless tire often will audibly pop into place. The valve stem may have a jam nut that threads onto the outside of the stem to hold the stem in the wheel rim. See above – this nut should be tightened down.

Tire Pressure

The pressure marked on a tire is a consumer protection warning – a fraction of pressure that will blow the tire with an inner tube off the rim. It is not a recommendation for performance. High pressure was believed to lower rolling resistance, but that theory or belief has been contradicted. The operating pressure is normally much lower than the marked pressure. The maximum pressure for 700c x 38 with an inner tube is 75 psi. I ran the Panaracer Gravelking SK at 60 psi; I got less rolling resistance in the low 50’s and mid to high 40s (psi). For a 38-40 mm tire, with an inner tube, the pressure will be in the 3 to 3.2 bar range or lower. The recommended pressure for tubeless use is even lower. Fatter tires run at lower pressures. The appropriate pressure depends on several factors. The modern thinking is stated in this Cycling Weekly article. There are some good online calculators; a couple are noted in the article. I have used the Silca calculator. The full “pro” version is free, although at this time it requires registration by entering an email address.