Note to anyone else trying this in the future... probably best not to put the bag in on its side. I did so because of the shape of the ultrasonic cleaner, which is rectangular & longer than it is deep.

Except the bag split open at the seal & the hot water mixed in with the wax, ruining my efforts to wax the chain & spilling the wax all over my ultrasonic cleaner. I’ll need to order a new bag & start from scratch.

unless the other additives in the lube are water soluble I would simply let the bath cool and scrape the wax back into the bag. I imagine that you would end up with 99% of the original formula. As Josh mentioned in a pod cast the bags are to be used for boil in bag use ie on the stove top not in the ultrasonic bath. It is my understanding that you simply put the wax straight into the ultrasonic bath with no water and you are good to go. The bag idea was for those without a ultrasonic bath.

My ultrasonic cleaner still had hot deionized water & cleaner (shooters choice) in it. So I basically ultrasonically scrubbed my chain of the very wax I was trying to apply.

I also got the wax all over the inside & outside of the cleaner, requiring me to use boiling water to get it clean.

It was quite the inept, comical adventure. But in the end it only cost me $40 plus shipping for a new Hot Melt Wax, the week it’ll take to arrive, and just a wee bit of embarrassment.

Not fully up on Silca's method, but generally, a small croc pot is your best tool for chain waxing without burning the wax... You can clean ultasonically, but rather than mixing wax and solvents (cleaning off the wax you were trying to apply), use a different vessle for doing so. You could for sure throw wax and chain in a sous vide bag (I assume the ones here are not vac seal bags, but zip ones (although you could vac seal with a conventional sealer, as long as the wax was in a solid form, and not liquid or aqueous), heat for application, and then let cool and re-use excess wax. But it's probably cheaper just to get a small croc-pot to use exclusively for chain waxing and just leave te wax in there between applications.

I just put the wax in a mason jar and use it in a small pot of boiling water, once the wax melts, I turn down the heat. The wax stays in the mason jar until I need to use it again.

actually the Silca bag of wax is a sous vide bag, that was josh's ah ha moment...he mentioned this on the podcast so they are meant for placing in hot or boiling water. The top is a zip lock though.

There's been a lot of tragedy in 2020. This ... isn't quite the same scale as everything happening nationally, but as far as the cycling world goes, I think it deserves honorable mention and some compassion. That wax is expensive!

Maybe you already boiled some water on the stove before transferring it to the cleaner and putting the bag in, but if not, you could consider that. It would save time over having the cleaner's heating element heat the water and melt the wax from cold.

I'm personally not relying on the ultrasonic cleaner to wax the chain. Adam Kerin and Molten Speed Wax both say to go swish the chain in the crock pot. The friction modifiers that MSW uses are little solid particles, and you need to distribute them through the molten paraffin. I'm not sure if the ultrasonic cleaner will do that, or if it does that sufficiently. I think Kerin is saying he still prefers the crock pot.

Another thing is that if you buy Kerin's and MSW's theories about how wax works, when you go immerse a chain in a slow cooker, any contamination held by the wax will get distributed through the pot. The wax should have very little sticking to it in the dry, and if you rode in the wet, you'd melt the wax off with hot water before putting it in the slow cooker. Gradually, the slow cooker gets more contaminated. That's why both MSW and Kerin say to use about half a bag at a time. I'm sticking with that theory, so I'm not going to be boiling my entire (very expensive) bag of Silca wax at one shot.

Watching Josh's YT vid again, it sounds like his theory is more like molten wax the chain, top the chain up with the drip lube every ~300 miles. Thoroughly clean the chain and then re-wax about every 1k miles. That way is going to blow through a lot of solvent every month or two, unless you are distilling your used solvents (which I am not). Thoroughly cleaning my chain was already a big pain the last time, and I feel like it's the more onerous part of the waxing process. I'm not at all eager to repeat it every few months.

I haven’t watched the video, but there was an interesting/upsetting part of the latest Margin Gains podcast that talked about how you could screw up your chain with cleaning compounds and the ultrasonic cleaner.

I have been waxing chains and then using the Premier drip wax on the chain after the wax wears off. Then every couple of months I toss the chain in the ultrasonic cleaner with some dish soap and let it sit for 10 minutes at 50C. I blow any excess water off with compressed air and toss it in the crockpot for a new coat of hot wax. The chains come out of my heat and dish soap process clean as a whistle and 10 minutes in dish soap doesn’t seem like it would be problematic. It would be cool to know if this process is OK. It would seem like using the Silca drip lube and Premier would be about equivalent in terms of how easy they are to clean.

Great input all, thank you. Josh eluded in one of the vids that the ultrasonic waves are great for wax penetration when using their sous vide bag. I’ll just need to keep that bag upright next time. Also, the cleaner that can damage a chain is a particular type of simple green, if I recall correctly.

Here, I used the exact chemicals & process Josh recommended & it work brilliantly. Essentially, I started with a new chain that I degreased with a citrus degreaser by hand with a shaker bottle. Then into the ultrasonic cleaner with hot deionized water & a particular ultrasonic cleaner solution. Then a shaker-bottle rinse in denatured alcohol (this super strong stuff Josh found) that is a perfect way to simultaneously confirm that the chain is utterly clean.

It’s true that it’s a lot of cost in terms of solutions, but at least they all can be ordered easily via amazon prime. The actual time and effort is not bad at all.

As for the extra $40 of wax, I’ll live. I love Silca & everything they’re about, and I’m happy to spend a little extra to use their stuff. I’ve got their tubes, valves, floor pump, speed shields, seat bag, co2’s, etc. I’m a total fanboy.

the issue is that the ultrasonics and use of certain type cleaners(regular consumer Simple Green) will cause something called hydrogen embrittlement if left too long (like over night or on the scale of hours). The thing is the issue is not immediately visible but it causes cracks to form in the metal structure then under stress they propagate and can lead to failure. Cleaning solutions/ degreasers that are specifically designed for ultrasonic use such as aerospace types and certain consumer brands ensure that hydrogen is not available to cause this sort of problem. Josh deals with this question on the most recent ask Josh anything episode #14.

So I think for most intents and purposes as long as you do not leave the chain in the cleaner for long periods of time the chain will be fine.

On a secondary note most of the solutions used for the process can be reused at least a couple of times and some many times so that reduces the cost per use factor a lot. Even the alcohol can be reused a few times to dry the chain. There are materials you could add to the alcohol or acetone to dry it but in the end it is so cheap that it is easier to just toss it after 2 or 3 uses.

Thanks for info. I did listen to the podcast but the one thing they didn’t mention was leaving the chain in mineral spirts. I Usually throw a new chain in a bottle of that overnight to remove the nasty grease they pack chains in. I am guessing that is not corrosive and I don’t use that in a ultrasonic cleaner.

I would suggest that mineral spirits would have a very low to nil free hydrogen content. I would be more concerned with polar solvents like water, and even possibly alcohol for the issue of hydrogen embrittlement. Anyone who is a materials scientist might be able to chime in with more depth.

This seems to be over thinking to me. I use standard paraffin wax in a croc pot. The croc pot has chicken wire in the bottom to keep the chain suspended. I rotate 2 chains. Place a freshly waxed chain on the bike (30 seconds). Place used chain on the top of the cold wax and turn the croc pot on. Go for a ride and when I come back pull the chain out of the croc pot and hang it from a hook to dry.

I very rarely put 300 miles on a waxed chain because it so easy to change them out. It takes less than a minute to switch my chains out. I never have to clean my drive chain... ever. You can run your hand along any part of my drive train with no grime.

Once just for kicks I tried waxing my cassette. That did not work so don't try it (:

Minutia is a specialty around here.

That's true and I just keep coming back for more. I'm guilty of it as well

I'm right behind you.

I totally agree and I do the same basic procedure. I have been using just paraffin wax and it is silent and lasts very well with no issues. For me it was in response to using my gravel bike on dusty sandy roads. When I first got it I should have done the full clean and waxing but did not and the amount of dirty that stuck to the chain was impressive. I then cleaned it and waxed it and presto no more dirt adhering to the chain and nice to work on because no grease formation. Waxing is the only way I will lube my chains from now on. Whether it is important enough to me to go from plain paraffin wax to the high tech solution is still up for discussion. I do not use ultrasonics nor a crock pot, I have an old metal dish and use an induction hot plate that works like a charm, I can hit just about any temperature I want and I typically go above the boiling point of water to ensure it is removed and to lower the surface tension of the wax so that it gets into the hard to reach parts of the chain.

The croc pot I have was only $15 or so. That seems a small price to pay for convenience, between myself and my wife we have 4 bikes that have waxed chains so I do this process several times a month. I just leave the wax in the pot, put the chain on the holder, drop it in, take it out about 70 minutes later, easy peasy. Don't like the idea of wax on the stove, molten wax is flammable.

For the real geeks in this discussion on embrittlement I found a good source of information of cleaning and acid induced embrittlement. https://www.pfonline.com/...ing-low-carbon-steel
this has some great info for those interested in this topic. The key issue of this failure mode is cyclic stress like in the use case for bicycle chains. To this I wonder if chain failure by breaking a link or a pin has actually happened because of this failure mode?

I've seen them under $10 at Amazon. There's often a Captain America version that's $8-9.

I have mason jars already around, it was my free option.

There's over 6" of glass above the wax line, to the top of the jar, and it's in a pot of water. Unless you go crazy with the heat, the risk of ignition seems pretty low, especially considering the wax has an ignition temp very close to common cooking oils.

If there was a t-shirt for marginal gainers, it’d say this...

or "CAUTION: GEEK SQUAD" ;-)

Since someone brought up Silca's hot melt wax in general, I'm going to bring in this thread from the Paceline forum. Josh said:


Thinking logically, I'm not sure Silca's wax is necessarily worth the premium over Molten Speed Wax based on that statement. I assume that was a short-term lab test. (Of course, I went and bought it anyway.) We know that one of the friction modifiers is different. Josh explained in his Youtube vid that the nano-scale tungsten disulfide particles are smaller than the molybdenum disulfide that's used in MSW. Josh thinks the WS2 is small enough to load up in the crevices on the surface of the metal, so it should maintain lower friction over time. And perhaps he made other modifications to the base wax as well.

I'll have to wait for Adam Kerin's long-term wear testing. He had completed the first stage of wear testing for Silca's drip wax lube, and it was performing very well at that point. Hopefully, Kerin will report back on Silca's molten wax by the time my bag runs out. Basically, unless Silca is clearly superior to MSW, I'm probably switching to MSW. It's $28 shipped for 1 lb (less if bought in bulk) from MSW's store, versus $40 plus shipping for 1 kg of Silca. If I'm concerned over those .2 watts, I'd probably get MSW's race powder. I won't be surprised if Silca has or if it launches a race powder, but that tungsten disulfide has to be pretty expensive.

Don't get me wrong, my hat is still off to Josh and the Silca team. It's just a matter of cost-benefit over a known good competitor. Because I like my fancy bike stuff, it's possible I will countermand my reasoning next year.

This is one of those classic comments where I really wish SlowTwitch had a "like" button. Pure Gold!