You need to add a part about when to take the chain out. If you take it out at full temperature, a lot of the wax drips out ime. General advice I’ve seen in several places is to turn off heat and wait until a skin starts to form on the wax, then take it out. For me this is when the wax reaches about 50c. This means less of the wax drips out. You can break the chain and pull off any big lumps over your now solidifying wax to put it back in the mix.
Hmm - I’m not sure about that - personally I don’t let the wax cool before removing the chain and letting it drip the excess back into the pot.
Would be keen to hear from others on this point?
I wouldn’t say that the wax “drips out”. It is only the surplus wax on the outside which drips down. The rest stays in the between chain links and rollers IMO.
Agree with you @jasedepuit. The purpose of immersion waxing is to deposit a layer of wax onto all surfaces of the chain, rollers, pins, etc. By soaking the chain into a heated pot of wax, and assuming the chain was prepped well, a layer of wax will most assuredly be formed on the chain’s surfaces.
Leaving the wax to cool, while the chain remains submerged serves no further purpose in my view, as the chain itself will very likely shed any additional wax during the first few minutes of articulation anyway.
What can I tell you. I definitely get better results in longevity doing it this way.
EDIT: Thought I’d read it somewhere before (step 4 or 7)
This is what I’ve been doing as well, but it has been pointed out that Silca might have an ulterior motive in this instruction, since it ends up using more wax (mostly on the exterior where it just flakes off)
Seems like anything over 140 C for an extended period of time can ruin the added chemicals. So the cheaper crockpots should stay on low. Learned this the hard way recently - my $10 crockpot got my wax to 145C…
suggest clarifying in the title of this thread that it is chains being waxed in this discussion. This omission led to much disappointment.
Friendly discussion about the wiki claim - apparently made by @tim_k7906 - that DIY wax, “…does not save much money and is likely to lead to an inferior result.”
I’m biased as a DIYer, but I feel this is overly negative. ZFC indicates that even just pure paraffin performs remarkably well in efficiency, and is among the most cost-effective options. In the main testing spreadsheet ordered by cost-to-run, “candle wax” and the several “private immersion wax” are all around the top 10, only being beaten by the absolute best in market, and still beating all drip wax and all not-wax lube.
They also do quite well in efficiency - if you can get a whole extra watt out of name-brand immersion wax, you’re doing really well.
The only measurable benefit of high-end immersion wax I can think of is it definitely increases time between immersions. And it performs better in the wet - it’s really hard to match whatever magic Rex does for wet riding.
But overall you can have a fantatsic experience DIY, beating anything you can drip on. And even with higher-frequency immersion, I can still go multiple weeks of pretty high mileage riding.
Edit: Apologies, @GeraldoBeavis already made this point.
@tim_k7906 , are you opposed to an edit being a little more open to DIY, while still acknowleding that Rex, Silca, MSW, etc, are going to outperform almost any DIY formula in longevity and wet-weather performance?
Thanks. I re-worked the Process section to make it far more detailed. I included some notes below and one of them relates to this point.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Edited the drip wax section and added the IPA-dipping to get rid of cleaner:
- Option: dip and shake chain in isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and hang to dry (IPA replaces cleaner and evaporates afterwards. Also boils off at significantly lower temp)
One could explain that the IPA flushes out residue and is clearer to the eye and therefore remaining contaminants are better seen. Didn’t see the reason to expand that much in the section.
No, that’s fine. It’s a wiki and I’m not precious about “my” contributions.
@jasedepuit is it worth stickying this in the Tech category? Otherwise (as far as I can tell) it just slides down unless someone has commented on it recently (not sure if editing the wiki brings it back up?)
Agree, let’s have a “wiki” section ![]()
Also I thought that would be the main point of the switch from discord?!
This post is already a wiki-post. I’m not sure what you’re suggesting? Wiki topics should have their own Category? I prefer the ability to create Wiki-based topics in any Category.
I’m not sure I want to pin it to the Category. There’s likely plenty of people using the Tech Help Category that may not be interested in chain waxing? I know that individual’s can unpin posts for themselves, but still.
As a user you can bookmark posts that you don’t want to lost track of. At the bottom of the first post hit the three dots “…” and a Bookmark option will appear. There’s a Bookmark section on the main navigation menu to help you find them again.
That’s basically the two ways of going about it. I’d have preferred the other way, but your point of pinning topics relieves some if the issues ![]()
To provide another option I just created a “wiki” tag. If we tag all wiki posts accordingly they’ll appear here:
https://community.escapecollective.com/tag/wiki
You can follow tags, add them to your sidebar etc.
A wiki tag is probably adequate. I guess I was thinking that the point of a wiki like this is to create a durable resource that is easily accessible/findable by anyone, including people coming to the forum for the first time. So if someone is new to waxing or has a question about waxing, the existence of the wiki needs to be sufficiently obvious that they know to check it first, rather than posting a separate question.
I wasn’t asking for my own benefit - as you say, it’s easy enough for me to follow any particular post. More just about making sure it’s actually a valuable resource for the community, rather than something a lot of people spend a lot of time on, only for it to be lost to the depths of the forum.