What is the salient compromise that waxing a chain offers compared to lubing a chain? (Was: what's the sales pitch for waxing chains?)

Question

I'm almost sold on tubeless setups (even for road tires), but it took me a while until I heard the "sales pitch" (what someone committed to tubeless tires would say to convince a tube user to switch). It might go something like this:

You do an exchange: you spend less time on the road/trails fixing flats, but you pay the price in increased maintenance time to clean up the sealant once in a while.

What's the sales pitch for waxing chains? In other words, if you're a buff, what would you say to someone who uses a lubricant if you were to convince them of waxing? Is it just about guaranteed clean legs when you're back from your rides?

Clarification (edit)

In case "sales pitch" is ambiguous, think of it in the following way.

You're a bike shop owner/operator. You love bikes, but you also have a business to run. You get in the store a couple of cycling enthusiasts. They've watched several videos and read several articles that the usual publishers and the established sites have published on this subject.

When you declared that you'll help them save time on the trails/roads, they were sold. They went for tubeless tires.

What is the scoop you'd say to convince them to switch to waxing their chains? It's a sales pitch, and so you don't want to get technical on them. Sure, they may be thrifty and decide to do it themselves. They may not trust that you have the patience and the diligence to do an exacting job. They may not fathom returning to your shop every 1000-1500 km. At that point they'll select one school of waxing rather than the other and look at the details before doing it themselves, but at the outset, they only want to hear the big picture — delegating the details to you. What is the salient compromise that waxing a chain offers compared to lubing a chain?

Answer 1

Both drip wax and molten wax have been shown to be both low-wear for the chain and low-friction. This can potentially reduce wear on your whole drivetrain. Wax sets as a solid, so contaminants are generally stuck on the outside of the chain. If you use hot melt wax, then every time you dunk the chain in the wax, then whatever contaminants get inside the chain also get flushed off. You can clean the chain with just boiling water. That's recommended after a wet ride. It probably isn't necessary otherwise.

One clear tradeoff is that you have to start with a clean chain. Either you remove the factory grease yourself, or you pay someone else to do that. Removing the factory grease yourself usually takes multiple baths in two different solvents (turpentine to get the factory grease off, then isopropyl alcohol to get the turpentine off). There are a number of products that make this easier. Silca and Ceramicspeed, and possibly others I've forgotten, make one-step concentrated degreasers. You could just rinse the chain off with water after soaking them. Or Silca has its Stripchip that promises to let you just put a factory greased chain into a pot of wax - if you do this, the process is said to be very sensitive to temperature, so you need to get the wax relatively hot and keep it in a narrow temperature range. Other parties are likely to come up with other solutions, but one easy solution is for people to sell pre-treated chains.

As far as I know, you can take company A's pre-treated chain and use company B's drip or molten wax on it. They tend to use tungsten disulfide (WS2) as a friction modifier. Otherwise the wax tends to be high-grade paraffin with low oil content. Some companies use graphene as the friction modifier. I'm not sure if there are anti-synergies with WS2, so I'd probably tend to use chains treated with WS2 with something else that uses WS2.

The bottom line is that there's more cognitive complexity. You can gain both lower friction and better chain life.

Answer 2

The question should probably be reformulated, as it is it's clearly opinion based.

The main advantages are:

• solid lubrication, so less dirt retention/cleaner chain to the touch
• better chain longevity (I refer to the links provided by @WeiwenNG)
• lower friction
• longer interval between wax applications (mostly true for hotwax though, to my experience, drip wax tends to be similar to usual lubricants).

The main drawbacks are:

• more complex application, as it requires some tooling (can be mitigated by having a rotation of several chains).
• the chain needs to removed from the bike if the wax application (hot wax only), although it's possible to use drip wax between hot wax applications.
• initial degreasing is time consuming without specialised products (one step degreasers either liquid or solid). These specialised products are much more expensive than generic products, but not so much if you "value" your time.

For more details, I'll refer to this answer. Being much older 7 years older, it however does not consider two recent developments (one-step degreasers and drip waxes), that are game changers in my opinion. WeiwenNG's answer on the same thread is also interesting.

In contexts where there are absolute performance requirements (racing or ultra-cycling), the benefits can outweigh the drawbacks. For other cases however, it's a trade off.

In my case, I live in a flat, with bikes stored in a basement without access to water. The bikes are washed in the street. My preferred riding style is gravel, which means dust if the weather is dry and mud if it's wet. I use a combination of hot wax and drip wax (CeramicSpeed has a "wet drip wax" that I like during winter) because of the lower dust retention, so lower wear on the components. Maintaining a clean drivetrain without water is also easier with a solid lubricant (a hard brush is enough to remove most of the "grit"). On utility bikes, I use drip wax, because "not leaving stains" is actually much more appreciated for bikes used with clothes that you wear for other purposes. With good degreasers, the initial cleaning is not the hassle it used to be, and drip wax is almost as convenient as dry lube in terms of application — it ideally needs to dry before riding, which would take a few hours, so a "last minute lubrication" is better to be avoided.