hi this is David shed from eastern slopes comm and today I'm here to show you how to lube your bicycle chain with paraffin very few people know that actually paraffin is one of the best bike chain lubricants you can get it is higher efficiency it actually provides less friction than most of the expensive bike lubes you can get and it lasts a whole lot longer the problem is to pain-in-the-neck to apply because you have to apply it while it's molten and again I'm talking paraffin wax I'm talking good old the stuff you buy it at Shaw's Hannaford wherever your local grocery store is you make candles with it use it for canning whatever and the real key to doing this is to have something to melt the wax in that's easy to work with and I picked up a little mini crock pot at Goodwill and I don't think I've ever been in a Goodwill store that didn't have at least one of these because everybody ends up with them and can figure out do with them but they're perfect for this use so what you want to do is get your chain off your bike and get it clean however you want to do that whatever degree through you want to use whatever method is fine make sure that it has plenty of time to dry you don't want to put it into the paraffin with solvent still on it and then you take your milk and paraffin and this is really difficult watch carefully you Christian it yep that was it literally it's as simple as that and what will happen is you let that sit in there and you'll actually see bubbles if you look down in for a little bit of a period of time and that's the air coming out because what you're trying to do with a paraffin is a bike chain is plates with rollers sandwiched between them and you want that paraffin to get into the space between the roller and the pin that comes through and lube that space and that'll do a couple things for you obviously the loop gets in there it stays in there it's very durable it also keeps other stuff from getting in there contaminants they get in there that are going to damage the rollers and where your chain out faster so you've got sort of a double double advantage from doing that and basically what I've done now is just and I'm going to do this a little bit faster I would normally let this sit a little bit longer I don't know that I need to but on principle I tend to do that and then you need to have someplace to hang the chain up let it drip as it dries and I have and I'll show it to you once I've hung it up here a little just a little it's like this a little a little pick set that you can get you can pick them up at Home Depot or wherever and a little right angle picks are really handy for working with things like this because you can reach in you can grab the chain through one of the gaps and lift it up and out and let as much of it drain off as reasonably make sense and when I hold onto it forever because it's pain in the neck and then you just lift it up and you stick it onto your whatever you're choosing and you use these things but you could just easily have a stick of some sort that the the chain can hang over and dangle and you can see what I've got is the this is that little pick and I just have it clamped to on a shelf here and I have a piece of cardboard underneath that catches the gripping so I don't mess up my bench too much and then you just let it dry now one thing that you might want to consider doing while you're waiting for it to dry is metal is micro porous even though metal is fairly smooth you put a microscope on it you'll see gaps and pits and things like that so one thing that's really good to do at the same time is take your cassette and clean your cassette in advance so that again it's ready just like you do with your chain and then take a brush and I use this is a what's called a chip brush you go to any painting store and they're probably a dollar a give or take looks an awful lot like a basting brush you might use in your kitchen I promise you we never use the same brush for basting that we do for working with the paraffin but I can honestly say I have use these for basting and just what you want to do is you take your cassette that's nice and clean and you paint on all through it the paraffin and that dries on then when you run your chain over it and that will basically sort of beat the pair from the paraffin will have melted into those little gaps and it'll beat the paraffin and more and it'll help keep your cassette cleaner longer which especially where since as it happens to be right now we're coming up on winter riding which is filthy and nasty makes a whole lot easier to clean your your cassette and keep everything working afterwards and you just dip your dip your brush into the paraffin and literally it's that easy just brush it on nice and goopy and I said you don't have to clean it off that's one of the wonders of this is that just as soon as you put the chain on you start running the chain it's going to be a little ratchety at first because of all this gunk that's in the way the chain itself when it finishes drawing will have will have gunk in it you all which all the paraffin when you've put it on it'll be stiff it'll be difficult to work but then once you get on the bike and you spin it a few times the paraffin to come off and then you'll have we typically find that my chain lube lasts for depending on the weather circumstances often a month more than a month you can tell when it's starting to come out you'll start hearing the chain being noisy your chain will be very very quiet with paraffin typically if you have a reasonably good chain line and have your drillers aligned correctly but just taking it and putting the paraffin on will be smooth and slick and it's wonderful it's very you know dude it feels it feels very professional and then when it starts to get a little ratchet little noisy you'll know that it's time potentially to either use another lubricant for a while and just add someone if you're lazy or take the thing off clean it loop it again obviously every time you take it off check the chain get a chain checker that determines whether the wear is appropriate or not because you if it's if it gets to be too much wear you don't want to put it back on your bike because it will damage your cassette and that's the last thing you want to do because those things are a whole lot more expensive than chains so that's the process this thing is already about starting to dry it starting to strike feel it starting to stiffen up a little bit these links don't move easily and that means that it's almost ready to use so another 10 or 15 minutes I can put this back on my bike spin it around take it out for a ride and I'm good to go for a month or more it's that easy so again the big key to the whole thing is clean chain and something to melt and keep the wax molten in you can't put it in a pan and melt it and then bring it out and it's hardening at the same time a crock-pot mini crock-pot is in my experience the best way to do it so that's it hope you take this tip and I hope you can use it it will make your bicycling easier and it actually the facts are because it's a more efficient lubricant it'll actually make you a little bit faster so hey free speed can't complain yeah this is David Shen from eastern slopes calm and we'll see you out there