The shop vet said never use WD-40 on chains and I argued for years

Honestly, I thought my coworker Dave was just being old school when he told me to ditch WD-40 for chain lube back in 2019. I kept using it on my own bike and customers' bikes because it was cheap and seemed to work fine. After about 6 months, I noticed chains were wearing out faster and getting noisy around 400 miles. Dave showed me the inside of a chain he cut open and it was basically dry sludge. Ngl, I switched to a proper wet lube after that and chains last me at least 800 miles now. Has anyone else had a similar wake-up call about something you thought was fine?

3 comments

3 Comments

rubysingh8d ago

300 miles on a chain before it gets noisy? I think you might be expecting more miles than normal for wet lube especially if you ride in rain or dust. I run a similar setup and I'm lucky to get 600 miles before I need to relube, and that's with regular cleaning. Chains just wear out faster than we want to admit, even with the good stuff.

jamesf413d ago

Huh, do you think maybe the issue is less about the lube and more about how often we actually check our chains? I used to have this old commuter bike and I swear I'd ride it through rain, mud, whatever, and the chain would just keep going until it literally snapped one day on a hill. I think I got like 2,000 miles out of it with almost no maintenance, just throwing some 3-in-1 oil on it whenever I remembered. That was pure luck though because now I'm all paranoid about chain noise and I'm constantly wiping and relubing every 200 miles or so. So I guess my point is maybe some of us are just used to different levels of neglect and others are hyper-careful, and that skews what we think is normal mileage.

emery_flores8d ago

I dunno man, are you really losing sleep over a couple hundred extra miles on a chain?