Manufacturers and brands often claim wattage savings but rarely put them in context, such as at what speed and power the savings are calculated at. For a cyclist on a budget I feel the biggest number that matters is the £/watts ratio. Cyclists often spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on equipment that will save them very little watts, but ignore or mock wattage gains that cost very little. To go faster for the same amount of power you can improve your aerodynamics, your rolling resistance, your weight or your drivetrain efficiency. These are the variables within your control. My aim here is to try to put wattage gains in to context and normalise them with the £/w ratio. The...
Waxed chains were pioneered by Jason Smith of Friction Facts, an American company performing research and testing in to lubrication, chains, bearings and all other drive-train paraphernalia. Jason found that current lubricants just weren't up to scratch, with some lubricants being up to 6w worse than his optimum paraffin wax recipe at a 250w power output. These results were published by VeloNews in their February 2014 VeloLab test, available here Jason's own process involves running in a chain, cleaning it in a ultrasonic bath and then waxing it with a special mix of paraffin wax, PTFE and MoS2.Jason was selling his own optimised chains under the Ultra Fast Optimisation (UFO) brand until 2015 where he was bought out by CeramicSpeed....
