Campagnolo chain wear

"Neal" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

I have 4900 miles on a C10 Campy chain and when I check for wear using a
straight edge, it shows 12 1/32 inches. When I check it with a Park chain
gauge, it shows that the chain is still good. Should I go ahead and

replace the

Quoted message said:

chain since Campagnolo states a chain life of 3000 - 5000 miles or keep

riding?

Quoted message said:

The chain has been lubricated every 100 miles with Prolink.

Neal

Buy a new one (you have to eventually anyway), take off the old one. Hang
both on a nail and compare them. If the old is 4 mm longer put on the new
one. If not put back the old one. It is that simple.

Lou

My squinty eyes are getting squintier year by year. Using a metal ruler
to measure chain wear is not reliable for me. I've wondered if chains
wear at a constant rate throughout it's useful life or does the wear
rate accelerate ever higher at a given point.

Kenny said:

My squinty eyes are getting squintier year by year. Using a metal ruler
to measure chain wear is not reliable for me. I've wondered if chains
wear at a constant rate throughout it's useful life or does the wear
rate accelerate ever higher at a given point.

Riding with the chain dirty and gritty will accelerate wear. Riding
with a properly cleaned chain will slow wear. E.g. the chain on my
infrequently-cleaned rain bike wears much faster than the often-cleaned
"sunny days" bike.

So if the amount of grit in your chain varies, it's rate of wear will
vary as well. A clean chain that would otherwise have lasted, say, 4000
miles could go downhill fast if ridden uncleaned a lot after a gritty,
rainy ride.

Probably need to get it pretty filthy to get it to wear truly rapidly,
though.

Mark

Lou Holtman said:

Buy a new one (you have to eventually anyway), take off the old one. Hang
both on a nail and compare them. If the old is 4 mm longer put on the new
one. If not put back the old one. It is that simple.

Your elongation number of 4 mm: does that apply to 12 links of chain or
the whole thing? If you intend that to apply to the whole chain, then
it's not a general number that you can apply to all bikes as cassettes,
cranks, and length of chainstays (the factors that determine chain
lengths) vary so much.

--
Paul M. Hobson
Georgia Institute of Technology
..:change the f to ph to reply:.

Neal said:

I have 4900 miles on a C10 Campy chain and when I check for wear using a
straight edge, it shows 12 1/32 inches. When I check it with a Park chain
gauge, it shows that the chain is still good. Should I go ahead and replace the
chain since Campagnolo states a chain life of 3000 - 5000 miles or keep riding?
The chain has been lubricated every 100 miles with Prolink.

Neal

In spite of some whining about Campag chain cost or longevity...they
are really nice items. Like engine oil, they are 'disposable', and you
should replace before they wreck anything.
I would go ahead and change it at 5000 miles..use a Veloce replacement.

Paul Hobson said:

Your elongation number of 4 mm: does that apply to 12 links of chain or
the whole thing? If you intend that to apply to the whole chain, then
it's not a general number that you can apply to all bikes as cassettes,
cranks, and length of chainstays (the factors that determine chain
lengths) vary so much.

Not *that* much. Pretty much all regular upright bike chains are between
104 and 116 links.

Jasper

Mark Janeba said:

Kenny said:

My squinty eyes are getting squintier year by year. Using a metal
ruler to measure chain wear is not reliable for me. I've wondered if
chains wear at a constant rate throughout it's useful life or does
the wear rate accelerate ever higher at a given point.

Riding with the chain dirty and gritty will accelerate wear. Riding
with a properly cleaned chain will slow wear. E.g. the chain on my
infrequently-cleaned rain bike wears much faster than the
often-cleaned "sunny days" bike.

Somebody posted a link to a website showing that lube doesn't significantly
affect chain life. Does anyone have that?

--
Phil

Squid-in-Training said:

Mark Janeba said:

Kenny said:

My squinty eyes are getting squintier year by year. Using a metal
ruler to measure chain wear is not reliable for me. I've wondered if
chains wear at a constant rate throughout it's useful life or does
the wear rate accelerate ever higher at a given point.

Riding with the chain dirty and gritty will accelerate wear. Riding
with a properly cleaned chain will slow wear. E.g. the chain on my
infrequently-cleaned rain bike wears much faster than the
often-cleaned "sunny days" bike.

Somebody posted a link to a website showing that lube doesn't significantly
affect chain life. Does anyone have that?

Dear Phil,

You may be mis-remembering Professor Spicer's tests at Johns Hopkins:

http://www.ihpva.org/HParchive/PDF/hp50-2000.pdf

Spicer didn't test for chain wear.

He tested for transmission efficiency and found to his surprise that
the same chain transmitted power almost as efficiently when dry and
bare as it did with the three kinds of lubricants that he tested.

The chief purpose of the lubricant, he suggested, was simply filling
the minute crevices in the chain and keeping road dust out.

This means that there isn't any friction that ordinary lubrication was
going to reduce and magically increase transmission efficiency.

In short, the squeaking of a dry chain is awful, but very little power
is required to emit a squeak.

In real life, a no-lube chain would presumably wear much faster than a
chain with any kind of lubricant because more road dust could get into
the unfilled crevices of the dry chain.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel