Green Oil White Super Dry Chain Wax

I feel slightly guilty for criticising Green Oil. I rated their basic lube, and they have so far managed to combine impeccable eco-credentials with products that actually work - and work well. However, their latest offering, White Super Dry Chain Wax, is far from impressive.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of this type of lube. It gives you a chain that runs very clean and is easy to wash, but unless you ride track or have a fair weather TT bike it generally wears off too easily to be useful.

As is the way of these things, applying the lube is a tricky process. It's very thin, basically a beeswax lube in a plant-based ethanol carrier. In theory, the ethanol washes over your chain, leaving the wax behind. In practice, what usually happens is that you end up squirting the stuff over chain, chainstays, wheels, cranks and floor. I got around this by holding a pad of kitchen roll under the chain as the lube went on. It's still wasteful but at least you don't get the stuff everywhere. It dries out quite quickly - Green Oil recommend leaving it at least seven minutes in cold weather - leaving a whitish residue over the chain.

At first I put it on a brand new chain, fresh from its very first clean. For over 200 miles it ran quiet and smooth. I was impressed. Had I written this review straight away I'd have been saying lots of nice things. Sadly, the chain was attached to the Dawes Century SE that I was testing (great bike: go and buy one) so it had to go back before I could give the White Super Dry Chain Wax a more vigorous thrashing.

So, after a thorough cleaning, I stuck it on my daily workhorse. Did I get 200 miles? No. I got two commutes, which is barely 30. I applied a fresh load, reasoning that the previous chain must have had remnants of factory grease left in the rollers, a luxury that my workhorse bike's chain certainly doesn't have. Again, I got around 30 miles. Thirty (dry) miles is a pitiful performance by anyone's standards. The next load I applied didn't even get me to work before it wore off. I was hoping that repeated applications would eventually build up within the rollers, but this didn't happen. Eventually I gave up, having used almost the whole bottle.

It's possible we had a faulty sample, with too much ethanol carrier and not enough actual lube. It's equally possible that this is just ineffective. Sorry, Green Oil chaps, but this is by far the worst lube I've ever used. One to avoid.

Verdict

Green Oil usually make a good lube. This chain wax is absolutely useless