A somewhat more comprehensive chain lube job
When I came home from riding the Three Capes R300 yesterday, my chain was, as I may have mentioned, completely free of the evil taint of lubricating oil (most of which was left besides the Wilson River Highway, but some was soaked into road gunk that was caked onto the cassette.) Now, cleanliness may be next to godliness, but bicycle chains are the exception to the rule, and I wanted to get lubricating oil back into this chain while I pondered what lubricating regime I should use instead.
So I pried the chain off the bicycle, dunked it into degreaser overnight, then wiped it down with a cloth, coiled it up in a shallow pan, and dumped my entire bottle of chain-L over the thing. Then, after eight hours or so, I pulled the chain out, hooked it over a nail in the rafters, put the now-empty bottle underneath it, and have had it sitting there since then as the thick lubricating oil s-l-o-w-l-y creeps down the chain and back into the bottle.
The chain-L oil started out as a sort of pale straw colo(u)r, but the stuff that’s draining back into the bottle is more a dirty black (from the metal dust that’s being pulled out from the inside of the bearings as the excess oil drains?) I’ll need to drop a rare earth magnet into the bottle to try and coax that dust away from the oil I might want to use, but I hope that this will keep the chain oiled for the next thousand miles or so (which is, what, a couple of R400s and a R600? Or perhaps a couple of R200s, a R400, and the local loops I run everyday) of breveting around.