Snoop PP wrote:just had a quick look on the site, Fibre-Lyte - you mention you dont see the Ceramic type lubricants as suitable - can you please elaborate on the reasons why, as that's the best lube i've used for our conditions over here.
Sorry if that's a somewhat naive question and i dont mean to be disrespectful in questioning why.
Not disrespectful at all, in fact, a good question
. I'll give you my best understanding of why we don't recommend it. A little while ago, a long standing customer of ours used this lubricant on his latest time trial chainring and noticed that it created excessive wear on our chainrings. This is a customer who has used our chainrings for years with a variety of lubricants (including other finish line products) with no problems at all. Our understanding of the way the the ceramic lube works is the reason why it doesn't work with carbon chainrings. For standard alloy chainrings I believe that the nano ceramic particles are supposed to penetrate the surface of the alloy chainring and create a sort of ceramic coating. That's fine with alloy chainrings, but carbon is as hard as ceramic and so instead of the ceramic particles penetrating, it simply wears against the carbon and instead of providing a protective layer it wears the chainring faster.
We did contact Finish Line about the lubricant at the time but I believe that they couldn't come up with a good reason for why it was happening (probably due to lack of experience with carbon chainrings?)
It did also make me wonder what the effects of that lubricant on chainrings with a ceramic hard coating as standard would be such as the Stronglight CT2?
For the record, that is the only lubricant that we know of that isn't great with our chainrings and in fact, our chainrings require very little or no lubricant at all (due to the smooth platelet nature of graphite/carbon). Obviously, the chain still requires lubricant
