Ok its been a bit since posted anything to, anything – but that’s because it has just been shoulder to the plow, its been a few months of pretty exciting times on the retail front and back orders up the wahzoo as I still struggle to get stock in at the rate that its going out.

What this keeps re-enforcing is that the message re the big, huge, low hanging fruit of watts savings and therefore drive train wear savings is getting out there, hopefully little zfc has had a good hand in the at but also the number of high profile exciting new lubricant releases has also helped drive more cyclists to think about their hardest working, completely exposed component and just how much difference may be had by running a genuine brilliant performing lubricant vs a meh to poor performing lubricant.

So if you have been one of the many recently to make a smart call re your chain and drive train running – well done you and enjoy the big watts and wear savings!

What I find most interesting is just how pervasive completely, well lets call it crap – information persists in forums and comments posts.

Here is an example from are recent lube review of Silca Super Secret done by road.cc – now as far as online lube reviews goes this one is of a MUCH higher standard than normal, and im not just saying that because they said nice things about zfc, I promise ? They actually went through some proper detail.

https://road.cc/content/review/silca-super-secret-chain-lube-277641#comment-form

But at the bottom, one of the commenters posted this;

“Chris Boardman was asked about posh chain lube when commentating on the Worlds and to paraphrase, said it was all bollocks: Chains are apparently so efficient anyway, that any improvement is so minimal as to count for nothing”

Now im not sure if this is true re CB stating this as I didn’t hear the commentary, if it is then CB knows about as much re chains & chain lubes as eddy Merckx did re aero when he went drillium on his hour record attempt bike.

We now have nearly a decades worth of testing starting from Friction Facts through to ZFC showing that the difference between factory grease and top lubes can be as high as 5w straight out of the box – not contaminated, that factory grease is a contamination magnet, and that the real world difference between someone running and maintaining a chain on one of the top lube choices = a real world chain the circa 5w loss mark at 250w, whereas real world chains on factory grease / poor lube choices can easily hit 15w.

As chain efficiency losses are scalable to load, you can nearly double that 10w gap every extra 250w load, so those 500w power climbs or 750w attacks, when you are in the 20 to nearly 30w loss difference gap, that is hardly bollocks.

Every morning I wake to emails of support from around the world wishing they could purchase from ZFC to help support the work and testing being done – and this really does make me very happy that the hard work and time is appreciated.

Even though ZFC is not really set up to ship around the world (wax & chains are heavy and outbound shipping rates from aus due to ginormous continent with low population and commerce are pretty bad) – everyone can help by pitching in where you see wildly off comments re chains & lubes to help correct and direct readers to proper information.

I do this where I can, and whilst im never going to win over the opinion of the person who posted the terribly inaccurate comment – they will inevitably defend & double down – it does help other readers to get more balanced information – I can guarantee there would have been some who read that comment and taken that as fact – and each person who does is one more cyclist ripping through chains and drive train components at a very wasteful rate.

So if ever you wish to help support ZFC, helping with good input to counter way off comments as well as posting comments directing people to proper testing and information on the many terribly inaccurate video’s on you tube etc – trust me that really helps.

Speaking of spreading the word of accurate information, if you do not already, please start listening to Marginal Gains podcast, within a couple of weeks there should be a good feature on the topic of saving drive train watts and wear! After a quarter of million km’s of controlled drive testing, the work of ZFC is growing in profile ?

And again apologies re lack of updates to testing graphs and reviews, I have completed 3 tests that I need to get to updating asap – I will be doing so before the above mentioned podcast so that info is there when people go to look! Its just been big days for months to keep up with everything im running rather behind. But testing is always going on in the back ground – some of its private but some new exciting lube test results will hopefully be up within a week,

Stay tuned, stay low friction, and stay low drivetrain parts wear!! ?