A clean and well oiled chain is a joy –
silent and smooth running, along with easy shifting of gears. I'm a
bit of a chain oiling obsessive, usually putting far too much on, too
often, and so ending up with a manky, gooey paste as dirt sticks to
it, sort of defeating the object of the lube in the first place. So
you'd think I'd welcome the idea of an automatic chain oiler, an item
that works very well on motorcycles.
Well no. Just how hard is it to oil
your own chain, really? Judging by the state of some drive chains you
see out and about, usually on some poor old commuting rattler, it is
nigh on impossible, but the sort of person that neglects their bike
to such a degree is hardly the sort to shell out a load of Lizzies
and fiddle and fanny about fitting fancy bottles of oil and hi tech
jockey wheels to their bike.
There seem to be at least two types on
the go, one using a soft plastic bladder and a bottle of oil that
requires the pilot to squeeze the bladder periodically while riding
to push oil out onto the chain. The other uses a pair of AA batteries
in a downtube mounted device that does it all for you, although you
do have to programme it to tell it how often you want your chain
squirting. So you have bottles and bladders, pipes and tubing, and
oil nozzles to aim at the chain, or even a whole new jockey wheel to
install. What a load of faff that lot will be! Bike frames already
have plenty of cables, hoses, bottle cages, bags, pumps, and
batteries hanging off them, who wants to go plumbing in a load more
guff?
No no no no! Just buy some oil and put
some on the chain every now and again, it takes just a couple
seconds. You don't even have to use shop bought bike oil, old engine
oil is better than no oil at all for instance. These things surely
are a case of desperately making something to sell, regardless of
whether the resulting product has any real merit.
If one of these devices turns up in my
stocking one Christmas, there will be the most dramatic and bloody
murder in Lapland of a popular bearded seasonal character, and his
merry elves, the world has ever seen.
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