I add a little oil with my chain oiler at the beginning and end of each ride. Thats it.

Take the advice your mother gave when you were nine: "If you keep playing with it, it'll drop off".

Andy

Anyway , Andy, back to chains !!
I oil my chain through a syringe and tube that is fixed near front sprocket and
i use old engine oil and i never let my chain run dry !
33,000 miles on a crf1000 and the chain was as good as new !
K

In the old days:

I removed my chain and boiled it grease.

Nowadays:

The important lubricatation is inside O-rings. No need to mess with that.
Clean some time and and some oil. Just for the other surface.
But very seldom.....
No need


BTW; Drive a Moto Guzzi and you do no even have to think about such things

When you have a metal to metal contact , you need some sort of lubrication.
Oil on your chain will do 3 things !
1.. it makes the bike run so much quieter
2 ..it adds many more miles to the life of your chain
3.. also it will give you more POWER as the friction is less

try riding say a 250 with a dry chain.... then oil it .... you will be amazed !

If you want more power try changing your o ring chain for one with no rings. That'll do far more than waving an oily rag at your existing one. It won't last but then no one said power was cheap. I changed no ring chain for a 'modern' one on an old 500cc Kawasaki many years ago and was amazed at how much slower it was. Slower to the point that I went back to the original chain. Bike engine power has had to increase just to compensate for whats lost in turning all those O rings.

In a sensible world we'd all ride bikes that had chains protected from the elements but for as far back as my biking memory goes (and probably much further than that) exposed chain = sporty and enclosed chain = boring old plodder. That's because sports bikes used to lead the market and they took their styling cues from the race track. So we drag our worn out chains across the savanna somewhere because Rossi et al chuck their free chains away every 50 miles and everyone wants to copy that. And we end up with some kind of arms race to try and make a 50 mile chain last 20,000+ without visibly protecting it. It's kind of ironic really that a lot of modern bikes have exposed chains hidden behind stuff like exhausts / suspension / luggage etc to the point where you can't see them anyway, but rain and grit can still get in to wear them out. It really is the worst of all worlds.

How much power does using an O-ring cost you over a regular unsealed chain..? I Googled this, and although I couldn't find much in the way of cold hard numbers, I did find someone who dynoed a Honda TRX 450R quad both with regular and O-ring. The loss in HP (out of about 40 total) was around 2. A 5% loss in horsepower, but you gain less maintenance and hassle. That seems like a very reasonable tradeoff to me.

__________________
Bruce Clarke - 2020 Yamaha XV250

I think it depends on use. My 160kg, 35HP (more like 25 now) 1973 CL350 is way more fun than my 200 kg, 46 HP CB500X. The comparable 20HP, bunged up with emissions controls, lardy with ABS pump modern 350 wouldn't compare, but an extra 1 HP is going the right way and is cheaper than say a 1% weight reduction by dumping an overkill silencer. I mostly ride them once or twice a week so whipping off a chain to be boiled in blubber once a month would be no great hardship.

I might think differently if I had the chance to go up the desert for a month like I used to.

Totally agree with the race fashion comments. Wait until someone sees the clip link on the CB500X's chain that everyone knows will snap 7000 miles ago and take off my leg aand at least three ********s

Andy

Well you can't argue with the dyno. I've read somewhere though that the seat of the pants dyno can't feel much less than an 8% change so if I could tell the difference it was probably more than that. No proof or numbers though; it was just one of those things I noticed to the point where I did something about it. Isn't the rough rule of thumb that engines lose about 20% of their power between the crank and the road. I wonder how much of that vanishes in the chain - rings or no rings.

I agree if you have to have a chain, all other things being equal one that doesn't wear out would be preferable. I still remember from years ago getting back home after a 4000 mile dry trip with the brand new no-ring OE chain virtually dragging on the ground. You'd never be able to sell a bike with a chain like that now.

Sealed chains don't need a lot of external lube. It's not like ye olde days when you slathered it on the outside hoping some would maybe make its way into the rollers. If I'm giving the bike its annual clean I might wipe the side plates, otherwise I'll give it a squirt of spray lube every 500 miles or so to stop it rusting. Seems to do the trick, my 790 chain is still perfectly adjusted after 12,000 miles on and off road.

The power lost in an O ring chain is going to be relatively constant regardless of engine capacity, so 2bhp in 95 is a great deal less significant. It also ignores the friction losses in a worn-out unsealed chain running without lubricant.

I used to run unsealed chains on my son's MX bike, because you need to give those a good wash every meeting and you'd ruin an o-ring one. They lasted well, and unlike some I'd only need one new chain per year. But I made the mistake of running one on my green lane bike and it destroyed the chain in just one ride, because it lost all the grease and was running dry. So now I run sealed chains.

I don't know the answer to the HP loss question, but I find it impossible to believe that a manufacturer would fit any consumerable that would make their bike slower. Especially in the cut throat race for power stats. They spend millions eeking another 5hp out of their bikes. And they give zero shots how long your chain lasts.

__________________
Did some trips.
Rode some bikes.
Fix them for a living.
Can't say anymore.

We switched the Tango from the original chinese unsealed chain to a DID VX "X-ring" chain, that bike has a whopping 9hp and there hasn't been any noticeable drop in performance ... however the bike feels much much smoother to ride!

__________________
FreeBSD fan since before it was cool ...

I'm surprised it was that much, though bear in mind the lost power to o-ring friction will be fairly constant irrespective of engine power/size. On a bigger bike it won't be noticeable, and in any case more recent X-ring chains supposedly reduce friction even further. To me the case for longevity of a sealed chain is a no-brainer, and in this case external lube doesn't do much beyond stopping it rusting and making sure the seals have some form of lubricant on both sides.