Silca says you don’t need to fully dry a chain before waxing it.
My experience with waxed chains, waxed with Silca, Molten Speed or Black Diamond, has been to just wipe it off with a microfiber cloth and dunk it in the wax. I have removed all wax from waxed chains of each of the above products and this was my process-
- Boiling water- to fully remove wax, boiling was not sufficient. Even after 6-7 minutes. Hollow pins retained wax and the chain did not feel loose.
- Ultra sonic heated at 75C for 1 hour in water- same results as 1 above.
- Ultra sonic heated with Ceramic Speed degreaser- the older type, 80% clean, best guess. The degreaser seemed to have emulsified or absorbed the wax, it had a jelly like consistency afterwords.
- Any method above and then soaked in turps for an hour or so - required at least 2 soaks in clean turps and the 2 soaks in denatured alcohol - 100% clean, so all of the additional processes really only removed 1 turps soaking from the “new chain process” of degreasing a new chain.
- Silca chain stripper on waxed chain - no real effect. Works on new chain, however, but it’s pretty expensive vs a jug of turps, which seam to clean “cleaner” in my opinion.
- Possibly heating the chain elevated over aluminium foil in an oven at 350 F would work, but my wife was home, I’m pretty sure the wax would smoulder.
I only redunk in hot wax now, since I noticed no performance or longevity from stripping down a waxed chain prior to rewax. I do have 4 bikes between my son and I and we ride about 3-4000 miles a year and race mtb. So lots of maintenance on my behalf, I don’t use a shop, I’ll just buy the tools.
Yes, it was cold and rainy and I had nothing else to do over the winter.
Happy Trails and just dunk it!
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I think I’ve seen maybe at Escape discord channel that if the wax isn’t too hot to boil water you start contaminating and leaving water in the wax as you rewax washed chains, but maybe isn’t that big of a deal