The Chain its Function on a Bicycle

Video Transcript

"Charles McMahon for Expert Village. We are talking about the bicycle. If you want further information on this you can look at my college level text book, you can see that described on merionmedia.com. Okay, we are talking here about wear resistant materials in cases where one material rubs past another, so we want to talk here about the chain. Now the chain obviously if you look at this there are rollers and then there are these connectors here and little pins that hold the whole thing together. The chain is obviously moving past the chain wheel and past these cogs, so the chain has to be wear resistant and so these little parts here, they are all made out of hardened steel. They do not have to be alloy steels, because the parts are so thin, so that you can make them out of just carbon steel with enough carbon in it and when you quench them, you can quench them fast enough to harden them, because they are so small. So you do not need alloy steel in the chain. A chain of course should be clean and lubricated. When you lubricate it you do not use oil or grease, you use a dry lubricant like graphite for example and that does not collect dirt. But periodically you should take your chain off and clean it, may be to get a little container gasoline and swish it around on the gasoline to get all the dirt out of there and you can feel 10 years younger if you have a dirty chain and you take it out and clean it and put it back on, the pedaling effort will be so much less, because you have less friction, because you cleaned out the dirt. "