Green Oil Chain Lube

Chain lubes are boring, and if you spend time reading articles about chain lube efficiency, you should reevaluate the way you spend your time.  Here's what you need to know:  

Most chain lubes use teflon (PTFE) which is evil.  It's the last thing you want in the environment, but everytime you ride your bike in the rain or in the wet or thru a stream, it's gunna end up in the water supply.  That's bad.  Green Oil is made from plants, and is the ONLY legitimately biodegradable lube out there.  Other lubes use biodegradable elements, but only have to be 60% biodegradable to say they're biodegradable.  That's like saying a hamburger is organic beef, but 40% of the burger is made from factory farmed D grade beef.  Also, some lubes will just skip the certification all together and write bio lube, which is literally meaningless, but implies a respect for the environment.  

Green Oil wet lube works like any wet chain lube, lasts 75 to 120 miles depending on conditions, and is fine down to 12 degrees.  Below that, you need a thinner lube to not gum up.  

Lubing a chain is easy:  run the chain backward in the smallest rear cog and biggest front cog.  Dribble lube on the chain until it's saturated enough to drip a bit. Wipe off all the lube you can with a rag, rotating the rag and clasping the chain loosely while pedaling backward.  When the chain is almost dry, ie when you flip to a new bit of rag and barely any oil comes off, you are good to go.

If you need to clean your chain, and want to do it in the most eco friendly way possible, take your chain off, get an old water bottle and an old spoke.  Then put the chain in the bottle with Green Oil's degreaser.  Shake it up.  You can even leave it overnight if you want.  Put the old spoke in the bottle and fish the chain out.  Dump it in another old water bottle filled with water.  Shake it up hard, for at least 30 seconds.  Pull the chain out, drip dry for an hour, or hit it with a hair dryer.  Now it's clean and dry, inside and out.  Reinstall, wet lube it up.  

The less eco friendly way to clean it is much faster, and there's no teflon, so you don't have to feel super bad about it.  Use Prolink as your chain cleaner.  You don't take the chain off.  Just lube with prolink heavily, wipe off all the prolink, let it sit for 10 minutes, then lube with green oil as stated above.  Much faster, but obviously not as through.