ZFC's test protocol, in plain English.

What the test actually is

ZFC built a custom motorised rig: a bicycle drivetrain runs at a steady 250 watts of power and 100 rpm cadence — realistic riding load, repeatable to the second. Each chain is brand new at the start. The lubricant is applied per the manufacturer's instructions — that's important; ZFC is testing the product as it's actually meant to be used, not stripped to some lab-pristine baseline.

The chain then runs through six 1,000 km blocks (so 6,000 km total per test). Each block introduces a different contamination profile: fine sandy loam (~5 g) for the dry block, water mixed with dirt for the wet block, sustained heavy contamination for the extreme block. Re-lubrication happens at fixed intervals per the manufacturer's instructions — typically every 333 km, or 27 events across the 6,000 km test under the standard protocol.

The crucial design choice: the chain is never cleaned during the protocol.No wipe-downs, no flushes, no degreasing between blocks. Whatever abrasive paste forms from contamination plus lubricant plus chain wear stays put. That's why ZFC's test is as unforgiving as it is — the lubricant has to fight off ongoing degradation, not just a single wet day.

How wear is actually measured

A chain doesn't literally stretch — the steel plates don't get longer. What happens is more subtle: the pins wear thinner and the inner-plate bores wear larger. Cumulative microscopic play between every link adds up, and the chain physically lengthens. That's chain elongation, and it's the standard the cycling industry uses to decide when a chain is finished.

ZFC measures elongation right on the rig (or with the chain briefly removed for a manual reading), at seven or more points along the chain's length. Chains wear unevenly, so single-point measurement misses the real story; multi-point averaging captures it.

The tools that actually work (and the ones that don't)

Most cheap drop-in chain checkers are misleading by design — they push adjacent rollers in oppositedirections, which lets the rollers themselves move on their pins and bundles roller wear in with the pin-and-bore wear you're actually trying to measure. The reading comes out artificially high. Adam Kerin has been clear about this: most checkers in your local bike shop give you a worse signal than no measurement at all.

The two tools ZFC actually trusts:

• Shimano TL-CN42 — laser-cut 3-pin checker that pushes rollers in the samedirection, exactly the way a drivetrain does under load. That isolates pure pin-and-bore elongation. It's a pass/fail tool rather than a digital read-out, but the reading is honest.
• KMC Digital Chain Checker — a digital caliper purpose- built for chains. Slides into the links with hard physical index points and gives absolute elongation readings in millimetres. This is the tool ZFC uses during the lab protocol to gather hard data, rather than just passing or failing a mechanical gauge.
• For SRAM flat-top chains and other oversized-roller designs, ZFC also recommends the Park Tool CC-4 — same same-direction principle as the Shimano.

The numbers themselves are then scaled to the industry replacement threshold:

• 0.5% elongation is the cycling-industry chain-replacement standard — past that, the chain damages cassette and chainring teeth fast.
• ZFC calls 0.5% elongation "100% wear" — i.e. the chain has used up its useful life.
• So a block reading of 0.146 means 14.6% of the way to chain-replacement during that block. A reading of 1.0 means the chain is finished. Anything above 1.0 means the chain wore out faster than the protocol could finish testing it.

That framing is what lets ZFC compare lubricants on real-world economics: how many kilometres can you ride this chain before you're replacing it? Lubes that hold the chain at low percentages across all six blocks save you cassettes, chainrings, and chains.

The six rides, visualised

Each block represents a different style of ride. The wear-by-block charts you see across this site (the small six-bar mini-chart on every lubricant) are reading those six numbers, left to right. Hover any bar for the exact value; the colour walks from green (very low wear) through amber (moderate) to red (failing).

• Block 1 — Clean ride. Fresh application, no contamination yet. Almost every lubricant looks fine here. Block 1 mostly tells you the baseline friction profile of the lube, not its real-world durability.
• Block 2 — Dusty ride. Dry abrasive dust kicked at the chain — the kind of thing you ride through on gravel and dry trails. Differences start showing up here.
• Block 3 — After-dust recovery. Clean conditions following the dusty block. Tests how well the lubricant holds up once the dust stops.
• Block 4 — Wet ride. Water and dust together. This is the most informative block in the whole test — wet contamination is where chain lubricants genuinely separate. If you compare two lubes and only have time to look at one number, this is it.
• Block 5 — After-wet recovery. Clean conditions following the wet block. Tells you how a lubricant copes with drying out.
• Block 6 — Worst-case torture. The most punishing conditions ZFC throws at the chain — heavy contamination, sustained. Mostly relevant if you ride genuinely punishing terrain regularly.

The four numbers that actually matter

ZFC publishes a lot of figures. For most riders, four of them carry almost all the signal:

1. Block 1 wear — the friction baseline. Useful for indoor-trainer riders and time-triallists where every watt counts on a clean chain.
2. Block 4 wear — the wet-conditions number. The biggest spread between products, and the truest test of whether a lubricant earns its place. If you ride outdoors at all, this is the one to weigh.
3. Single Application Longevity (SAL)— how far one application lasts before the chain dries out, in real-world km. Tells you how often you'll be reapplying, which feeds directly into how much hassle a given product creates.
4. Cost-to-run per 6,000 km— the drivetrain economy number. Combines lubricant cost with how much chain wear it's preventing, expressed as AUD spent per 6,000 km of useful drivetrain life. The eye-opener: cheap lubes often work out the most expensive once you factor chain replacement.

Everything else (other blocks, recovery numbers, sub-categories) is context. If you're comparing two lubricants, look at Block 1 and 4 together with SAL and cost — that's 80% of the decision.

Caveats worth knowing

• ±5% test variance. Two runs of the same lube can land ~5% apart. Treat any small difference between products as a tie.
• The Choice Matrix "Tier 1".ZFC publishes a curated short-list separately from the raw block data — products that perform across multiple test dimensions and aren't just edge-case winners. When this site shows a "ZFC Tier 1" chip, that's ZFC's curation, not ours.
• Methodology adjustments are sometimes made.ZFC occasionally varies the protocol for a specific product — most notably extending the rewax interval for additives like Silca's Endurance Chip, which are designed to be used with longer intervals. When that happens, this site flags the product with an * Extended-interval test chip and the chart's bars render as outlines rather than filled. Don't compare their numbers head-to-head with standard-protocol products.
• Wear is a proxy for friction, and it's a strong one. ZFC measures elongation rather than friction directly because it's repeatable to high precision (digital multi-point averaging) and correlates tightly with friction in the field — abrading hardened steel takes real energy. Lubes that protect the chain from wear are the same lubes saving you watts. Wear is what gets measured; friction is the implication.