Knowing how to lubricate your bike chain will keep your bike running smoothly, help prevent parts from rusting and extend the life of your chain and cassette.
Luckily, it’s also one of the easiest bike-maintenance jobs, requiring only a bottle of chain lube, a chain cleaner and a cloth.
In this guide, we explain the best way to lube a bike chain before answering a few key questions about the process.
How to lube a bike chain
1. Clean your chain
Make sure your chain is clean before you apply the lubricant. Applying lube over grit and dirt can lead to premature wear.
To clean your chain, apply a degreaser before agitating any dirt and grime with a brush or rag.
Wait for the degreaser to work away at the dirt before wiping it away with a cloth.
If your chain is especially dirty, you could use a chain cleaning tool and some wet degreaser. This is usually the most effective cleaning method, but it's more time-consuming because the chain needs to be rinsed and dried before it can be re-lubricated.
2. Apply the lube
Once your chain is nice and clean, open your lube and begin to back-pedal your bike, either in a workstand or on a level piece of ground.
Apply the lube to the lowest part of the chain, where it exits the rear derailleur and heads toward the chainring. This minimises the chances of accidentally getting lube where you don't want it – such as on your disc brake rotors.
Keep dripping on the lube and back-pedalling at a constant speed to ensure an even coverage.
3. Wipe away excess chain lube
Excess lube doesn’t benefit the drivetrain, attracts dirt and can even be transferred to the braking surfaces, so you need to get rid of it.
Use a microfibre cloth or a clean rag to wipe the excess from the chain, being careful to keep your fingers clear of the cogs during this step.
How often should I lube my chain?
How often you need to lube your chain is a contentious issue, but repeating these steps every 100 miles of road riding in fine weather should be adequate.
If you’re a mountain biker, or you ride in poor conditions, it could be wise to follow these steps more frequently, paying particular attention to the cleaning and degreasing of your precious chain to maximise the longevity of your drivetrain.
What should I lube my bicycle chain with?
Make sure you use a dedicated bike chain lube. Unlike penetrating or generic lubricants, these lubes are optimised specifically for bicycle chains.
You have probably heard of 'dry' and 'wet' lubricants. Dry lubes are designed to work best in dry conditions and wet chain lube is intended to give you optimal performance in wet conditions.
Broadly speaking, wet lubes are thicker and designed to be more difficult to disperse when facing water and spray. Dry lubes are easier to wash off but are thinner, offering the lowest possible friction.
There are all-condition lubes designed to combine the properties of both, but naturally they are a compromise.
It’s also possible to wax chains. This is a more labour-intensive process, but some cyclists favour it because of the purported performance benefits. It’s not a process we’d recommend for everyday cycling.
We’d also recommend avoiding sprays. The way modern bicycles are designed, it's very difficult to avoid contaminating the braking surfaces when lubricating the chain, and spray-application lubes are too risky.
How to lube electric bike chains
If you have an electric bike, the chain won’t move when you try to back-pedal. This can make lubing the chain harder.
To get around this issue, we’d recommend putting your ebike in a workstand and rotating the wheel anti-clockwise to get the chain moving.
If you don’t have an easy way to get your ebike off the ground, you could use this nifty ebike drivetrain crank tool from Muc-Off. This temporarily locks your spider to your cranks so you can spin the drivetrain backwards just by turning the pedals backwards, as with a non-assisted bike.
