Silca incorporates graphene into new chain wax, saves half a watt

Silca has recently released three new products: Two new ways to inflate your tyres, one of which is aimed squarely at the gravel sector, and a new, even faster wax treatment for your chain. 

The tyre inflators consist of a new track pump, the Terra, which has a non-linear dial to allow more precision at lower pressures and an update to the original Eolo CO2 inflator head that featured in our list of the best CO2 inflators. The Eolo IV now features a valve dial to allow you to better control the flow of gas.

For fans of ultra-slippery chains, Silca now has an even faster hot wax treatment, the Hot Wax X. It's taken its already very fast Secret Chain Blend wax and added Nanene, a proprietary graphene product,  into the mix for additional wattage savings and extended chain life. 

Nanene for your chain 

Unless you’re blessed with your own mechanic, an ultrasonic cleaner, or deep enough pockets to buy pre-treated chains, you probably haven’t dabbled in the nerdy world of waxed chains yet. 

For those of you who do like to submerge your drivetrains in the hot stuff though, Silca has a new, even faster wax option, along with a new gravel-specific track pump, to offer the discerning customer. 

The headline-grabbing news from Silca here is the launch of Hot Wax X, an all-new Nanene-infused chain wax, which claims to be both faster and more durable than the Secret Blend on which it's based. 

Graphene is fast becoming one of the most zeitgeisty materials in the bike industry, with brands popping it into everything from frames to extremely expensive brake pads. In its basic form, Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms, but according to Silca, a single layer isn’t particularly useful. In the form of Nanene, an extremely pure, few-layer thick form of Graphene produced by a patented process, the American brand believes it’s a little more useful, specifically in this case for your bike chain. 

Adding an amount of Nanene into a hot wax chain melt - based on the already-available Silca Secret Chain Blend - serves to reduce the wattage penalty of your drivetrain by 0.5 watts vs the Secret Blend, Silca claims, or up to 12 watts over what we assume are basic chain lubes. It also promises to increase the application interval - how far you can ride before you need to wax your chain again - to 800km, as well as an impressive total chain lifespan of up to 30,000km.

Details on how the Nanene aids the performance are thin on the ground, but based on what we’ve gleaned in the past from the absoluteBLACK graphene brake pads, where graphene is added as a friction modifier in place of copper, we speculate that the Nanene has some additional lubrication properties, as well as the ability to infill micro-pores in the metal surface of the chain, as the pads claim to do with brake rotors.

Hot Wax X is priced at $165 for a 300g tin of solid wax. For comparison, the Super Secret wax it replaces is priced at $40 for a 500g bag of wax pellets. 

A gravel specific track pump

Elsewhere at Silca today, is an all-new gravel-specific pump called the Terra, as well as an update to the Eolo CO2 inflator. Long-time fans of Silca may recognise the Terra name; while the company initially brought a high-volume, low-pressure pump to market in the '80s, it's only now, with the gravel boom, that it has re-explored the concept and reignited the name.

We have recently concluded our roundup of all the best bike pumps, in which we kept things pretty middle of the road on the track pump front covering options that will do both road and fatter tyres. If however you’re after something more specialist, specifically for fatter tyres, then the new Silca Terra track pump might be an option. 

The Terra floor pump has a unique, non-linear gauge, where half the dial face comprises 0-30psi, and the other half goes all the way to 120psi. This way, at lower pressures where precision is even more critical, you get 0.5psi increments to play with, and then larger increments at the higher end of the scale. 

Naturally, being a Silca product, the construction is premium; a wooden handle, and an all-metal chuck with a reversible head finish off a package that’s coloured more like a vintage Toyota Land Cruiser than a track pump. Gravel-specific colouring, perhaps?

Pricing for both the Terra and Eolo is to be confirmed.