Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Topic started by: halhorner on 26 October, 2019, 11:33:17 am
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Hi, maybe a daft question... If I were to buy a second 'spare' chain to swap over whilst the other was soaking the other would that be bad for my cassette? Cheers
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Not at all, it is very common for people to have multiple chains as others soak or hang up. Especially among people who wax their chains by hand.
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It's only bad (and not so much for the cassette as for the other chain) if you don't swap them early/frequently enough.
If you put a new chain on a worn cassette the chain will quickly wear to match the cassette.
If you put a new chain on a really worn cassette the chain will skip.
But if you swap frequently and before there's too much initial wear then you'll get better life out of all of it combined.
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it is best if you keep the chains 'in step' with one another, which means rotating them fairly often, depending on how fast you wear chains and how many chains there are in rotation (three or four isn't uncommon).
If they get out of step then you can end up with a virtually unworn chain trying to work on more worn sprockets; this can make for skipping. It is unlikely that you will end up with a worn chain on newer sprockets this way (except in virtually unused gears) but if you do it will usually run OK A bit noisy perhaps) but the wear rate will be much higher than normal.
cheers