Toothpaste and chain waxing

 Toothpaste ran out last night. Opened new tube this morning. Squeezed. Nothing but air came out.  Squeezed again.  More air. Squeezed the bottom inch and eventually - behold! - some toothpaste emerged.

Thought for a moment. How come?  Extracted old tube from bathroom bin. Examined carefully. Old tube stated "Net 120gm".  New tube stated "Net 90gm."

How GlaxoSmitheKline saves itself 25%, the sneaky tricksters

Thus is inflation disguised from the inattentive purchaser, since the two tubes are the same length and almost the same diameter.

In happier news, I found a motorcar wheel hubcap at the side of the road and being an invertebrate (sic.) collector of junk - like a hermit crab -  gathered it up and repurposed it as a chain waxer. 

Domed hub cap, nice for swilling around

The advantage over the saucepan I previously used is that it's like a miniature wok and you can swill the chain around, and therefore don't need to use as much wax. - For those who aren't avid chain-waxers, the technique is to bend a spoke to hook through one of the links so you don't scald any fingers. You melt ordinary paraffin candle-wax in the pan and deep-fry the chain for a moment.  Hoiking the chain out of a normal saucepan is awkward, the sides of the pan being vertical and the volume of wax being large and a coiled up 120-inch recumbent's bicycle chain being mostly two-dimensional and irritatingly flappy.  The newly-fried chain is dumped onto a piece of hardboard from which the excess wax will later be scraped back into the pan for the next time, and then the chain is stretched out onto the shed floor so when it cools it is long and straight and stiff, rather like any other long and straight and stiff item that may spring involuntarily to mind. This stiffness makes it easier to thread through the rear mech's idler wheels and the plastic tubes we all use on to corral long recumbent-chains.

The advantage of chain waxing was again brought home to me the other day when I adjusted the Rain Bike's chain, which is the only chain I oil rather than wax. The Rain Bike is a hack bike - old and largely unmaintained - I have written of it elsewhere on this blog.  Despite a low mileage it had stretched by an eighth of an inch over twelve inches.  Road dust sticks to an oiled chain the oil conducts it inside the links  where it acts as an abrasive. Wax doesn't flow, nor does road dust stick to it. My other bikes have far higher mileages and still no chain wear. Ye of little faith who aren't yet converts to chain-waxing need to be a mustard seed. Or something.