Finish Line launched its teflon-infused dry lube, two years before this writer was born, in 1988.
Over the years, the American brand’s lineup has expanded to introduce a full range of bike care products, from wet and ceramic-infused drip-on chain lubes to bike wash, brushes, and degreasers.
The brand’s latest HALO lube is its first foray into the full wax and hot melt arena, with claims of reduced friction and mechanical wear, improved endurance, and water and dirt resistance.
The brand also says it achieves all this without using any PFAS forever chemicals, and the formula is biodegradable.
Finish Line is offering this new lube in three trims — hot wax, drip wax and wet.
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What’s in the stuff?
According to Finish Line, the secret sauce inside this chain lube is non-stick boron nitride ceramic platelets (say that ten times fast!) that are claimed to extend the wear life and how long the lubrication stays slippery, and proprietary spherical tungsten particles. These are said to have a hollow core, maintain their shape under pressure to create a rolling effect, and are small enough to fill metal asperities inside the moving surfaces on the interior of the rollers of your chain to reduce friction.
As with most chain lubes, verifying any of that is basically impossible. Thankfully, third-party testers like Zero Friction Cycling are at least working to root out its performance in the context of wear and friction.
And the initial test results to come out of the ZFCs chain torture testing chamber were less than promising, with the HALO hot wax coming in dead last—performing worse than no lubricant.
As a result, Finish Line published third-party testing results—albeit commissioned by Finish Line—from two independent labs based on the ASTM D4172 and ASTM D2714 protocols used to evaluate how lubrication protected against wear and friction to back its claims.
HOWEVER, a recent re-test by ZFC has yielded entirely different results, and it appears the outlier may have been the result of a batching issue with the early bags of hot wax — though Finish Line is yet to confirm this. The more recent ZFC testing puts it among the best options for chain lube.
Why are we spending so much time on this? Chains, cassettes and chainrings are expensive these days. While you may not be interested in how many watts a particular lube may save you, making the wear parts in your drivetrain last longer is something that should definitely pique your interest. Especially when riding off-road where chains are pretty well being sandblasted, having a good lube that runs clean is paramount to keeping them out of the bin.
Finish Line HALO Hot Melt Wax
Hot melt chain waxing is something that is steadily gaining steam. While it takes a bit of preparation to properly strip your chain of the factory grease and some practice to master the process and not make a huge mess, a waxed chain runs insanely clean, and you can get weeks of riding from it with almost zero attention.
When it does require attention, all you need to fully strip and clean your chain is hot water.
Finish Line includes a nifty chain hook — quite the step up from the bent clothes hanger I was using — and the boil-in-a-bag waxing process is more or less the same as with a crockpot. Once all the wax is melted, pull it away from the heat and leave the chain to marinate.
The directions on the bag recommend leaving the chain in the melted wax for at least three minutes. The goal here is to allow the chain to heat up so that the wax can penetrate all of the little nooks and crannies inside the rollers in your chain.
The longer you can leave it, the better, as the cooler the wax is when you pull the chain out, the fewer drips you’ll have. In a crockpot, the skin forming on top of the wax is the signal to pull the chain, however, because the sous vide bag is cooling from all sides much faster than the ceramic pot in a slower cooker, it’s significantly easier to make a candle out of your chain.
Ask me how I know.
You’ll need to leave the chain for at least 30 minutes to cool, and it will be as stiff as a board. Before you put it back on the bike, you’ll need to articulate each link to break it loose—I use a spare chainring—and it will feel a little arthritic for the first few minutes of your ride as the wax breaks in.
The paraffin used as the base of this wax feels a little bit more oily than Silca Super Secret, but it still runs mega clean, and we’ve had impressive longevity so far in both dry and apocalyptically wet weather.
According to the Finish Line, you should get approximately 25 immersions out of a bag. In dry dusty conditions, we get as much as 250km out of waxed chains before it needs attention. Your mileage may vary based on where you ride, but this bag should last you for quite some time.
Finish Line Halo drip on wax
The Finish Line Halo Wax lube is essentially an emulsified version of the hot wax. It has the same microscopic additives as the hot wax but comes in a more convenient drip form. To get the most out of it, you still need to apply to a chain that has seen the factory grease removed and is clean and dry.
Being a liquid wax lube it’s not something you can apply on your way out the door, it needs time to cure. Finish Line recommends 6-12 hours, so do it the night before you ride.
The beauty of this liquid wax version is that it can be used as top-ups between hot wax treatments, or if you’re still not keen to leap into chain waxing, it can be run on its own and should see similar performances.
In our experience, it doesn’t run quite as clean as the hot wax. Even though the lube cures into a film, it’s still a bit tackier than solid paraffin wax and seems to pick up slightly more junk—though is still significantly cleaner than any oil based lube we’ve used.
Finish Line also includes its new Smart Lube applicator, which appears to be an evolution of the No Drip Chain Luber. The pitch here is that this attachment applies an even coat to the chain without drips or mess, using a spongy material lining the head — Finish Line includes two replacements in the cap. Given that you want the lubrication to penetrate the rollers and not coat the side plates, we’re not so sure about the efficacy of the Smart Luber.
Pro Tip: if you put the chain in the largest cog at the back and drop the chain lube on each roller, as the chain articulates while you backpedal, it helps to suck liquid into the rollers.
Finish Line Halo Wet Lube
Alongside the wax offerings, Finish Line also offers the Halo lube in an oil-based wet lubricant. Again, it has the hollow tungsten spheres and ceramic platelets in the mixture but swaps the paraffin for what the brand calls a hydrodynamic fluid film synthesised from natural gas.
In reality, it performs like an oil-based wet lube. It’s not quite as viscous and thick as Finish Lines standard wet lube but still attracts a bit of grit and dirt in dry conditions. Given how well the wax has performed so far in the rain, this is probably something we’d save for events where only ducks would say the weather is nice.
