About

Built because I got tired of typing the same answer.

Friends, social-media strangers, weekend-warrior types — all asking "what lube should I actually use?" Every time I wanted to give them something properly useful: why this lube wins in those conditions, why the marketing on that bottle doesn't match the test data, what they'd save on components and time across a year. But typing it out in yet another comment thread, with enough detail to be honest but not so much that they'd bounce back to oil out of overwhelm, kept eating my afternoon.

So this site is the thing I wanted to be able to ping in a reply. Educate first, recommend second, save people money along the way. The hard testing work was already done by Adam Kerin at Zero Friction Cycling — his data is the reason any of this is possible. The job here is making that data easier to act on, adding my own experience and other voices I trust where they help, and not scaring anyone back to the oil bottle in the process.

Not affiliated with ZFC. Just an enthusiastic signpost.

Credit to Zero Friction Cycling

This application exists because of Adam Kerin and Zero Friction Cycling. Over the better part of a decade and hundreds of thousands of kilometres of controlled testing, ZFC has single-handedly moved the field of bicycle chain lubrication forward faster than any lubricant manufacturer's in-house research programme.

Their test methodology, public league table, detailed reviews, and refusal to compromise independence have given cyclists the first genuinely reliable way to evaluate chain lubricants — and have forced manufacturers to raise their standards. Wear and SAL figures shown here are ZFC's published numbers unchanged. Cost-to-run figures are derived from ZFC's published AUD figures and either shown in AUD or converted at display time using ECB-sourced rates (see the Currency & pricing section below). Commentary from manufacturers (Silca, CeramicSpeed) is indexed alongside as context, visibly tagged so readers can weight it appropriately — but the rankings themselves only move when ZFC's numbers move.

Want a plain-English five-minute breakdown of how the test protocol works (what each "block" means, which numbers actually matter, how to read the wear chart)? See the ZFC protocol breakdown →

Lubricant test data on this site was last refreshed from ZFC's lubricant testing page on 2026-04-24. The current master spreadsheet (and any subsequent revisions) is always linked from there.

Support ZFC

The retail side funds the testing side. Four things you can do:

Buy tested products direct from the ZFC online store where practical.
Subscribe to the Zero Friction Cycling YouTube channel — video reviews now lead the test pipeline, and subscribing actually moves the needle.
Share ZFC's work with other cyclists. Few enough people understand how much chain lubricant choice matters; ZFC's plain-language explainers are the best starting point.
Read the source material directly at zerofrictioncycling.com.au. The site is regularly reorganised as new tests and guides are published, so navigating from the homepage is more reliable than following deep links that drift.

Currency & pricing

ZFC publishes all cost figures in Australian dollars. The header currency selector converts those figures to GBP, EUR, USD or AUD using exchange rates from Frankfurter, an open-source service backed by European Central Bank reference rates. Rates are fetched periodically and bundled into the build — if the upstream API is ever unavailable the site continues to work using the last known good values, never showing a broken cost figure.

Conversion is applied at display time only. Underlying ZFC numbers are unchanged. The CSV export from Pro Charts always contains raw AUD values so spreadsheet workflows aren't affected by whichever currency you happen to have selected.

Current rates (2026-04-27, base AUD): 1 AUD = 0.52996 GBP · 1 AUD = 0.61211 EUR · 1 AUD = 0.71917 USD.

Pricing for retailers and lube manufacturers is on the roadmap as a future step — live RRPs per region instead of converted ZFC figures. Today's figures are honest about what they are: ZFC's published prices, exchanged into your local currency.

What this app is not

Not a replacement for ZFC's spreadsheets or detail reviews.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by ZFC.
Not commercialising ZFC's data — no paywalls, no premium tiers, no affiliate deals on lubricants ZFC has tested, no sponsorship arrangements implying ZFC endorsement. The site does carry modest static ads to offset hosting costs (capped at break-even); they're never placed to undermine ZFC's retail arm. Built as a personal decision aid by one cyclist who wanted scenario-aware recommendations over the top of ZFC's publicly published data.
Not a static snapshot — ZFC publishes new tests every month or two; the site is refreshed periodically to keep pace.

Other sources

Beyond ZFC's test data, the app draws on a small amount of manufacturer commentary as additional context — currently from a couple of brands whose public material is well-documented and clearly attributed, with room to add others over time where the source is reliable and the publishing position is unambiguous. The Compare tab and Advisor result cards show what each source says about a given lube, with independent test data carrying the most weight; manufacturer self-test claims are visibly flagged so you can weight them appropriately.

Source authority is rendered everywhere a claim is shown. Green chip = independent test data. Amber/orange chips = manufacturer commentary or self-test data — useful context, but weight accordingly.

If anything on this site reads as if it's claiming authority over ZFC's data — or otherwise overshadowing them rather than just helping riders use their work — that's the one bug I genuinely want to catch. Let me know if you spot it.