Chain Oiler - For Road Racing

Wondering what others are using as a chain oiler? Did you make yours or where can you purchase one for karting?

I recently started running some road races and need to do something with the chain as I’m tearing up sprockets and wearing chains out. I race tag with a x30 and a 219 chain.

Wade #73

In my region, a lot of people like the Motul line of karting/motorcycle chain lubricants.

Personally, the best product I’ve seen is Maxima Chain Lube. I know a lot of people don’t like it because it can get somewhat messy, but it seems to do the best job of actually staying on the chain compared to cheaper aerosols which just run off the chain or go off everywhere in a cloud of aerosol dust instantly.

Just my 2 cents.

@Wade73 are you trying to run a chain oiling system on the kart so you can periodically oil the chain while on track?

Yeah, if so I don’t think that’s legal for road racing.

I think it’s still legal. But you can run only so much oil in the system.

Yeah, I don’t think those are too common. Reach out to Jim Conlin. He’s not on here, but you can message him through his team Adrenaline Fix Karting. He rigged one up for our Birel-Rotax that we used for the 24 hour record at New Castle. I’m sure he’d be happy to share with you how he made it all work.

Can’t you run a belt driver with an X30?

We used to run an oiler on our Rotaxes before we switched to belts. We got ours from AMC and built a bracket to mount it on the back of the seat.

@Tony_Z , @Peter_Zambos, Any insight on chain oilers for road racing?

Well, I don’t see any at the track or racers don’t talk about them. I have some ideas based on some street bike oilers and ideas to follow up based on the posts

Options-
Belt drive for a X30
High quality sprocket & chain
Find a chain lube that can handle a 30 minute run
Buy a chain oiler for street bike and modify
Make one from scratch

Thanks

If you can find a belt drive I would roll with that. I wouldn’t even bother looking for the other options.

Keep it simple and user-friendly.

We ran 40 mm belt drives for a long time on TaG engines and they weren’t reliable enough, for us, so we went back to 219 chain. The chain was more reliable but came with it’s own problems. Used high quality gears, lub and chain and laser aligned the gears. But some tracks were just murder on the chain. Practice sessions were OK, but after a 25 minute race, the chain was bone dry. So dry on occasion, the chain was not only dry but turning blue and stiff. Oh, ours was a non-O-ring chain. If we had continued for another season in road racing, we would have had an oiler.
Scott Grenier put an oiler on a Rotax and I saw the results. His chain was fine and I was tossing mine out. And there is a cost factor. Spray cans of chain lub are not cheap. But chain saw bar oil is.
The issues with installing an oiler is position so the oil drips on the chain and the drip rate. So a little experimentation is required.

Though I’m pretty sure that an oiler exists on the market, Scott had made his own. If I remember correctly, his was a catch can from a Briggs & Stratton that was attached to a flat bar which was that attached to the bearing cassette. He then had a valve on the end of it, which would control the rate of flow. It worked incredibly well
By the time that we were considering using one is when we ended our road racing so we never got a chance to run it ourselves .

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