Will a bike chain with ONLY master links even work?

welcome to another episode of burn peak express i'm seth and today we're going to do something a little different kind of the same what are we doing here [Music] the way i see it a lot of you are home and bored and i've got a responsibility to entertain you and the other day you know while recovering from this whole ankle thing i did a q a on instagram and somebody asked what would happen if you made an entire chain out of master links and now that i think about it i don't know what would happen because i've never tried it i don't know of anybody that has every chain has one master link that's the link that joins the chain together and those master links are a little bigger and more complex than normal links that's what's going to make it interesting and unpredictable we've got all the ingredients right here let's get started so first things first we have to weigh the original chain and we're going to weigh it with all the links on it just so we have a baseline grams master links are just the outer link the inner part of the link is not used in a master link and so what i need to do to convert this to a master link chain is take the entire thing apart so we're just left with inner links so the first thing i'm going to do is take a chain tool and take this entire chain apart something i've never done in my entire life and i suspect none of you have done in your entire lives so the pins and the outer links they're just getting put in a pile and then the inner links which we're actually going to use they're going to get put in another pile just taking a chain apart link by link so when you're taking apart these chains they're not made to be taken apart and put back together so when you pop the link through it takes something a little out of it there's like a little ring of metal that comes off and they're starting to accumulate around the chain tool to the point where i'm gonna have to get these off or i can't pop the link off anymore wow we've been here with a chain tool for about an hour we have the entire chain apart these are all the inner links and this tray is all the outer links and pins these aren't gonna get used they're gonna be replaced with these sram power locks so i have to get all these out of the package hopefully will not take an hour all right that is the last power lock and now we have all the ingredients to build our master link chain so we're going to take an inner link here we're going to take one side of a master link put it together now if you look closely there's a little channel there that this pin can fall into in order to snap the link together and there's a good amount of force required in order to set that in so i'm going to put the master link pliers in and now you're going to watch right over here i'm going to snap that together i think this is going to be a long [Music] process i think we should just take a moment to appreciate all the people in the saram factory that are just putting these chains together link by link just like i'm doing right now they probably have a machine that just chains out all right almost done here got a few more to pop together i think it took us about an hour and a half solid hour and a half to construct this master link change so the question is does it weigh any different does the bike still pedal and shift right i mean what have we lost or gained with this so let's start with the weight and it is 274 grams i think that's a little more i think that's about 12 grams more but it looks like it gained some weight although not as much as i thought it would so question number two if we put this on a bicycle is the bicycle going to pedal and shift normally now i think it's going to perform just fine because when sram engineers these links they want to make sure that it's not clicking or doing something different when it's passing through the derailleur so i think it's very possible it's it's going to perform the same but before we put this chain on the bike and get it all greasy i think we got to stare at it all right so let's install this new chain on this very dirty bike i have not cleaned it since my injury so we gotta find the master link and on this chain there's only one all right so i usually start around the back of the bike yeah drop it straight down here all right now we need a master link i don't know if the master link's engaged because i can't find the master link there's way too many master links so i got to look at every single one of them and see which one isn't clicked in but i think it is let's see i'm in the highest gear now let's give it a pedal to see if we notice anything besides the fact that there's sand and stuff in the gears crinkling it seems pretty good let's try so far the shifting is not good it's it's flawless it's perfect and i think we can test this bike this is not the first time i've done this is there any reason i couldn't go out for a ride like this it feels the same it feels totally the same when it shifts yeah that doesn't feel good on me but on the drivetrain it feels perfect you know what i think i'm going to leave this chain on as a connoisseur of kind of unique parts and just uniqueness in general look i have two different pedals on here because i'm testing the fully master link chain let's just keep it going i'm going to leave this what we're left with is a chain that doesn't do anything better than a normal chain we don't know if it's stronger weaker all we know is that it looks crazy and if you ever ask yourself what would happen if you built an entire chain out of master links well now we have the answer so i've been guilty of flexing on you guys before but this takes the cake i mean this is a completely pointless chain that probably costs about 350 dollars luckily i didn't have to pay for it myself this video is sponsored by competitive cyclists on competitivecyclists.com you can buy all sorts of bike parts just like these and you can talk to gear heads to make sure what you're about to purchase is a good idea so i've got a sram eagle chain in my cart how many power locks am i going to need to convert it to condor condor like like all power lock so anyway thanks for competitive cyclists for supporting this video and if you're making your first purchase you can use the code below for a special discount i learned something today i hope you did i hope you were at least a little bit entertained this is a crazy world and nice to take escape even for five minutes so if you enjoyed this video make sure you subscribe to burn peak express this is our second channel for extra things like this if you like this video give it a like share it with somebody who you know will enjoy it and thanks for riding with me today i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Berm Peak Express

Views: 844,764

Rating: 4.9581656 out of 5

Keywords: do it yourself, diy, tools, home, backyard, mountain biking, cycling, outdoors, mountainbiking, bike repair

Id: m1y95ztSY5U

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020