About

Stephen V.

Stephen has been riding and wrenching on road and gravel bikes for years — long enough to have wasted money on the wrong chain lube, stripped a bolt he shouldn’t have, and learned which upgrades actually change a ride and which just change your bank balance.

He is not a mechanic, an engineer, or a coach, and he doesn’t play one online. He holds no cycling qualification of any kind. You will never see letters after his name on this site, because there aren’t any.

He built Chainring Clubto do the work most gear sites skip: read the manufacturer’s actual spec sheet, do the arithmetic, cite the source, and say plainly when nobody has published the number.

Why this site exists

Because the honest answer to “which chain lube should I buy?” is a bit of arithmetic and a link to some published data, and almost nobody gives you either. What you get instead is a page of adjectives, a five-star rating with nothing behind it, and a price that was accurate eighteen months ago.

The odd thing about this category is that the useful information is mostly public. Manufacturers publish their specs. Standards bodies publish their standards. There is a large public chain-wear dataset. The work that isn’t being done is the boring work: reading it, dividing one number by another, and being straight about where it came from. That is the entire premise here.

What we refuse to claim

This is the short version. The long version, with the reasoning, is on how we research.

• That we tested anything.We haven’t. No lab, no test fleet, no testers, no long-term review bike. Not one product on this site has been in our hands.
• Credentials we don’t hold.No certifications, no engineering background, no “expert panel”, no “medically reviewed by”.
• An editorial team. There is one person. A masthead implying a newsroom would be a lie told in the layout.
• Ratings and reviews.We publish no star ratings and no review scores, and there are no testimonials on this site — because there are no customers to ask and inventing them is the one unforgivable thing a publisher can do.
• That a number is a fact when it’s a claim.When a listing says “70+ mile range”, that is marketing measured under ideal conditions, and we label it as the seller’s claim every time.

The obvious question

If you haven’t ridden any of it, why should anyone read you?

Fair. The answer is that most of what decides these purchases isn’t ride feel. It’s whether a tyre fits your frame, whether a chain matches your drivetrain, what a bottle costs per millilitre, what a battery costs to charge, and which certification a helmet actually carries. None of that requires a lab. All of it requires someone to sit down and check — and to tell you when the answer isn’t published.

Where ride feel genuinely is the deciding factor — saddles, mostly — we say so, and we tell you that nobody can review it for you. That is a more useful answer than a score.

Who owns this

Chainring Club is owned and operated by Type 5 Marketing LLC. It is funded entirely by Amazon Associates commission — the full disclosure is here, and the editorial policy is here. Nobody pays for placement, because placement isn’t for sale.

Tell us we’re wrong

Genuinely. If a spec is off, a link is dead, or the arithmetic doesn’t hold up, email info@chainringclub.com or use the contact form. Corrections get made and logged, with the date, on the methodology page. That’s the deal.