FAQ

No. Not one. We have no lab, no test fleet and no testers, and we’d rather lead with that than have you find it out. What we do instead is compile the manufacturer’s published specs, cite third-party data with its conflicts disclosed, and do arithmetic you can re-run. It’s all set out on how we research.

Don’t — check them. That’s the actual answer. Every number here has a source and a date next to it, so you can verify any claim without taking our word for anything. Compare that with a rival’s “we found it fast in testing”, which you have no way to check at all. Most of what decides these purchases isn’t ride feel anyway: it’s whether a tyre fits, whether a chain matches your drivetrain, what a bottle costs per millilitre, and which certification a helmet carries. None of that needs a lab.

Amazon Associates commission. If you buy through a link here we earn a percentage, at no extra cost to you. That’s the entire business model — no ads, no sponsored posts, no paid placements, no free products accepted. Full detail on the affiliate disclosure page.

No, and there’s structural proof rather than just a promise. Every roundup on this site names at least one product to skip. Our rankings routinely put a cheap product above an expensive one, which is the opposite of what a commission-maximising site does. And we don’t look at commission rates when ordering a list.

Because a score is a measurement, and we measure nothing. We could invent a rubric, apply weights to specs and publish an 8.4 — it would look rigorous and it would be arithmetic performed on judgements we made up. Dressing a judgement as a measurement is a way of lying that survives a fact-check. So we rank and argue instead, and you can disagree with the reasoning.

Because we have no customers to ask. Chainring Club launched in 2026 and sells nothing, so any testimonial here would be fabricated. Inventing reviews is the single most damaging thing a publisher can do, and an empty space where the testimonials would go is a much better look than a lie.

One person: Stephen V.He rides road and gravel, wrenches on his own bikes, and is not a mechanic, engineer, coach or bike fitter. You won’t see letters after his name because there aren’t any. There is no editorial team — a masthead implying a newsroom would be a lie told in the layout.

They’re live from Amazon’s API and were last verified Jul 17, 2026— currently 77products. But prices move constantly, so the number on Amazon’s page when you arrive is the one that counts. If our data goes more than 48hours stale, every price on the site disappears automatically and the buttons fall back to “Check price”. We never type a price into an article.

Either our price data went stale, or that product currently has no buyable offer on Amazon. Both cases mean the same thing to us: we don’t have a number we can stand behind, so we show you none rather than a stale one. That’s the system working, not a bug.

Because Amazon is currently the only retailer we have an affiliate relationship with, and we’d rather say that than imply a network we don’t have. It has a real consequence we flag on the pages where it bites: some well-known brands — Specialized, Trek, Rad Power, Lectric — don’t sell on Amazon at all. Where that matters we say so, instead of quietly pretending the brand doesn’t exist.

ZFC has run over 300,000km of controlled chain and lubricant wear testing and publishes the results — it’s the best public dataset in the category and nearly every lube recommendation online traces back to it, including ours. It also sells chains and lubricants, including products that test well in its own results.That doesn’t make the data worthless; it means you should know who published it. Other sites call ZFC’s testing “independent”. It isn’t, and we won’t.

No. Not now, not for the right number. If you’re emailing to offer one, you can save yourself the trouble — but we do read every message, so the answer will arrive eventually.

No. It’s an easy promise for us to keep, since nobody is rushing to send free bikes to a site that admits it doesn’t test them. But it’s real, and it stays real even if that changes.

Prices continuously; roundups quarterly; cost guides at least twice a year, because electricity rates move; how-to guides annually. A safety recall overrides everything. Every page shows when it was last updated, and that date only moves when something actually changed— re-dating pages to look fresh is common in this category and it’s a small, constant lie.

Please tell us — info@chainringclub.com or the contact form. We fix it and log the correction, dated, on the methodology page. Being visibly correctable is worth more to us than looking infallible.

No — and not because we don’t want to. We’re a publisher, not a shop: we never see your order, your payment or your details. Anything to do with delivery, returns or warranty is between you and the retailer, and they’re the only ones who can fix it.

There isn’t one, deliberately. Guides live inside the hub they belong to — how to clean a chain sits in Workshop, next to the lube roundup it supports, rather than in a dated feed. A blog invites filler, and filler is how gear sites rot.

No. There’s no office and no phone line to put a number on, so publishing one would mean inventing it. Email is genuinely how you reach us: info@chainringclub.com.