Uh. On all bikes throughout my entire life, both pedal- and motor-, I've just measured center-to-center on the link pins with a ruler, like it says in the manual. It's even easier on a bicycle than a motorcycle because you can just grab a pedal with one hand and make sure all the slack is taken up out of the chain. You don't even have to get your hands greasy.
For sprocket and/or chainring wear, my rule of thumb has just been once the teeth start looking like the water in Super Mario Bros. world 2-2, it's time for a new one.
That's gotten me across many hundreds of thousands of miles, no sweat. I fail to see how spending money on a specialized (and apparently shitty) tool to make this more complicated on yourself is a better way to live your life vs. spending that money instead on tires/oil/honey waffles/whatever it is you're into.
Same with the caliper suggestion, when fractions of a millimetre make the difference between a "worn" chain and a good one, I wouldn't want to use a ruler. Especially not on the bike.
It's so easy to use a chain checker tool, I'm not sure why anyone would use rulers and calipers. Just make sure you use an accurate one, which is the point of the post.
I'm aware of the article. Funny enough, they have a photo of the inaccurate tool I was using.
And it seems to be widely circulated that you should change a <10 speed chain when it reaches 0.75mm, but the Zero Friction guy says that replacing it before 0.5mm is probably going to save your other components.
I run pretty cheap stuff on my bike, so replacing a $25 chain too often doesn't really same me much when the cassette is like $35 😂
Funny enough, they have a photo of the inaccurate tool I was using.
Yeah I saw that too. I don't have much experience but I don't see why the # speeds matter -- the sprockets have the same shape so I would think a worn chain would cause exactly the same wear regardless of how many speeds?
As the video pointed out, we're talking fractions of a millimetre making a difference, and calipers for this use case would require the user to be dead on accurate, I wouldn't personally go that route.