Countrysailor has PMed me to ask for an update on the chain waxer.
Funny that he asked, I was thinking about this the last two days. I cleaned and lightly oiled the chain on Sunday (normally do it on weekends if I remember to) and was thinking that the block alone is not enough. The chain dries out and without a bit of oil the seals will eventually get hard and perish sooner than they should. My last chain lasted 15k miles, it had tight spots that were very noticeable. The sprockets both looked very good though so the wax is doing it's job of limiting the wear. To be honest, the chain looked pretty good, no real wear. The issue is that the seals perish and the grease that they hold in gets contaminated. The aren't as well lubed as they should be and they get hotter than they should because of the extra friction. The current chain has 7046 miles on it, the sprockets look very good, so does the chain, but it has tight spots already. You can't see them, but if you check the chain slack at different points it's different. This isn't serious enough to cause me concern yet, but I can't help and think that with some oil the chain would last a longer. Maybe the ideal solution is to have the wax to limit the wear on the chain and sprockets and also have a very slow oiler to maintain the seals. I was thinking of getting a positive displacement oiler and using chainsaw oil, apparently it doesn't fling much.
The whole idea is to not need to do chain maintenance twice a week, the wax system does that, but at the cost of shorter chain life. For the next chain I'm going to clean and oil the chain every weekend to see if it makes any significant difference in mileage I get out of it. I'll be using the chainsaw oil so that at the same time I can also test how good/bad the fling of chainsaw oil is. I'll give an update when the new chain has done about 10k miles, but it will only go on in about 8k miles so it will be a few months before I can report on the difference from the test.