About Loobman

Chain oilers  are a must if you are serious about chain maintenance. And here at Loobman we ride bikes for a living so we take chain maintenance seriously.

Loobman is a small London company which was established in 1997 by a motorcycle courier called Dennis (that's me) and with a little help (alright, a lot of help) from some good friends.
It all started one day when some of us decided it would be fun to ride sports bikes instead of shaft driven CX500s and GT550s. I got myself a Suzuki GSXR1100.

Brilliant fun but good chain maintenance was essential in keeping costs down. Replacing a chain and sprockets is very expensive yet oiling it is really quite a simple process.

But, when we checked out the available chainoilers on the market at the time, they were all going for silly money. That was mainly because they all used some form of automation to give the chain a continuous feed of oil.
If you ride your bike no matter what the weather, you'll know that you don't need much oil if the sun is shining but you need quite a bit more if it's raining.
We all pondered the problem and one of the lads even came up with a bottle of oil with a tap to control the flow. He said his wife got him the bits from the hospital where she worked. But he kept forgetting to turn it off so it left puddles behind and he had to keep filling it up all the time.
We figured that what was needed was a small 'dose' of oil every now and then.

We developed our first onboard chainoiler from a shampoo bottle. In fact, we found the name on that very same bottle (it said "wash and go" but, what the hell). Soon several London couriers were running prototype squeeze and go type oilers.
We sold our first Loobman in 1997. It featured a small squeezy bottle and a single oil delivery held in place by a short piece of wire inside the end of the tube so you could bend it to shape and cable tie it to the swinging arm. It fed oil to the side of the sprocket.
But we realised that the single feed was just not up to the job when the o-rings wore out on the unfed side of the chain on the GSXR. They looked thinner than the ones on the other side and suddenly the chain had to be adjusted almost every day.
With a financial budget limited what we had in our pockets after paying the rent, we invested in cups of tea while we discussed the problem of getting oil to the o-rings on the other side of the chain. The very first dual sided oil delivery system was made out of modelling clay, cable ties and a coat-hanger, but it got it oil to the o-rings on both sides of the chain at the same time and we were well pleased that day I can tell you! The world of motorcycle chainoilers has, quite literally, never been the same since.
We went into production with our first dual sided delivery in 1998. To do this, we took out a big fat bank loan and had a mould made. The finished unit was complicated and involved a lot of parts, so we called it the offshore oil rig. We sold it as an 'add on' to the standard Loobman kit because it cost more than the chainoiler itself to make.
It was complicated, expensive, had too many parts and when several of them came back broken we all went back to the cafe for more tea and consultation.
Then we realised that the delivery head could be held in place with wire. And we already HAD wire in the single sided kit. We just put a ring in the end if it to hold the bolt and fixed our existing delivery head to the end, and the rest, as they say, is history! (That is, if you know your history).
We put the wire supported dual sided delivery head into the Loobman kit as a standard part in 1999. Meanwhile, we put the old offshore oil rig mould in the bin. This, we are told, is called a bikers learning curve.
Dual sided delivery must have been a good idea because suddenly everyone else started doing it. (Scottoiler 2001, Pro-oiler 2004, Tutoro 2009). You'd think we would have got some credit for it but nothing so far. Perhaps you have to join some secret society or something. We're bikers here, not business wizards so, perhaps we're not so good at blowing our own trumpets. All the same, I'm told I play a pretty mean bass guitar. But that's another story.

The Loobman chainoiler was conceived out of necessity and designed with simplicity in mind. No high tech automation, but no remembering to turn it off either. You just "Loob" -ricate your chain "man" -ually whenever it needs oiling. We think "squeeze and go" speaks for itself.
The Loobman squeeze and go chainoiler has been around since the last century and is used by riders all over the world. Our new AB chainoiler retains that same simplicity but it's now activated by a push button!
We try to be helpful because we rely heavily on comments and feedback from the riders who use our products. This includes face to face discussion with professional couriers and high mileage riders and our main research facility is the cafe at Smithfield, City of London EC1.
If you're in town, pop around and ask any of the couriers for Dennis Loobman.

If you're anywhere else, just e-mail dennis@loobman.co.uk and we will do our best to get back to you as soon as we can.
All comments are welcome and we try to answer all e-mails.
We have lots of ideas. Some of them are rather GOOD ideas!