garage door lubricant

jesus - could you possibly be more passive about obtaining information?

Dry dusty areas - Teflon based dry lube spray

Reasonably dust free areas - Motorcycle chain lube.

Jeez. I've used left-over motor oil on mine for 38 years. They're still going strong.

I started with 10W-40. Now we're at synthetic 5W-20. Whatever is left over goes into my "what the hell" pump oiler.

Dicker wrote in news:2bafc $5579989a$43de0cc0$ snipped-for-privacy@news.flashnewsgroups.com:

boiled linseed oil works great, keeps everything from rusting.

Cydrome Leader fired this volley in news:mlcav8 $1t9$ snipped-for-privacy@reader1.panix.com:

Yep... then top that off with LOTS of dry graphite, to keep everything moving smoothly. 'Bout a 1/2-oz per foot of roller channel works well.

Once motor oil leaves the engine, it should ONLY go to recycling. It shouldn't be used for anything else.

I didn't say "used." I said "left-over," as in the drips that are left in the bottom of a can of oil when you change the oil in your car or lawn mower.

And what do you do when it oxidizes and hardens? It's the basis of real, old-fashioned oil-based paint. First it turns to something like the gunk inside the lid of a molasses jar, and then it turns to varnish.

Ed Huntress fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

REALLY? And then all that graphite would turn it into BLACK varnish?

Wow! What an amazing factoid!

ROTFLMAO

Eventually it hardens into Linoleum.

Yup. Black paint, as any handyman over 60 ought to know.

Our oldest family home, built in 1741 in Greenland, NH, was painted with a mixture of linseed oil and white lead for well over 100 years. 'Makes good paint.

And several of my gunstocks are coated with hand-rubbed linseed, which dries in a month or so.

Which makes me wonder if these guys are trying to give Dicker the shaft. Not nice.

Ed Huntress fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Not if it's PROPERLY "boiled". You must've done them with commercial 'boiled linseed oil', which is not cooked, just prepared with chemical dryers to eventually sequester all the fats. In the long view, it's terrible stuff which stays sticky for a LONG time.

Proper old-school cooked, skimmed, strained linseed oil, on exposure to the oxygen in the air, polymerizes perfectly in about a week. In order to do that, ALL the fats have to be cooked out and mechanically removed.

And, if you pre-treat the wood with a potassium permanganate solution (and clean it again) to accelerate the normal slow oxidation process of the wood's own resins, you'll get a "years old" patina in about two months.

I've done a whole bunch of that, building period reproduction furniture.

How about as a release agent on concrete forms? [rhetorical]

I recently used the 3 in 1 garage door lube from Lowes. All I can add is, my wife's comment.

"What did you do to the garage door, it's so quiet!"

All I could say is, I spent half the afternoon working on it, but I got it quieted down, for you dear. :-)

Mikek

The non-engine lubricant business, like many other commodity businesses, has made target-market differentiation its main method of marketing. The idea is to take a commodity and claim that it's made specifically for some special purpose. Kingsford Competition Briquettes are one of my favorite examples.

If they described it functionally, it would be something like "Garden variety lubricant suitable for low-grade bearings that wobble around with atrocious clearances in misaligned channels, and may have to run with dirt of various kinds, including cat droppings. Prevents screeching, howling, and absolute freezing of said low-grade bearings, until it doesn't."

Give 'er another squirt, and see if it will spin...

Give them a little more credit than that.

the stuff is in a spray can, so they get points for ease of application vs the complete garbage plastic oilers that 3 in 1 comes in now. All those things do it drip oil everwhere but where you need it.

I botched up a screw drive garage door opener with a lube that well, was a bit too thick. Took a while to clean all the crap off and apply the right oil or lube it needed. Whoops.