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. <g>
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.
On Thu, 11 Jun 2015 22:30:45 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
What did you apply, 30-weight? <g>
Some years ago I had an interesting conversation with the VP of
industrial lubricants at Exxon-Mobil. I think I reported it here. It
helped get me down to earth regarding lubricants, additives, and
special applications.
I suppose you know that all "synthetic" oils are made from petroleum
oil.
not sure what it was, but it seemed like the right choice at the time.
So is some vinegar. The additives do make a difference, and I do agree
that there are too many types of lubricants to even shake a stick at these
days, all of which claim to be the best thing ever created. The
differences while subtle do exist and for the case of a garage door
rollers anything would probably work fine in the end. Other applications
could be fussier.
I do keep over a dozen types of oils and greases around for various
things. Each have their purpose, for instance the Cameron drill press,
scissors and old camera shutters only get Nyoil, which is just fancy pure
mineral oil. I never add teflon filled oils to motor bearings, locks get
graphite and so forth, super lube for general purpose use blah blah. No
doubt everybody has their favorites as well. Bike people get real crazy
about chain lubricants.
On Thu, 11 Jun 2015 23:50:52 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
Yeah. The basic point was that synthetic motor oils, which are derived
from petroleum oils -- cracked into components and then re-combined in
a controlled way-- are much more lubricious than conventional
petroleum oils. Beyond that, the differences between motor oils and
machine oils are not commonly understood.
You know that grease is just oil with metallic soaps in it to make it
thick and pasty. You may know that the true weight of multi-viscosity
oils actually is the lower value: 10W-40 actually is 10-weight oil.
The additives that give it the multi-vis property really don't alter
the viscosity of the oil. Those additives actually are polymers that
swell up when they're heated. What they do is increase the gap between
journals and bearings *as if* the oil was thicker. The polymers just
swell with heat and keep the gap open.
Most of the additives in motor oil have no effect on the oil's
properties for other uses. Anti-foam, rust protection, and anti-acid
(anti-corrosion) components do almost nothing until they're activated.
The detergents and dispersants only come into play in *closed*
lubricating systems, where the oil it recycled through the machine. In
a plain-spindle-bearing lathe, which is a "total loss" lubricating
system, they have no noticeable affect. In a system that recycles, you
can use motor oil as long as you change the oil when it gets dirty.
The lubricating effects won't change. The additives won't do any
damage. You can have a problem if you've used non-detergent oil in a
machine or engine for years and then switch to deterget oil, because
the semi-jelled glorp can come off in lumps big enough and hard enough
to block oil passages.
All of this came up, and prompted me to call Exxon-Mobil, from a
comment by former member Jim Rozen that he had switched his company's
South Bend plain-bearing 10L lathe to Mobil 1 motor oil - 0W-20, I
think. He said the spindle ran cooler and allowed higher speeds. Like
me, he had been lubing it with South Bend spindle oil.
I talked to the E-M VP about it, and she said, first, it's the same
oil as their industrial synthetic, aside from the additives, and that
those additives make no difference in a total-loss system. She thought
0W-20 would be fine in that application.
This prompted me to ask about other applications, and she said it was
generally the same story: synthetic lubricates much better, and the
additives in motor oil won't matter for almost all applications except
those that recycle the oil. As for viscosity, make sure it's thin
enough to get into the bearing area and thick enough to minimize
metal-to-metal contact.
So I stopped driving to my mill supply to stock a few different
weights of machine oil. I use synthetics in my cars, and I just save
the remains, turning the cans upside-down overnight and then pouring
the last bit into my all-purpose pump oil can.
I did buy a can of 0W-20 to use in the spindle of my furnace blower
motor. I use the heavier stuff on my garden tools and the joints of my
pocket knives. My honing oil is still 10% motor oil and 90% kerosene,
as it has been for close to 60 years, and the motor oil for that is
whatever is lying around.
On Thursday, June 11, 2015 at 6:58:19 PM UTC-4, Ed Huntress wrote:
I am not too sure about that statement. Does that include silicon oil? And how about the oil for use with 410a refrigerant? And then there is the oil with iodine in it. And the transmission oil made with jojoba oil.
Dan
"Made from petroleum oil" can mean that the synthetic oil is based on
chemicals originally derived from petroleum, such as ethylene and its
relatives. Plastics are also "made from petroleum".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene
Right. That was the sneaky point. d8-)
They crack it down, and then re-synthesize it to make "synthetic"
motor oil. And the result is worth it.
This comes up from time to time because I once had a boss who was
proud of the fact that she used synthetic motor oil in her Benz, thus
avoiding the use of petroleum. She was really let down when I
explained it to her.
On Thu, 11 Jun 2015 23:18:14 -0400, snipped-for-privacy@snyder.on.ca wrote:
Are you sure they make synthetic motor oil from gas? I know it's a
common source of ethylene, but I'm not sure about what molecules they
use to assemble Mobil 1.
Hydro-carbon gas is a many slandered substance, but when you talk
about "pipe line" gas it is usually mostly Ethane and Methane. In
Indonesia they use "gas" to make fertilizer but I'm not sure whether
they are using strictly ethane-methane of something richer.
Since neither of those (nor other natural has) contains significant
amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium, there must be more to
the story than that one sentence reveals.
I'm not a chemist so I can't argue one way or the other. All I can say
is that I know of two "fertilizer plants" in Indonesia that made
fertilizer from natural gas. I seem to remember the "Habor, or maybe
Haber, process" being mentioned.
The Haber Process turns nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from
natural gas into ammonia, which can then be converted into solid urea
for fertilizer.
http://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/equilibria/haber.html
German chemists developed this and the method for making gasoline from
coal during the wars when they were cut off from petroleum. At the
time they weren't economical for nations with better access to raw
materials but they have become so as the natural supply diminished.
-jsw
Haber
again from Wiki -
The 1910s and 1920s witness the rise of the Haber process and the
Ostwald process. The Haber process produces ammonia (NH3) from methane
(CH4) gas and molecular nitrogen (N2). The ammonia from the Haber
process is then converted into nitric acid (HNO3) in the Ostwald
process.[96] The development of synthetic fertilizer has significantly
half the people on the Earth are currently fed as a result of
synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use.[97]
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