garage door lubricant

Yum, bypassed combustion products and acids on my chainsaw bar, sprocket, and chain...I can't _wait_ to try that at home!

"Terry Coombs" fired this volley in news:mlej37$o6r$1 @dont-email.me:

And I switched to boiled linseed oil and half-again its weight in graphite, just because I never wanted to paint the inside bearing surfaces of my garage door roller tracks again.

MAN, there are some stuffed-shirts on here!

Totally different applications here Lloyd . I got tired of having to scrub the mess out of pans that don't see frequent use . Stuffed shirt ? Me ? Hardly ! I can think of a few places where your BLO and graphite mixture would work well though .

What am I missing: garage door rollers are supposed to roll, the channel doesn't need to be lubricated.

e:

shouldn't be used for anything else.

I don't run my hands up and down the chain or bar except during adjustments and with work gloves. And I don't eat the firewood. And just exactly how much exposure is there when stacking the firewood when I'm usually using w ork gloves again? See how silly this exposure to toxins can become. Go ahea d and pay for bar oil. Your dime.

"Terry Coombs" fired this volley in news:mlepf7$g4e$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

'Still don't get it, do you, Terry?

When's the last time YOU painted the INSIDE BEARING SURFACE of a roller track?

Lloyd

What I've found to work best on cast iron pans is peanut oil. Smear pan all over, heat up until it starts smoking, set aside. The oil turns to varnish right away. Lard also works, but takes longer to cure. Likewise tallow.

Joe Gwinn

Peanut oil is the one often recommended by chefs and cookware manufacturers, supposedly because it has a high smoking temperature and seals the cast-iron pores better than other oils.

I used it 40 years ago, but I don't like the smell and switched to other oils. I never noticed a difference in how my pans behave but there are so many other factors involved that it's hard to tell.

I'll bet that 20W-40 would work really well. 'Maybe even better if you load it with graphite powder. d8-)

I chipped and scraped out my grandmother's baked-on crust and cook breakfast in a few drops of olive oil, then lightly wash the frypan with Dawn and a plastic brush. The remaining black coating is thin but very stable and the iron doesn't rust while drip-drying. Omelettes come loose easily in it without splitting.

I don't run the wood stove hot enough to make the oil smoke.

-jsw

I've read that too, though I was using peanut oil long before, probably because I observed that it seemed to turn to varnish pretty quickly.

Turning this around, I've also discovered that the quickest way to remove burned-on crud in the bottom of a pan is methylene-chloride based paint stripper - the cured food oil is in fact varnish.

Any unsaturated edible oil will do, though some cure better than others, and the taste of the oil varies as well.

As for peanut oil, once the oil on the pan has cured, one cannot taste the oil. Especially after frying some meat.

I have not tried it, but I bet corn oil would work. Likewise safflower oil.

I bet the viscosity modifiers are tasty.

Joe Gwinn

Never , and if you look above you'll see the post where I was laughing my ass off about it . HOWEVER there may actually be an application where graphite bound with BLO may make a decent lubricant . Ever heard of/used molykote 8800 ? MoS2 in a binder .

I can't use peanut oil , wife is sensitive to it . Does awful things to her digestive tract .

"Terry Coombs" fired this volley in news:mlf76g$7k4$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Sorry. I didn't see it, or I'd have lightened up on you.

Apparently, though, SEVERAL folks here just do not get the joke.

And to the guy who asked why anyone would lubricate a ROLLING member... I don't know... why do they lubricate roller bearings? (duh!)

Lloyd

Huh. I'll have to try that. I use a 3/4" wood chisel and a 4" angle-head grinder. d8-)

I went to olive oil first, and then settled on canola oil.

It tastes like...quinoa panzanella a la Pennzoil.

To reduce friction against the cages and against each other, in cageless sets.

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

Really? I didn't know that!

And why would one lubricate the rollers in a garage door track? Because they do not roll precisely-true, and rub on the sides. And they're noisy, metal on sheet metal, and all that; lubrication also quiets them.

Just to be clear, Ed; I knew all about that... its being sort of "mechanics 101". The joke about BLO and graphite was a joke, so "off- the-wall" that ANYBODY would have 'gotten it'. And so many didn't...

Lloyd

She'll be OK so long as she doesn't eat the pan. The oil is well cured and does not come off.

Anyway, as Ed mentioned, canola oil also works.

Joe Gwinn

We seem to have a failure to communicate. Let's see why that is:

Lloyd asks:

"And to the guy who asked why anyone would lubricate a ROLLING member...I don't know... why do they lubricate roller bearings? (duh!)"

To which Ed replies:

"To reduce friction against the cages and against each other, in cageless sets."

And Lloyd rejoins:

"Really? I didn't know that! "

Lloyd, you asked a reas "And why would one lubricate the rollers in a garage door track? Because they do not roll precisely-true, and rub on the sides. And they're noisy, metal on sheet metal, and all that; lubrication also quiets them."

Which is generally true, but which HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE QUESTION YOU ASKED!

You asked why roller bearings are lubricated. And you expect an answer to why one would lubricate a roller wheel on a sheet-metal track. Different questions, and they get different answers. My solution, BTW, is to shoot some oil into the bearings and don't wipe it up when some oil drools out. It works great. No fuss, no muss.

Now, about your linseed-and-graphite soup: You'd just given us a story about "real" boiled linseed oil, which was sort of half cracker-barrel technology and half old-wives's tale (more about this later), and now you sound like you're serious about recommending this glop. Maybe you were serious. What you said is partly true: linseed is used to protect against rust (more about this later, too) and graphite is sometimes mixed with binders for lubricating purposes. You seem to think that some linseed doesn't get really hard, so maybe you thought that was all a good idea. I didn't want to get into a big discussion about it (an idea that now has become a complete loss ), so I let it slip away after your sardonic remarks.

===================================

A few facts about linseed oil, boiled and otherwise: It boils at around 300 deg. F. It smokes -- like crazy -- at around 225 deg. F. When they boiled it in ancient times, it was done with a metal-compound catalyst, which they called "metal salts," which was, in earlier times, litharge. That's lead oxide. It wasn't until they STOPPED boiling it, centuries later, that they found they could use other metal salts to promote hardening without actually boiling the oil. Today, it's often a cobalt compound. Sometimes it's a mixture of a zinc compound and something else.

So I have no idea what you mean by "real" boiled linseed. They haven't done that for well over a century. Where the idea came from MAY be from the way they make "stand oil." For that, you heat linseed in a sealed container to around 600 deg. F, for hours. The result is called stand oil. It's used a lot in artist's oil paints, and small amounts of it are sometimes mixed into the commercial product that we call "boiled" linseed oil today. It's as thick as honey and it's partly polymerized. It promotes polymerization of raw linseed. Don't do this at home; a leak could cause an explosion.

So far, you've got some homebrew product that you're happy with, and that's fine. But you got the tacky part all twisted up. Raw linseed takes a very long time to harden. I sealed a pair of custom-made ash oars, which I still have, with raw linseed the year we moved into our house: 1978. By 1981 or so, they were nice and hard and dry. They took extra time because I didn't know at that time that you're supposed to mix the first coat 50/50 with real turpentine. Now I know. That's how I've done my gunstocks, only with boiled linseed rather than raw linseed. The first coat takes weeks to dry. Subsequent coats, hand-rubbed with the heel of my hand, take around a week or less. My Model 1885 Browning falling-block, before I sold it, had over 20 hand-rubbed coats on it. It was absolutely beautiful. My antique woodworking planes were treated the same way.

That was "commercial" boiled linseed. That's what "boiled" linseed is today. It's refined raw linseed that contains metal compounds (collectively known as "Japan driers") that catalyze the oil and promote polymerization, which basically occurs from an oxidation reaction. As I said, it may also contain some stand oil, some turpentine (the artists' product, which is thicker than the turps we used in house paint years ago), and sometimes other solvents.

Now, here's why I didn't get into this with you: You were partly right. It can protect against rust, but it doesn't do very well in open air. It's hydrophobic, but it's also porous. It's kind of a mixed bag in terms of rust protection. For around 90 years, it's been used to coat the inside of steel tubes used in aircraft tube frames as a rust protectant. But here's the kicker: Its protection is based partly, or maybe mostly, on "eating up" available oxygen in those (hopefully) sealed tubes, as it oxidizes and polymerizes. In other words, it starves the rust. And, if the tube is well sealed, it never gets really hard.

So, not being a mind reader, and not knowing where you got your ideas about "boiled" linseed oil, I let it slide. You do tend to be jumpy from time to time, as we both know. d8-) I don't doubt your experience with the oil but man, following you around the block can be a workout.

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

You obviously know nothing but "lore" about BLO.

It is not "boiled", it is slow-cooked at steam temperatures to cause the oils/fats to separate from the resins. It is then carefully decanted first, then filtered through material preferential to fats, until only the resinous parts remain.

You read. I do. I've made authentic BLO furniture finishes since the early 1960s by the method above. They don't "harden in a month". They 'cure' in a week.

Lloyd