Favorite cleaners and lubes

It sounds as if you're complaining about having work. :^)

On Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:27:39 GMT, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Big Rich Soprano instead replied:

Is that your hand I see held high in the air?

-- Ray

That's what they said, without qualification. They qualified two types of plastic but, no qualifications for wood.

If it's made out of wood they sure did. No qualifications on wood, just like you quoted them to start with.

Paul

Wow, I didn't mean to stir up a hornets nest. ;-) Thanks for the replies everyone. Glad to know that naphtha shouldn't hurt anything. I still want to test it on the little rubber pieces found in some models to be sure.

After running the engines around, I'm not sure that the watch barrel grease is really the right thing. I don't think it's hurting anything, but I also don't think that it's really doing an ideal job. I'm going to get some teflon based lube and try that out.

Thanks again all :-)

WD-40 is a water displacer/penetrating oil (hence the "WD") and is approximately only 4% lubricant. The best place for WD-40 is in a plumber's toolbox.

As the former owner of a bicycle shop I have had to replace many a destroyed drive chain that had been "lubricated" with WD-40. For bicycle chains its best use is as a cleaner; flood the chain, wipe the excess and let the rest evaporate. Then use a good chain lube. My favorite bike chain lube is heavy-duty air tool oil. Any lubricant on the outside of the chain, where all it does is pick up dirt, should be removed with a clean, disposable rag.

I have had good success lubricating model train engines with tiny amounts of light air tool oil and synthetic bicycle grease.

Texas Pete

"Brian Smith" wrote

I'm primarily a luthier, and nobody who builds high-quality musical instruments likes to see them mistreated, even if it means losing some repair income -and I'm semi-retired anyway! :-P

Pete

"Mark Mathu" wrote

Usually.

Fender -and a few others- finish their maple boards to keep the finger crud from building up in the grain and making the guitar look ugly*, but rosewood and ebony are almost never finished.

*BTW: This only works until your fingertips rub off the finish. Oddly enough, old Fender guitars with ugly, dirty, worn-out fingerboards are now a status symbol among guitarists! Who knew?

Pete

"Pete Kerezman" wrote

Bingo.

Thank you, Pete.

Pete -also.

"David Nebenzahl" wrote

Thank you. But if you've done any at all, you're *way* ahead of most people who style themselves luthiers.

Tsk!

Hmm. Did you ever know Erika Aschmann? She was into that scene when she lived in the Bay Area. (And do you know the tuning joke about the Balkan guitarist?)

Huh. We'll have to meet if we should ever end up in a similar neighborhood.

I used to play with "The bound To Frail String Band" here in So Cal, I've won the Clawhammer category at the Topanga Contest a couple of times, and I cooked up a "Bold-Timey" Clawhammer style where I combine a traditional clawhammer right hand with a jazz guitar style left hand; enabling one to play all *sorts* of unconventional material on the 5-string. ("Satin Doll", "Well You Needn't", "Sh'Beg-Sh'More", "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning", Etc.)

My current band is yclept "Felonious Plunk".

Pete

I can live with that. :-) BTW, never use WD-40 on an antique clock. It really won't damage it, but it certainly won't make it run either.

Given what we've read over the past few days, I think I can stand by what I wrote in the first place.

"NEVER use WD40 on anything to do with model railroading."

"It is NOT plastic compatable and isn't a lubricant."

"W" = Water "D" = Displacement "40" = The 40th try at development?

I'm a technical director of a small theatre and I use WD40 to clean residue from electrical and audio cables that have been taped to the floor with gaff tape. It's an excellent cleaner for that kind of work but as a lubricant? Well, it isn't.

-- Happy New Year

Roger T. Home of the Great Eastern Railway at:-

48° 25' North Longitude: 123° 21' West

hehehe... might be. I have a few Front Range GP-7's that are my favs...

On 1/3/2008 12:44 PM Big Rich Soprano spake thus:

All in the name of Science, of course ...

I was told of a guy who went deer hunting on a really cold January day and his rifle wouldn't fire. Turns out he cleaned an lubed it with WD-40, and claimed that WD-40 really gets thick at low temperatures. Cleaned out the WD-40 later and everything worked fine.

Of course... he cleaned it out *later* at higher temperatures then when it wouldn't fire, which makes us suspicious that it could actually be other things which kept the rifle from firing.

Unless he cleaned out the WD-40 and went back out on a *really cold January day,* I'm not sure if we can really learn a lesson from this, especially second-hand...

oh of course hehehe...