Re: Motor Oil Cartel ? Price is a Ripoff.

Scott Dorsey wrote:
Steve <no@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:

Lubricating oils and plastics are really best made with petroleum, and
part of the need to conserve petroleum is so that we'll have enough left
for making lubricants and plastics. You can use damn near anything as a
fuel, but a precision bearing lube is not so forgiving.

Well.... we could always start hunting sperm whales again.

Whale oil is funny stuff... but it is very, very subject to varnishing due
to contact with air, as well as doing some weird things when it's in contact
with high-sulfur brasses.

It took us a century before we had a good replacement for the stuff for most
applications. It wasn't until around 1995 that we had light and stable
synthetic oils for precision work that could match the low friction of whale
oil, and the good news is that those synthetics also came with much better
stability and wider temperature ranges.

The synthetics for the most part are made from ethylene gas from petroleum.

Whale oil does still have some advantages in surface lubrication for magnetic
tapes, and none of the replacements are quite as good yet. But that's not a
field where a whole lot of development is going today.
--scott

I knew there were still some applications for which there weren't equal replacements, but I didn't know one of those applications was lubricating mag tapes. My first summer "engineering" job involved pre-winding, repairing, and playing back long-stored mag tapes <shudder>

But you do know I was kidding. It just strikes me as funny. Save the planet! Stop using oil! (but hunt whales again...) :-p

.

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