white lithium grease

[MrTube]

Ok maybe its just me, or the brand of white lithium grease I bought but I'm not impressed.

I've tried it on everything from door hinges, throttle linkages and last night tried it on my bench vise and I had the same problem on every application. It simply sits on the surface and stays there or in the case of the vise it got pushed off of the screw and left the screw dry.

This is the white lithium grease you buy in a spray can. Has anyone else had any luck with this? Are there good brands and bad brands? Perhaps I'm just a dope and using it for the wrong application?

 

[Mitch//pa]

we dont use it here in the shop anymore. the reasons being it does not penetrate, drys up, spraying it on door hinges looks real bad and usually doesnt stop the squeak. try a penetrate such as pb buster, wd40 etc for something you need to penetrate. or such as your vice maybe small amout of brushable synthetic grease...
we also use something called chettah grease from crest company. it sprays on clear and penetrates better and dries like a liquid jell....

for rubber products like window runs etc we use silicone spray

 

[Uncle Bob]

Grease (typical paste texture not spray, get to that in a minute) is basically a sponge full of oil. Most formulations are 90 - 95% oil plus additives and the soap thickener; e.g. lithium, sodium, barium, etc. The oil component has a viscosity just like fluid oils, and varies by application similarly. The thickener is needed to assist in keeping the oil in place when inadequate containment for fluid is the situation. But the basics are still the same, it's the oil component that does the lubricating, not necessarily the thickener. Which brings us to the spray stuff. Likely what you've used has a very light oil and a very fluid "sponge" for sprayability, and in the kind of application you've described you probably got very little actual lubricating material in a light spray application. Not necessarily a problem in some apps, just means more frequent application is necessary to have enough oil to do the job.

Mitch's suggestions are reasonable alternatives, though on something like the vice screw you might be better served by an oil with a tackiness additive, such as bar and chain oil used for chainsaws. The drawback there is that any work debris might get caught up in the lubricant. Depends on how you use the equipment.

 

[MrTube]

Interesting.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate the responses.

I was thinking about using some wheel bearing grease on the vise as well as the other things I mentioned.

I have to wonder how well something like the 600W equivalents being sold would work on these items as well. Its certainly thick and tacky.

 

[Tom Wesenberg]

I like to keep jars or oil cans filled with 3 different weights of oil. One filled with ATF, one with regular motor oil, and one with heavy gear oil, such as 90-140 or heavier. Something like the vice would get the heavy oil on the screw, but the curved part over the screw would remain dry so it doesn't pick up all the metal bits from sawing steel. Something like dry door hinges would first get a squirt of ATF, then work it into the hinge, then I'd come back with a squirt of heavier oil, or a dab of Mystik JT-6 grease.

 

[Uncle Bob]

The original formulations of a 600w oil were intended for the steam cylinder application. The "w" indicated whale oil as an additive to aid lubrication in a wet environment. Whale oil is a fatty acid that has polar characteristics, so it adheres to metal similar to a magnet. Your eye sees the thickness of the base oil, or what you may characterise as tacky, but it's the unseen polarity of the fatty acid that aided lubrication in a steam cylinder (as well as worm gears and screws).

Todays steam cylinder oils use other fatty acids as a replacement for whale oils, and if the product advertised as a "replacement" for 600w is authentic to that type of application it could function well, keeping in mind the admonitions about holding debris.

Another alternative would be solid lubricants such as graphite or teflon. Graphite is often applied dry, manually. Teflon particles usually in suspension in a light oil or what we would normally consider a solvent making it sprayable. Being solids, and not particularly polar, they are wiped off over time, rate depending on operating conditions.