Subject: Lard Oil & white lead

From: [email-masked] (Greg Dermer)
Date: 2 Oct 95 20:52:20 GMT

20 years or so ago when I worked in a shop full time, we used a mixture
of white lead and lard oil as a tapping lubricant for steel.  Clearly the
white lead is no longer (never was??) a good idea from a health point
of view, but the stuff worked great.  Somewhere I've seen a no-lead white
lead (!) but can't figure out where it was.  Anybody else know?

Also, lard oil doesn't seem to be readily available anymore.  I think I
saw it listed in an old McMaster-Carr, but has anyone seen it elsewhere?

Greg

[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Bart Smaalders)
Date: 2 Oct 1995 22:03:24 GMT

> saw it listed in an old McMaster-Carr, but has anyone seen it elsewhere?

If you've got any 600W steam cylinder oil handy, that's about 5% lard oil.
Mix in a little Rapid-Tap or other modern goop and you get a pretty handy
cutting oil...

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Bart Smaalders			OS Performance		SunSoft
[email-masked]		(415) 336-6322		MS MTV05-44
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From: [email-masked] (William L. Brown Jr.)
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 04:12:21 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>saw it listed in an old McMaster-Carr, but has anyone seen it elsewhere?

More years ago than I like to think about, I took machine shop in high school.
For lubricating dead centers we used a mixture of white lead and lube oil.
Seemed to work fine and AFAIK classmates have not been dropping like flies
as a result of the exposure.  But then hardly any of us ate the stuff, and
the one fellow who did (or said he did) on a dare really didn't need to worry
about the effect on _his_ brain, such as it was.

I don't recall what we used as a lubricant for tapping.  One very popular
lubricant in this neck of the woods for tapping aluminum is something called
"Ban_Turge Hand Cream."  It's kind of a white gooey stuff and it can be thinned
with water.  I've never used it on my hands, but it seems to work great on
taps.  Since the only place I've ever seen it is where I work I don't use it
in my home shop.   Here I use the green "universal" cuttin/tapping/whatever
stuff from Enco.  Seems to work great, but then I'm probably too dumb to
know the difference.

Way back then I studied machine shop type stuff and did electronics for a hobby.Now I do machine shop stuff for a hobby and electronics/computer programming
for a living.  Go figure!  (Proceed and calculate?)

-bill
[email-masked]
Concord, CA

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From: [email-masked] (gary preckshot)
Date: 3 Oct 1995 17:55:58 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Bart
Smaalders) wrote:
> 
> 
> > Also, lard oil doesn't seem to be readily available anymore.

With good reason.  It eventually gets rancid.

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From: [email-masked] (Andy Dingley)
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 1995 23:04:22 GMT

Greg Dermer <[email-masked]> wrote:
>of white lead and lard oil as a tapping lubricant for steel.  

I presume that "lard oil" is the hard white animal fat that we Brits
call "tallow". I've never heard of white lead being added, but tallow
is still available from electrical wholesalers as a lubricant for
threading steel conduit.

I don't use this stuff for threading, but I do occasionally use it for
plumbing (in the original latin meaning, of soldering lead in the
eutectic phase) . There's a 20 year old pot of it in the workshop, and
I haven't used half of it yet. For threading I just use commercial
goop; Thread-U-Like or somesuch.