Subject: Re: Lard Oil & white lead

From: Mike Rehmus <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 Oct 1995 20:18:10 GMT

White lead is indeed the stuff that is almost impossible
and perhaps illegal to obtain these days.

A good substitute for it if you are using a dead center
would be a way oil or some other 'sticky' lube.  Even
STP would work.  You want the oil to stick around rather
than drip off.

Best regards,

Mike Rehmus

---

From: "John W. Hall" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 95 22:36:37 -0300

On Tue, 03 Oct 1995 23:04:22 GMT, 
Andy Dingley  <[email-masked] > wrote:

>Greg Dermer <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>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.  
>
>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.
>

What we need here is something like a pharmacopaeic (sp?) 
archeologist. Tallow in North America is from sheep or beef and is 
much firmer in texture than lard which is from pigs; waxy rather 
than greasy, but both are solids, not what I would think of as oils 
at all. Is "lard oil" lard with a thinner, like turpentine (white 
spirit?) or kerosene(parafin) added? and is the white lead the same as 
the lead oxide that was used as a pigment in paint until it was 
outlawed, or is it too something else? 

I've often wondered about it since "How to Run a Lathe" says that's 
the stuff that goes in the little hole in the tail stock so you can 
dab it on the center from time to time.

John