Using foods for lubrication - fact or farce??

KonaKurt

i got chatting on a train recently to some guy who told me that he "never uses recommended traditional lubricants on his MTB". He told me that instead he uses Lard, high fat Margerine and for his chain only, olive oil. He showed me his bike as we travelled and claimed that he has never had any problems, although he admitted that he has to apply them more frequently than other cyclists!!

I'm not sure how I feel about using food products for lubrication, I'm very enviromentally responsible but wonder if this is going to far..?

What do you all think??

KK.

bike-a-swan

I'm sure it works, up to a point. How well by comparison, no idea! My favourite is the idea of running disc brakes on cooking oil when coming up short of spare stuff...

KonaKurt

Hmmmm interesting. I would imagine that cooking oil would not work well with hydraulic brakes due to poor thermal properties (overheating)?

I remember reading about some crazy Aussie who used honey to lube his hubs, and then got swarmed by hundreds of bees!! How crazy can you get!

KK.

bennett_346

cooking oil must be one of the worst possible things to use in brakes, since its sole purpose is to heat up fast, but each to their own

nicklouse

a waste of food.

Anonymous

I wondering if he has a problem with dogs chasing him, what with all that lard on his chain.

KonaKurt

A waste of food? Anymore than spilling the odd drop or scrap on the floor? Surely it's worth considering and giving some thought, since we are all supposed to be more enviromentally friendly...??

Mind you, I remain sceptical about using any. Although lard in bearings might work... fats are harmless right??

KK.

The Rookie

Cadburys went through a project to replace the sealed greased bearings on their 'wet' chcocalte conveyors, these are now open bearings lubricated by the chocolate that spills off the chocolates on the conveyors....

The first engine oil was castor oil - few early motorists (or pilots) had constipation after inhaling the fumes.

I have heard that olive oil is quiet a good single grade lube, but doubt its thick enough for most bike applications, and something like lard will be too thick to flow back after being squidged out.

Simon

Anonymous

I've used baby gravy instead of fork oil for a while. Does that count?

The Northern Monkey

could you use bacon juice? yunno the greasy fat stuff left over in the pan after cooking?

The Rookie

yeehaamcgee wrote:

I've used baby gravy instead of fork oil for a while. Does that count?

Your forking yoke-ing right?

Simon

cooldad

Presume he took a lot of drugs as well.

camy151

Am I the only person who thought about the last tango in Paris when they read the title of the post?

Anonymous

I couldn't find Tango in France. But they did sell Orangina everywhere.

cooldad

camy151 wrote:

Am I the only person who thought about the last tango in Paris when they read the title of the post?

You must be even older than me.

camy151

36!!??

BlueAdvocate

I assume he uses lard in the summer and oil in the winter.

captainfly

In pretty sure 3in1 oil is veg based, so not that crazy.

I mean. what next people will be putting veg oil in their cars :roll:

cooldad

I had a friend who made bio diesel out of old kitchen oil. Worked fine. You can make it out of old chipfat and some hippie types go round their local chippys collecting it.
The point is oils greases etc are designed for specific applications, and butter is not. It might lube but it won't do the job that grease would.
Why would you want to anyway?

langster

Old used car salesman trick was bannana skins in a noisy diff. But lard instead of grease is a bit of a false economy. Butter on a chain? Someone was taking the proverbial

Northwind

bennett_346 wrote:

cooking oil must be one of the worst possible things to use in brakes, since its sole purpose is to heat up fast, but each to their own

Olive oil works pretty well as a replacement for mineral oil. Not the sort of thing you do if there's any choice though. Cooking oil doesn't heat up much differently from any other oils, its specific heat is pretty much the same.

grawp

I remember hearing once that formula one cars used some type of veg oil as lubricant. probably a load of rubbish but the guy did work for Mclaren.

grawp

Here you go: I lifted this from some F1 forum.

Castrol R dominated in those days.
Guess what, it was a vegetable oil and did not use crude as a base.
Shame that pollution from oil came to F1 shortly after its demise.

Early mineral based oils were actually quite poor in terms of performance. Vegetable oils like castor oil was actually much better, even though they had their own problems.

Today several synthetic oils have their origin in vegetable oils, and can offer advantages similar to castor oil without the disadvantages.

nicklouse

I used to run R in the Minis when I first raced.

it will never go near my current race Mini.