Thread: Slideway and machine oils

I was hoping to whip some up this afternoon, but the VFD on my lathe was not reaching full speed and it took some time to track down why. I'm not sure now when I'll get a chance to make some, I'm as busy as heck at present, but will definitely throw pictures up when I do.

Getting back to the original topic. The way oil sent over from the US doesn't appear to have tackifiers in it. I had been using chain and bar oil on my machines' ways. The way oil provides a MUCH lighter movement compared to what I had been using, especially on the saddle. Indeed it's quite surprising what a difference it made. Now how much is due to not having tackifiers for example I can't say. I suspect however tackifiers have a large influence on the feeling of how much resistance is felt. I'm now very curious to see how it goes in the little surface grinder. As that is a manual machine I found the type of oil I used made a huge difference to the effort required to traverse the table (chain and bar oil for example clearly doesn't work, and quite a lightweight oil is needed). While it's early days, I've been pleasantly surprised so far, and given the price landed, think it was worth the purchase.

Pete

I use Houghton Sta-Put 68 for slideway its very good, the ways are always covered with oil. Heavy chips which falls on the slideways carry away the oils that's when I reapply the oil. 5L last many years.