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Home Spindle Lube Test

In anticipation of an phono preamp switch I gave my 30+ year old Dual 1219 turntable a lube job. It's rim drive so the platter spins freely with the drive disengaged. The test involved only common household lubricants that have other uses.

Procedure: clean the mating surfaces with 99% isopropyl alcohol; lightly lube all sufaces using Q-tip; spin platter by hand at high speed for a few minutes.

The test (taken at 58F degrees room temperature): Engage drive at 33 1/3 then disengage it, noting how long it takes the platter to come to complete rest. I repeated each test once to verify the result. The results in the order tested:

Light machine oil - Gunk Household oil: 105 seconds
Bicycle bearing grease - Castrol Synthetic: 65 seconds
Automotive motor oil - Mobil 1 grade 0W40: 160 seconds

Note: when mounting the platter on the spindle, with Gunk the platter seemed catch as it slid down. On dissasembly, the Castrol had coated the surfaces reassuringly. I left the Mobil 1 undisturbed!
rockvirgo
lgrodhaus
4 posts
 
Now that's the kind of post that makes this site truly interesting and worthwhile. Bob, your expertise is appreciated. My Gyro SE comes with a thimbleful of oil, which can be replaced for a mere $15.00. As an engineer, I was quite certain that Michell doesn't have a refinery create a unique oil for their application, and that any motor oil would think it was on vacation circulating around in my turntable. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
rockvirgo OP
587 posts
 
Back when the 1219's were new, owner's used to compare who's platter would spin the longest after auto shut off. The Dual manual refers only to an "oiled" plug being pushed out when initially settling the platter.

Bob, correct me if I'm off course but the concept of early Mobil 1 was to create a more uniform concentrate of unwinding long chain polymers for the sole purpose of having an abundance of them to shear off. Isn't this molecular shearing the definition of lubrication itself?

Blast from the past: addressed the assembled 1974 U of D Chem.E graduating class with an unsober yet complete rendition of J.D.Salinger's The Laughing Man. Go Hens! :^)
inpepinnovations1e75
395 posts
 
A light sewing machine oil is all that is required.
Of course, I know that someone is going to start hearing differences in the sound of the oils, probably because the different viscosity oils will have differing damping and resonances on the speed of the table and vibrations cause by the slightly wobbling spindle. (All tongue in check, of course!).

Bob P.
inpepinnovations1e75
395 posts
 
Rockvirgo, yes to a point. But for this "shearing" action to be of benefit, the lubricant has to be strong enough to handle the load imposed on it by the two mating surfaces so that the surfaces DO NOT touch, but are in fact sparated by a continually shearing liquid. That is why water is not a very good lubricant, even at medium low loads. That is why a minimum viscosity is necessary for a lubricant to be successful.
Also, synthetics, as you have pointed out, have long straight chain molecules as opposed to the conventional oils which have a mixture of ring and branched chain along with some long chain molecules. Its not so much the molecules breaking up that is the "shearing" as it is the separate molecules moving against each other. Long or straight chains tend to slip by each other more easily than branched chains.
dan_ed
2,451 posts
 
"Of course, I know that someone is going to start hearing differences in the sound of the oils"

Yep, I heard a difference. Interestingly it was the lighter stuff that I found to have less bearing noise, but keep in mind the turntable bearing I'm referring to, a Music Hall table. Don't really care why and it was only audible on those quite passages. BTW, just for the record I'm not advocating that anyone use water on their bearing.
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