Home Spindle Lube Test

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! :^)

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.

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.

"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.

Inpep: I just went back and re-read your explanation. It makes perfect sense to me and i have nothing to argue with you about on this. In fact, i would even go further in saying that one can use too heavy of a viscosity lubricant, which would result in increased drag and / or less than expected results.

I still don't get where we are "diverging" on what we are looking for as an end result though. Isn't the goal of a lubricant to reduce external frictional losses to a minimum without introducing further drag into the equation of its' own accord? I understand about viscosity, "shearing" of oil, the use of fillers to widen thermal stability, etc...

What i'm getting at is this: If a product is the slipperiest substance known to man, and it is both thermally and chemically stable for the intended use, how could system losses or internal drag be reduced any further? Obviously, i'm taking into consideration that the mating surfaces are properly machined, etc... Help me out here, will ya? Sean
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