@Mallard4468 posted:Labelle isn't stupid - if they spill the beans, their sales would probably dry up. I suspect that a lot of common products are packaged in small quantities and sold to hobbyists at a huge markup. If we only knew...
My inner cynic wonders if maybe they want to generate demand for spare parts (which you can't get right now anyway, but that's a different thread...).
Seriously, my personal, anecdotal, non-professional opinion is that grease is a lot like changing the oil in your car - the key is performing regular maintenance.
Seriously, my personal, anecdotal, non-professional opinion is that grease is a lot like changing the oil in your car - the key is performing regular maintenance
and that’s the key as stated numerous times,……if you faithfully do routine maintenance, you probably would never have issue even with straight up old school white lithium,….
I think a lot of the hoopla about red-n-tacky is folks think it’s so good because it is so gummy, ( swrr uses the term viscous cause he’s a chemist, I use gummy cause I’m a mechanic) and they see all that pretty red dye swimming around their gearboxes thinking they did something,…which is not necessarily a good thing,….thick goopy gummy grease makes the motor work harder to mush it between the gears,….we have several drums of grease,…..Molly based, high impact, and disc brake wheel bearing grease ( full synthetic) ….2 are Lucas products, 1 is Mobil1……the Lucas man brought us a drum of red-n-tacky he was dying for us to try,…( obviously he needed to unload it) so on a fairly cool day 50’s for highs, we tried that red-n-tacky through our pneumatic grease guns,….the mess wouldn’t even hardly come out the gun!….open the lid, the stuff was just way too thick,….our high impact grease even at 50 degrees still came out of the gun, and it too is a Lucas product designed for high impact ( tie rods, ball joints, king pins, etc.) never had a failure due to that product,…..and that product IMO is just too thick for a model train gear box,…..anyways, I told the Lucas man to take his frozen cherry mud back to where he found it,……for many years, in the gear boxes, I followed bob2’s idea of sparing Labelle, have at it with the lubriplate,…..now, I just use the synthetic disc brake wheel bearing grease, it’s a lower viscosity grease, and pretty much anything I work on agrees with it, so I stick to what works,….I have locomotives measuring in the thousands of hours, with not one failure,…..again, as stated routine maintenance is more the key than any of this scientific stuff,….😉
Pat
