Knife Oil: A question

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VorpelSword

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I was reading about watch making and repair (somewhere) . Traditionally, the tiny bearing points were lubed with whale oil. Later on various grades light of petrolium derived oils were used. In the body of the text was a short remark that today, a fine watch could be well serviced with appropriately small amounts of multi viscosity automotive motor oil . . .and that does make some sense to me.

What are your thoughts on this in regards to maintaining a fine pocket folder?
 
I wouldn’t put automotive oil in the joints of my pocket knife unless it was the last lubricant on earth. Mineral oil, or the food safe Victorinox lubricant.

Cue: member enters to tell us the anecdote about his great grandpappy using boogers and spit in his pocket knife joints.
 
Well . . ., they were not recommending inexpensive single vis petroleum sourced oil. The recommendation, for fine pocket watches, was for a multi-viscosity synthetic.

I'd like to hear from a folder maker on this.
 
VorpelSword said:
So, is multi-vis synthetic a bad idea then?

Why and how?
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The fact is that it's not really going to buy you anything.

An example of multi-viscosity automotive oil is 10W-40. 10W-40 has the properties of 10W-40 whether or not is synthetic or conventional.
0W-30 has about 65-75% of the kinematic viscosity of 10W-40 at the temperatures your knife or watch are likely to see, so which multi-vis automotive oil are "they" recommending for watches?
Fully synthetic doesn't break down the way the conventional stuff does, and that's the only benefit I could see, but in a knife joint I imagine you're reapplying oil faster than it's able to deteriorate.

I also don't want automotive oils on my clothes or near my food, so I'm going to keep them out of my knives.
 
VorpelSword said:
I was reading about watch making and repair (somewhere) . Traditionally, the tiny bearing points were lubed with whale oil. Later on various grades light of petrolium derived oils were used. In the body of the text was a short remark that today, a fine watch could be well serviced with appropriately small amounts of multi viscosity automotive motor oil . . .and that does make some sense to me.

What are your thoughts on this in regards to maintaining a fine pocket folder?
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It's hard to really judge the question without the context. Who wrote it? How long ago?

I guess my question is why? Are the current favorites in the knife world falling short in some way? Are they lacking something motor oil would provide?

Motor oil smells awful for one thing.

This a case of "If it ain't broke, why "fix" it?"

I guess if you quench blades in Motor oil, you might as well lubricate them with it for simplification purposes.
 
Automotive oil has lots of additives in it needed for the application in a high heat, high stress environment. I cannot see knives or watches benefiting from most of those additives.
 
I don't really have a horse to race with here. It was just an oddball thought.

I recently bought a high dollar (for me) high end folder from a premium maker. The paperwork included an exploded drawing that shows what seems to me to be a large number of small moving parts, many of which shear against each other. It made me think that a sophisticated mechanism like that would need a sophisticated lubricant . . . .too m uch thinking maybe.

The article I recall (but cannot cite) was sometime in the 1990s, perhaps in the watch and Clock Collector's Journal.
 
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