cyccommute 

Boy, are we getting way off into the weeds



Vidalia or other sweet onions. We grow craploads of onions here in Colorado but they tend to be pungent yellow onions...good but somewhat assertive.

For peppers, I use a variety. Some Big Jims (Hatch chilies), jalapeño, Pasella, and, my favorite, Pueblo chiles. The Pueblo chilies are actually Marisol that are also called Guajillo in dried form. The Pueblo chiles come from the Pueblo, Colorado area and are a bit fruitier than Hatch. The “Marisol” name comes from the chilies growing up towards the sun rather than hanging from the stem. The daily temperature variation we see here in Colorado...100° days and 40° nights...does wonderful things to many fruits.The peppers are sweet and hot. Peaches from Palisade are the best in the world. Cantaloupe and watermelon from Rocky Ford are amazing products that are like nothing you’ll find in your local grocery store.

The recipe for the pasta salad is something we adapted from Smoke and Spice. We added pasta and bumped up the vinegar with a raspberry balsamic vinegar that I make from our over abundant raspberry bushes. It’s also fantastic on vanilla ice cream.

We have people working on butanediol pathways at NREL right now. Some organisms can make it from cellulose sugars and it saves some carbon over other pathways.

The cellulose I make is clean enough to make very good cellulose acetate for spinning. We did about 4 years of work with Eastman Chemical back in the 90s. The cellulose for making cellulose acetate has to be completely free of hemicellulose and our process did an excellent job of removing the hemicellulose. Unfortunately, Eastman’s main supplier of dissolving grade pulp got involved in the project and persuaded Eastman to kill the project. Eastman Chemical went mostly belly up shortly afterward.

robertorolfo

Sorry to break up the the fascinating conversation (no sarcasm), but I double checked yesterday and my mineral spirits are indeed odorless. It's really not too bad to work with, but I can't imagine what the regular type smells like.

stephr1

And here I thought that living in Silicon Valley where there are an abundance of PhDs, there might have been more local responders. Learned something about that Nice that the folks here have a good sense of humor.....bugs pooping plastic....who knew?

OK. My thread kind of went sideways for a bit, but that made it enjoyable. Thanks for the smiles.

So, unless some of the folks here have any more great insight (abt WD-40 vs min spirits, not insects....) it looks like I need to get some odorless min spirits and use that as my cleaning base. Dip, wipe, repeat as necessary, then lube (or grease or wax). I have yet to use the WD-40 on my chain, but it seems to work really well on the ball bearings. And I spray it into a can until I collect enuf liquid to cover the tops of the bearings, so the over/out spray is minimal, but still some there (maybe due to evaporation).

OK. One last question for those who are still "listening"...since it appears that WD-40 leaves a bit of residue in the form of mineral oil, how might, if it does at all, it impact the new application of chain lube (I use White Lightning Clean Ride). Will the mineral oil left over reduce the lubrication qualities (as in keeping the Teflon, or whatever the white stuff is, in Clean Ride) from sticking to the chain?

Thx again for all the input. Fun to learn something new in all the years of riding....cheers....

Iride01 

Mineral oil is lube. The only question is whether that particular ester of mineral oil is a decent lube for the purpose. I don't see any issue. When you add other oil too it, you'll either displace most of it or at least you'll have the protection characteristics of both.

In my mind, the only thing you need to worry about is having residues oily or otherwise on brake surfaces and surfaces to be painted or glued.

cyccommute 

The mineral oil from the WD-40 won’t have too much impact on the chain lubricant. The solvent in the White Lightning will dissolve most of it and flush it away. Any left over will probably just dissolve into the wax and soften it a bit. You probably won’t notice any difference.

cyccommute 

My only quibble is that mineral oil isn’t an ester. It’s an alkane with not oxygen in it. Esters can be in some lubricants but not mineral oil.

Everything else you said is spot on.

stephr1

Thx. I thought I read, or heard, that somewhere. I appreciate the confirmation.

Cheers....

Iride01 

Yeah I sorta thought that wasn't correct. I googled to see if I was misusing it and the first result showed I was wrong, then another result made me think maybe it was okay, so I took a chance.

For me it was a handy way of saying mineral oils are not created equal. I'd never say with any certainty that mineral oil sold as a laxative is the same as mineral oil sold as a chain lube or used in formulations of WD-40 and others.

cyccommute 

Yes...to go further down a rabbit hole...mineral oil laxative is just a food grade of the mineral oil used in WD-40 and the mineral oil used in mineral oil hydraulic brake systems. It may be a slightly different viscosity...the viscosity is based on the molecular weight...but it’s the same stuff. It’s not metabolized because it’s a hydrocarbon and doesn’t really have any active sites that anything in our digestive system can latch onto to use.

WizardOfBoz

Some Finish Line products contain Teflon(R) fluoropolymer which provides some lubricity. In general, my take on Finish Line clearner is that they've chosen to use a bit lighter hydrocarbon base (more heptane, which has 7 carbons, than min spirits which is comprised of mostly c9-c12 compounds and has a higher (safer IMHO) flash point). But to the point of this thread: the Finish Line cleaner has about 1 % of isopropanol! But just to be clear: Teflon does not dissolve in just about anything. It doesn't melt. It can be chemically attacked by some substances but nothing even remotely similar to stuff a normal cyclist would have or would want near their house. You can degrade it if you have a nuclear reactor with extremely high gamma radiation flux. It degrades before it melts (die cast PTFE stuff is often made with powder technology: the PTFE powder is put in a die, compressed, and heated. The powders don't melt but they do rearrange to provide a solid product). But to be clear: NOTHING you use is going to dissolve PTFE. The PTFE in dry lubes is normally not straight PTFE, but has other chemical moeties stuck to the ends, but still, it ain't dissolving.

I suppose that there are some dry-lube products that use wax to suspend PTFE compounds, and for those the Finish Line product or min spirits will dissolve the wax and (I suspect) will suspent the PTFE compound and remove it. Other dry lubes have PTFE reacted with non-PTFE end groups. So for wax or non-wax PTFE lubes, physical removal is another matter. Some end groups allow PTFE to chemically bond to metal (ergo, non-stick PTFE pans). Other non-PTFE end groups allow the compound to physically bond to surfaces, and its this physical bond that could be broken by solvent or detergent. But typically the PTFE compound physically wears off, so if you clean the chain and sprockets normally after significant use, there's not a huge amount of the polymer left to get rid of. Besides the point. There are probably solvents that would remove 100% of the fluoro compounds, but most of them are probably EPA-restricted refrigerants that you can't legally buy* (lower molecular weight perfluoro compounds). But if you have PTFE compounds still stuck to the metal, why remove them? They're still lubricating. They don't attract dirt as much as oil or grease-based lubes do. Leave them be, and relube with some fresh dry lube.

I go back to the simplest, and cheapest approach to cleaning chains. The Sheldon Brown method. Chain + min spirits in a plastic juice bottle. Shake vigorously. Pull chain out and wipe pretty dry with paper towels. Allow to futher drip dry in a safe place. Re lube and reinstall (or vice versa). Then you get to go on a ride while the the folks using three-step processes and arcane, expensive, or fanciful solvents sit in their garage and breath fumes.

But to reiterate: There's nothing you have, or would want to have in or near your house, that will "dissolve" PTFE. Other solvents or detergents might knock the PTFE off the metal. But I don't see the point in that.

*Unless you are EPA-certified under their Section 608 refrigerant rules**
** Which I am.***
*** And I would never use such solvents for cleaning bike parts. Way too much work, and too expensive, and nasty to the environment.

noglider 

@cyccommute, can you give an example of an application of using Simple Green as a detergent? I stopped using it entirely when you warned us about it and said mineral spirits does a better job (because there is no water) and because of the environmental cost of using Simple Green.

Speaking of scents, Tri-Flow smells like banana bubble gum, and Simple Green smells like Coca-Cola.

cyccommute 

I use it sparingly on frame grime. Leaks of grease around hubs and bottom brackets, for example. If the bike is particularly dirty, I’ll take it to the car wash.

Triflow uses isoamylacetate which is commonly known as “oil of banana”. It’s used in foods and other places to for banana flavoring. I’m not sure about Simple Green’s fragrance. It’s appears that they use lemon and sassafras. Coca-Cola is basically lemon-lime with some caramel added for color. Sassafras would give more of a root beer odor although without the vanilla, it might give Simple Green that lemony odor.