Has anyone made "Homemade" grease?

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Howdy Bob grease guys,,

When I started researching grease a while back I thought it would be neat to try and make some from scratch,

It turned out Ok I guess, about a #1 grade, Brown in color, and pretty basic,

it has quite of bit of base oil in it, so should be okay for most applications

Did not try to get fancy nothing special, rather interesting, how this is made,
Basic grease,

Frank

DSCN5968.jpg
 
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Brewed it up in the shop,not advisable to do in the wifes kitchen
that is for sure,,

As far as to much time, hey Once I started on this it was very interesting,

The whole process start to finish, some of it is really fun
 
I can't decide if that looks more like gravy or fudge yum, or just mud. But I commended you for being industrious. About the only homemade grease I've made is when I've drained off bacon grease lol.
 
This doesn't constitute home-made, but I recall around 40 years ago, Dad and I were out fishing in the delta.

His reel had a real (no pun intended) annoying squeak. He held some bacon over the BBQ and then dripped the grease onto the crank shaft. Fixed.
 
Originally Posted By: JZiggy
Looks like it would do great in a Toyota axle!


Classic,

Maybee, but it doesnt have any Molybdendum disulshite in it , next batch I brew up I will go camping North of me Here in Thompson Creek Id where they mine the stuff find some black Rocks, smash em into tiny bits and throw it in there,
 
Originally Posted By: carroll7645
Looks like mush
grin.gif





Whats the formula?


The exact ingredients are a trade secret,

Intellectual property, or proprietary ,


No just kidding, here is what I did, first you have to collect rain water, then soak it in wood ash to form lye, folks call it sodium hydroxide but actually I read leaching wood ash results in potassium hydroxide, either way after a week of soaking you can tell if it has enough of this 'Lye" in it if it floats a egg or potato something like 1/4 of it floating

Then you have to butcher down a critter, for me it was a nice big doe deer with a nice layer of fat

You take this fat or tallow as it is known and boil it, render it down by boiling it, this is called "open kettle grease manufacturing" then you have a soap ,

This is the oldest chemical reaction process known to man, saponification or something like that,

Then you add your base oil, roughly 20% thickener, soap and 80%
base oil is what this stuff was,
 
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Gudday IH8mush.

I've been meaning to drop you a line for a while now. I have played around with making grease.


I wanted to buy a meltable grease to soak (freshly cleaned) motorcycle drive chains in but none were available (Well, not out here in the colonies anyway!) because lithium soap thickeners have replaced all the old calcium ones. The base oil seems to burn before the lithium soap thickener even comes close melting.


So I decided to make my own calcium stearate based grease using 90w oil and see if it would melt. I put ordinary bar soap (contains sodium stearate) in a kitchen blender then dissolved as much as I could into two liters of near boiling water. Then I dissolved as much builders lime (calcium hydroxide) as possible into another couple of liters of chilled water. I mixed the solutions together and filtered out the precipitated calcium stearate. I washed the filtered product with white vinegar (to remove any leftover 'hydroxide), boiling water (to remove soluble soaps) and shellite (to remove fats and oils... bar soap has so much stuff in it that isn't soap). I dried out the remaining powder in the microwave and ground it down fine with a mortise and pestle. I then mixed in a little 90 weight oil until I had a good texture/thickness.


I ended up with a very light brown, almost white grease that melts nicely into chains in a fry-pan on the stove. It thickens up a lot after melting and cooling(I think because calcium stearate is partially soluble in oil) but that is good because it helps keep the grease on the sprockets and chain. (ie, off the back wheel) The oil and soap didn't separate like I thought they might. All in all I think I had a win.
 
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