Thread: show us your chainsaws

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

on chainbar oil....for many many years I used ...used motor oil...shocking I know,but it cost me nothing.... then got all flash and got cleaner used tractor oil,from diffs etc.... have mixed in a bit of the sticky stuff to make it behave better...for the record Ive never burnt a bar...Mrs came close on the bench saw cutting blue gum. have sorted that wee issue,the bullnose blade wont be helping it either.
fellas down here were selling 20litr drums reasonably cheaply so I am using good stuff now.
IM TOLD the stuff they drain out of pivot irrigators is primo as is very similar to chain bar lube.... it should still be clean as they dont do anything fast LOL.

Yep a basic gear oil. Nice and sticky enough tack to stick to gears circulating will make for a very effective bar lube. Only thing with that is it has a fairly robust additive pack that is quite persistent in the environment - and also it might be so sticky that it gets cloggy with wood dust fairly quickly. There was a guy in Tok selling 200's of waste gear oil out of trucks - he'd get a couple a week. If I recall he was doing them for around twice what the oil recovery types were offering back then, so a little under half price of the cheap bar oil. A significant saving if you were out of the eye line of the greenies (or repackaged it into Stihl or Husqy bottles haha).

I ran into a bit of a curly issue with those people at one site, got a 5L of bar oil from Repco on the way through along with some other parts - it was the Aussie outfit's offering and comes with a spiffy blue dye. The blue dye is great for seeing if your bar is getting enough oil, but apparently the envirocompliance types can see it too and that makes it verboten!!! Had to go and drive back to the nearest town and the only thing I could get at that time was a bottle of 20w50. But it was 'invisible'.