Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What is WD40 good for anymore?

We have the winner. The original formulation of WD40 was majority fish oil. I understand that has been removed, which would explain the decrease in popularity as fish attractant.

Locks mostly ...

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It never had any fish oil
That's an urban myth, like most of the claims made about it

http://wd40.com/cool-stuff/myths-legends-fun-facts

Myth: WD-40� contains fish oil.

A friend of mine, his grandfather did this. He was a union wrench most of his life.

This is going to be a wild ride. Please bear with me. If I had not witnessed it myself . . . you get the idea. So much for the disclaimer.

Back in the day when I was an up and coming shaman, folks used to be amazed at how much odd stuff I had in my dorm room, then my apartment, then my house that gradually became the Black Hole Coffee House. It developed a mythos. The word on the street was that there was no gravity. My place just sucked. There was a myth about the large green chair I sat in. Supposedly it had a small black hole, a naked singularity, residing in it. There was another one in the war surplus Hicks Pack I carried when I was out. I was a budding young performance artist, so you really never knew what was going to come out of that pack or out of the chair. The myths began to grow and swirl. There was a monthly column in the local underground magazine. I had my own comic book. I was performing every weekend at the Cafe Nior. It was my buddy Kenny's place. He'd meant to call it Cafe Noir, but he couldn't spell.

WD-40 played an interesting role. Supposedly, I filed things in my little mini black holes in sort of a modified FIFO method. So if you asked me to produce a tea cup from the depths of my chair, I might have to produce a ball bat, baby shoes and some Archie comics before I could get at the tea cup. Some things would get stuck, and everyone knew you needed to spray a little WD-40 into the black hole to get it unstuck. This was all part of the schtick.

No here's where it starts to get strange. I've kept a pocket knife on a dog chain in my pocket since high school. Well, one day I was getting out of the green chair and the pocket knife got caught on something in the chair as I stood up. The knife got pulled off the split ring it was on and got sucked into the chair. Try as I might, I could not find it, even though I had seen it go in. I spent a good half-hour looking for that knife.

Then it hit me: use the WD-40. I felt a little sheepish giving in to this schlocky faux superstition. I was alone. There was no audience to amaze. It was just me and the chair. Still, I finally did resort to spritzing some WD-40 into the crack of the chair. That knife must have been severely stuck in a spring or something. The next thing I know this Swiss Army Knife comes rocketing out of the chair, past my head and lands out in the middle of the room. I was shaken.

I had a buddy that was also studying to be a shaman at that point-- an ex-Israeli paratrooper. I called her up to tell her what had happened. E. (I can't use her real name) got me calmed down and fessed up that that she'd seen similar stuff with superstitions in her unit. She theorized that we had all put such emotional energy into this whole mini black hole/ WD40 thing it was becoming real.

I had one more experience with the WD40. This was after I'd given up being a performance artist. I was cleaning a Ruger 10/22 in my chair, and I slipped out the trigger group to clean it. I knocked loose a spring and it went down into the chair. I tried everything before resorting to the WD40, but when I did finally spray WD40 down the crack the spring magically appeared on the floor under the chair. I heard it hit.

There were some physics types coming around The Hole at that time. One was a physics professor at U.C. Bob had worked on the Manhattan Project. There was a discussion one night on how it could all be happening. It was finally decided that the WD40 was causing some kind of breach in the Law of Cosmic Censorship, and mucking with the Lorentzian Manifold.

That's my story. I'm sticking to it. The green chair in question is now down the basement in Angus' room. He says he's still finding strange stuff coming out of the cracks.

I've used it for probably 20 years as a flea spray for my dogs...works amazing. Spray them down from head to toe and I usually try rubbing it in a little, but its hard to hold on to a dog sprayed with WD-40 cuz they immediately start wallowing around in the grass to get rid of the itching as every flea on them tries to escape to no avail - kills them instantly, makes for a nice shiny coat, and it lasts for weeks. Try it, you'll be amazed if your in an area thats bad for fleas.

I have also used it as a previous poster stated for combing out rat tails and knots in the manes and tails of horses - works really slick.

The main purpose of cutting oil is to keep it cool so the stuff should work fine for that.

This
Ps: it taste like fish oil to me

Me Too!!!!

Tolerances of a watch? Seriously?
I think any oil would thicken in cold temps. 65,000? Where is that? I never oil a trigger and I would use grease
for a cam not oil.

It keeps my snow blower chute from clogging if I spray before I start blowing. That's my major use of WD-40. I use it occasionally to remove gummy stuff like sticker residue.

I prefer to use products in their intended uses. WD-40 was intended as a water displacer and a mild solvent. Because it is mostly a petroleum distillate, I would never use it on my body or into a body of water.

I learned over and over again that WD-40 is death itself when used inside a semi-auto .22 firearm. Combined with powder residue under heat, it forms a horrible black tarry goo that completely prevents the action from working. I've cleaned hundreds of .22 rifles brought in to the gun store where I worked, and always had to tell the customer to stop using WD-40 in the gun. Many refused to believe it - and they'd be back in a year or so with the same gun all gunked up.

If used ONLY on the exterior of a gun, it may not be a problem (although it does ruin some finishes.) But inside? Horrible.

I agree completely with what Rocky said. I have seen these problems with .22 rifles, also.

From reading some of these postings I am starting to think that breathing too many WD-40 fumes may have mind altering properties.

Kinda like war.. Absolutely nothing..

I've bought and purchased the stuff by the gallon,....many gallons, and have used it forever on a host of applications one of which is EMPHATICALLY not firearms lubrication. At this point in history, and after years of seeing and hearing about gummed up actions, it would strike me that only the RETARDED would do so.

Pertinent to the quoted above though,....here's another application to AVOID.

Machining, Cutting, Tapping Aluminum ? Yeah, that's OK,it will improve aluminum chip forming processes (though there are better choices).
Be DAMNED careful if your Al alloy has any Magnesium content,.... At a certain point, and under the right pressure / heat condition ANY petrol based solvent will act as an OXIDIZER, and you'll see some very weird smoke,...and wreck some parts too, maybe.

Don't even THINK of trying to use it around the purer magnesium alloys.

GTC

Let me make it clear - I don't use WD40 or any other combo solvent/lube on my guns and I'm not advocating that anybody else does either. I know when I want a solvent and I know when I want a lube and I prefer to use something meant for the specific task at hand.

I just wanted to refute the silly "not a lubricant" idea that somebody always brings up whenever WD40 is mentioned. It may not be a high pressure lubricant, nor a low temperature lubricant, but it definitely is a lubricant.

I can imagine that it would not work well in the dirty environment of a 22 semiauto action. I've also had to use it as a cutting oil and it's not very good at that either. Both are specialized applications require specialized oils for best results.

I've heard the gumming "problem" mentioned often enough that there must be something to it, but I've never been able to make it do it. I suspect that the solvents in WD40 may interact with something else to form a gummy residue.

I got a cabin with better than a 1/2 dozen firearms that stay there... we shoot the chit out of them ..then hose them down inside and out with wd 40 ...no rust and they shine like new.....been doing it that for better than 12 years!

You betcha!

My neighbor and I were shoveling out our cars after a heavy wet snowfall... I sprayed my shovel and the snow stopped sticking -- a LOT less work!

This impressed the heck out of my neighbor so I sprayed his shovel too.

Apparently the WD-40 trick for wet snow and snow shovels never made it here to Sweden even though you can buy WD-40 here.

John

Ever try to get a quality trigger group just right with stones and other implements of destruction? Angles, surfaces, engagement must be precise to the tenths. That's the goal anyway.

65 kpsi chamber pressure plus extra for safety, all to fail in the least destructive way.

What amazes me is something like sear engagement. Not a terribly great amount of force there but the engagement is so slight (depending on design) and the engagement area so small the pounds per square inch skyrocket. Properly heat treated tool steel is necessary in something like a Timney to hold up reliably.

Amazing machines with how many hours of engineering into them only God knows. And that doesn't include the artistry in making them beautiful starting with embellishing even before the arquebus.

Well, I've personally SEEN the results of people using WD-40 in their firearms and it's a product to be avoided for that use.. Although, on the plus side, I've made money from removing/cleaning up the residue..

IMVHO it's a great product to help loosen rusty bolts on some old farm machinery etc., but NOT something to be put on or in any firearm..

YMMV..

Yup,
In our desert temps it can go to a fairly STICKY, waxy condition in a matter of days.
The combination of wax, fine dust and lint, regularly re-applied WD 40 sets up into a nice hard sludge eventually.Seems to be the lever guns and revolvers suffer the worst from this "care".

I'm thinking that trait is probably not as evident in Northern climes.

GTC