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Lubrication with veg oil?

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codesuidae:
Greetings all,

I'm planning to buy a lister-type engine, initially for backup power for an on-grid home and eventually for service as the primary generator for an off-grid home. Part of my goal in living off-grid is to be as self-sufficent as possible (or at least to demonstrate to myself the capacity to be) and so I'm planning to experiment with using exclusively home-grown seed oils for fuel. If this works out I'm left with supplying an appropriate oil for lubrication of the engine.

The obvious question follows, is there an oil I can produce myself (in the midwest of the USA) that could serve in place of motor oil for lubricating the lister?

Thanks for the advice.  I've just started reading about these engines in the past few weeks, and have yet to get my hands on one, so apologies if my question seems silly.

Guy_Incognito:
If it was me, and if I couldn't find *any* other mineral lubricating oil around, I would probably go with castor oil.
And more frequent oil changes. And regular inspection of bearings and internals (which is relatively easy in a lister anyway)
Dunno how well it would grow in your location though.

A bit of scratching around on google has this little snippet - mainly for two stroke engines though :

http://www.go-cl.se/castor.html

slowspeed1953:
Canola oil works great! It has a higher thermal stability than conventional oils and has very good lubricating properties.

I run it in my 6.9 ford diesel both as lube oil and as fuel I also run it in my small engines (lawn mowers ect) with no issues what so ever.

The best way to implement veggie oil in your lister is to use your crankcase as a fuel tank the canola is gravity fed into the crancase with a float switch and pumped to the injection pump via a small pump electric or belt driven. A 5$ junkyard Honda power steering pumps work very well as a transfer pump and are uncompilcated as they have a remote resivour and only two ports, one in one out.

With this system oil changes are a thing of the past and the oil that is in the crankcase is always fresh and gets preheated as a bonus.

Peace&Love :D, Darren

Guy_Incognito:
I suppose a 'flow-through' system as you decribe would be alright, depending on how much of the stuff codesuidae can grow.

If he can only grow a few bushes ( bushes? ) and get 50 litres of oil a year out of them, well that's enough for 4 or 5 oil changes, but not running continuously.

Ageing and gumming of the castor oil over time would probably be my chief concern. But a listeroid is relatively slow moving and no doubt in india gets by with much crappier stuff and rougher treatment than you would expect. Or what *I* would expect , anyway  ;).

codesuidae - if you can find the viscosity and other general lubricating capabilities of the seed oil you're using for fuel you might find that -  with care - you'll be able to use it for everything. What you really need is a lubrication engineer with an open mind who doesn't push his companies products as a cure-all.

buickanddeere:
  A "Little dab will do yah" of the zink based "Head and Shoulders" shampoo will fortify the high pressure carrying capacity of the oil so the lifters/cam don't wear.

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