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walrus121
Silver Member
USA
187 Posts |
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Goran
Double Platinum Member
Sweden
2203 Posts |
 Posted - 10/12/2005 : 08:35:13
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We use paraffin oil at the place I work, it�s a base in creams and ointments. It�s a highly refined mineral oil.
Description on our specification: Al colorless, transparent, oily liquid, free from fluorescence in daylight. Practically insoluble in water, slightly soluble in ethanol (96%), miscible with hydrocarbons.
This forum is going to be a laboratory..... |
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walrus121
Silver Member
USA
187 Posts |
Posted - 10/12/2005 : 18:32:36
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If it's not highly refined then it contains carcinogens. I think Vitamin E is added for stabilization to help keep it from breaking down. Important if you are going to use this stuff on your face or your GI tract. Also nice if you are generally going to be handling this stuff.
Applied it all of my pedals (Vox wah, Dunlop Uni-Vibe and foot-controller, Boss BF-2 MIJ, Boss GE-7 MIJ, Boss CE-2 MIT, Ibanez TS9). All have come out great, it even cleaned off the grime on the rubber in the process, except the two Boss MIJs which are still dried up.
Still working on it. |
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Goran
Double Platinum Member
Sweden
2203 Posts |
Posted - 10/13/2005 : 08:23:26
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Walrus: How did you apply the paraffin oil? How much?
Couldn�t you describe the procedure? |
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walrus121
Silver Member
USA
187 Posts |
Posted - 10/19/2005 : 05:29:40
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Sorry I didn't respond sooner, for some reason this did not pop up on my "Active Topics" radar screen.
Typically what I've been doing is using a cotton swab to apply the mineral oil to the rubber surfaces, waiting a few hours (sometimes overnight, sometimes 24) and then wiping the oil off with a paper towel. You will often remove grime from the rubber in the process, and the rubber will become nicely conditioned. It will still be slick for a while, but if it works (and it won't always work, I'll explain later) after a good drying period you will find the rubber to have a nice solid grip. On a Dunlop pedal you will have to let it air-dry for a few days because of the grooves. Some of the oil was still left in some places, so I took a cotton T-shirt-material towel and a credit card and swiped in between the grooves to remove the oil.
On most of the rubber surfaces the rubber has responded very well to the mineral oil. None have responded negatively.
On the two working Boss pedals that I have from the Made-in-Japan era at least one of the rubber surfaces on each one has formed a slick plastic-like coating on it (this is pre-oil I am talking about, i.e. what the pedals were like before I started doing oil experiments on them). The grommets are gone and I am working on finding replacements. My BF-2 (the oldest pedal) has both the pedal flap and the bottom-plate rubber with plastic-like coatings. My GE-7 has a plastic-like coating on the pedal flap and on the outer edge of the bottom-plate. On these plastic-like areas the oil does not seem to be changing the surface characteristics, even after several coatings and soaking periods.  My hypothesis is that contact with chemicals on human skin and/or Armor-All-type surface protectant created a slow reaction to make the coating (you should see what contact with skin does to beautiful rock formations in caves).
I have done further experimentation on the BF-2 and the GE-7 rubber using my kitchen oven. I applied the oil and placed the four rubber-coated parts in the oven on small toaster-oven cookie sheets. Heat was set to 170 F (this is perfectly safe as the paint is actually baked on at the factory). I checked on them about every hour or two as the oil evaporates. The plasticky-coated ones don't really dry up the but the GE-7 bottom plate does. My hypothesis (I am a scientist) is that there is a combination of factors going on.
The rubber is soaking in more oil because:
1. The viscosity and surface tension of the oil is reduced, which is really a product of...
2. The heat is increasing the random motion of the oil and the rubber, allowing them to mix better.
The oil is also disappearing due to evaporation, which is a very small factor.
If your rubber is dry and not slick in any way (possibly a little cracky) I would reccomend trying the oil only approach first. If you don't get good enough response with that try the oil and heat several times, but make sure that you don't leave the rubber in the oven too long without applying more oil, and don't turn up the heat too high.
The plasticky-coated rubber is getting softer through all of this, but the surface has not changed very much. My next step is going to be sanding down the rubber on the bottom plate of my BF-2 with fine sandpaper to attempt to remove this coating. This can't work on the pedal flaps because the surfaces are textured and you have that big BOSS logo sticking out. For those (and for the Boss logo on the bottom plate) I am going to try auto finish polishing compound applied with cotton fiber pads. If that doesn't work I will try again using ultra-extra fine steel instead of the cotton fiber pads. While I was uncertain that the oil was going to do anything to the plasticky-coated rubber, after coming up with the idea of sandpaper and polishing compound I think that I have found the solution to that problem.  Even if the polishing compound does not work on the pedal flap rubber, I am certain that the sandpaper will work on the bottom plate rubber since it is soft again. The bottom plate is really the more important rubber surface of the two.  |
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Goran
Double Platinum Member
Sweden
2203 Posts |
Posted - 10/19/2005 : 07:29:38
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Thanks a lot Walrus121!
I�ll try for myself on some pedal that are drying up. |
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Rubber maintenance
