Polyurea grease when making lube

Roger Allen

Active Member
I’ve heard people say lithium based and I’ve heard calcium based greases when making lube. What about polyeurea based grease?
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
Never used one but I recall fiver and Ian saying it wasn’t the best choice. Something about leaving hard fouling in barrels at times.
 

Ian

Notorious member
It breaks down under heat and pressure and the grease I chose (Lucas iirc) was thixotropic as all heck, never did well with any wax I tried. At first glance Polyurea seems like just the thing, and it may be, but I never made it work and was always concerned about extremely hazardous products of decomposition.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
which isn't overly a bad thing.
I really tried for thixotropic [controlled of course] with the moly lube.
i tried with several others but they went to goose poop at certain ambient temperatures as soon as you put them under pressure.
polyglycol looks good too [is good actually] but you have to manually mix it with other waxes and you have to watch the temps you heat it to.
[trust me on the heat thing]
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
which isn't overly a bad thing.
I really tried for thixotropic [controlled of course] with the moly lube.
i tried with several others but they went to goose poop at certain ambient temperatures as soon as you put them under pressure.
polyglycol looks good too [is good actually] but you have to manually mix it with other waxes and you have to watch the temps you heat it to.
[trust me on the heat thing]
Trust you on the heat thing? Let me guess, it catches fire? :rofl:
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
I would pay a fair sum to see video of that night.
 

Roger Allen

Active Member
I might just buy me a tube of Mobil moly grease and beeswax and make some 50-50 alox/beeswax and 50-50 Mobil grease/beeswax mix
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
don't go 50% with the grease.
it isn't necessary and it goes too soft in the heat.
I have seen the lithi-bee lubes work when you can see the grease just swirled throughout the wax.
I generally stay at more like 30% by volume of the wax.
now if you got the alox, adding in about 10% of that to the 30% grease mix makes a pretty fair lube.
 

Eutectic

Active Member
The large oil company I worked many years for may have been the first to market polyurea thickeners for grease... (They bragged about it) The thixotropic quality Ian mentions was a great benefit spoke of for 'instant lubrication' to bearings. We in maintenance work used it almost exclusively for a decade or so because our research department toted it the best..... I think electric motor bearings may still use it. BUT...... I have seen bearing failures in the many pumps a large refinery has. A bad failure many times will catch on fire.... Here I saw repeatably a plating in the bearing housing. A plating so adhesive we sometimes sandblasted it off the parts.!!

I was with the "Extreme Lube" thread when polyurea grease was mentioned by several here. I was leery to say the least! Having that plating inside our barrel would be a nightmare! Our bullet lube sees fire after all!

I was amazed in the 60's at some of the additions added to grease! The package and grease plant have huge vats like a huge kitchen blender on steroids!. The bigger ones could do 12,000 pounds at a wack! Common items for the blend were piped to the top (vats were open at top) and an operator, actually greasemaker, added exact amounts. One old formula for wheel bearing had sheep's wool in the mix!

I worked overtime one weekend with a pipefitter who was assigned to this area. He knew a lot about what was used in grease. He started showing me bags of stuff on pallets. Seeing my interest he went to a pallet with small bags on it. "You think grease isn't weird! Look!"
The bags were 15 kilos (so foreign) The product said "Feline Urine"! It had lions on the sack! He told me they were experimenting with some urea grease! I asked around but it was proprietary info. I think polyurea thickener is synthesized these days and I don't know if this dehydrated 'Feline Urine' was just added or processed first.?? I did ask about the feline part and was told it was the best! I saw the bags on that pallet with my own eyes though!!!!! I still wonder 55 years later how 'they' got it to dehydrate though!
 
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RBHarter

West Central AR
Cats run pretty dry anyway ....... Very dense urine , it most of why it stinks so bad and so long . It's probably not much of a step to get the little water out of it and reduce it to comparatively oily crystals ........don't ask . Boarding kennel opps in my youth .
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
Pack rats little balls of mummified dung [and stuff] is all held like that for millennia because of the urine it squirts on it.
 

Ian

Notorious member
Yes Pete, I did a burn test on that stuff (smear a thin film on a plate and hit it with a torch) and it left something akin to mill scale behind, almost like it turned to glass. Cab-O-Sil will do the same thing if you give it one full second with the oxy-acetylene.