running Maguras on baby oil last 2000km and cannot tell the difference

[steve216c]

DISCLAIMER- I did this to satisfy my own curiosity- and am happy with results. Constructive comments and criticism or sharing of experience welcome. Burning at stake for committing of sacrilege on a Rohloff bike not so welcome 

So I bought a 10 year old Rohloff hub bike in October last year as a treat to motivate me to ride more often after suffering a stroke. As bike was not full price or fault free, and having diced with death in March 2019, my fear of breaking expensive things is less than had I paid for the bike new. My curiosity to tinker for solutions has grown exponentially as I put on some km on that hub of mine.
So I posted yesterday about IKEA candle wax to lube the chain. Today it is baby-oil. Drug store own brand unperfumed and similar to Johnsons baby oil- jumbo cheapo bottle purchase from when the sprogs were smaller than they are today and still 80% full as this appears to be a never ending bottle.

Now I am pretty familiar with brake cable technolgy, but my Rohloff bike came with Magura hydrualic rim brakes, a technology I suddenly needed to school up on to keep the bike on the road. I needed to replace the pads (bought 4 sets just before lock down) and I thought that beginning of lockdown would be a good time to pop the new pads in. Easiest brake pads to switch in the world, but then I had to figure out how to adjust the hydraulic screw as the new pads were too close together to get the rim back between- having been adjusted as the old pads were wearing.

Hmmm, which screw should I take to adjust the brake setting...? Eenie Meanie Mienie Mo and... oppps, my hydraulic fluid was all over the patio tiles. And at beginning of shutdown, no chance to pop out and pick up a bottle of mineral oil to refill. Apparently baby oil is nothing other than mineral oil. And my HS11 set up runs on mineral oil. And I had no idea how long before a bike shop would be opening up. And some recommendations on Dr. Google suggested that baby oil works just fine.

Stuck between a rock and a bike rack, I decided to try baby oil. Next problem- how to inject it into the system. Lucky for us Rohloff users, the filler screw for Magura rim brakes seems to match the size of the filler screw on the Rohloff hub oil change syringe set. So after filling the syringe with cheapo unbranded jumbo bottle baby oil, I was able to refill the hydraulic pipe I'd inadvertently drained, and successfully fixed the brakes.

That was 2000km ago. Based on youtube testimonials, baby oil is just as good as branded cycling hydraulic mineral oil alternatives. I have not yet experienced any leaks or problems since resolving my self inflicted brake breakdown- at least not on the bike

Would I service the brake lines using baby oil in the future? Methinks I would. I still have around 70% of a 1 litre cheapo unbranded unperfumed baby oil kicking around that couldn't have cost me more than a pound at the time. And at that price, you can drain and refill your brakes as often as you want with the priceless scent of clean nappies as a bonus to boot. And I think if my never ending bottle finally runs dry- I might even stick with baby oil on the Mangura brakes just because it works and my local supermarket and drug store are closer and cheaper than my local bike shop alternatives.

Interested to hear if anyone else has tried such a fix- and if you were happy with the results- or regretted the experiment

[Andre Jute]

I have over 10,000km on my Magura Rim Hydraulic Brakes and never had them open, though when the bike was delivered I had a rebuild kit (oil, tubing, olives) delivered with it. However, the Maguras are supposed to be sealed for life, so I probably wasted my money, even more so now that I know about your baby oil hack, for which thanks.

If you haven't yet, you'll find the adjustment on the brake grips, on the HS-33 as a thumbwheel (usually red), on the HS-11 as an Allen (hex) socket screw in the web of the brake grip.

I have zero interested in burning anyone at the stake, for offences against the Rohloff Faith or any other. As a young man I was a political exile hunted by the assassins of BOSS, the South African apartheid-era Bureau of State Security, not once but twice, for a couple of my books. So I'm very keen on everyone's free speech, starting with my own. I can't promise you the same restraint from every other Rohloff owner; they tend to be fanatical. As you'll discover in a moment when they confuse baby oil in the Magura brakes with baby oil in the Rohloff...

[Aleman]

Baby oil is a good substitute ... another one is water!!! yep water. TrailTech do a fancy water based "Brake Fluid" that I am really tempted to try in my HS-33R's ... it is supposed to improve the speed the brakes disengage as it's less compressible than oil. ... but then Royal Blood works fine for me so far

[Matt2matt2002]

As I started to read your post I thought you were about to carry out a Rohloff hub oil change.

You still have quite a lot of your baby oil left.
Would you dare.....?

[John Saxby]

I'm beginning to think that "someone" should do a content analysis of the Forum threads since, I dunno, the Ides of March, to test the veracity of the late (and deeply lamented) Hunter S Thompson's mantra, "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro".

Johnson & Johnson/"no-name" baby oil in the Rohloff??  DSMG, where will it all end??

Please, please someone get a reliable and ubiquitous vaccine out there ASAP...

PS edit: are we having a Bonfire of the Verities?

[Danneaux]

By my reading, "baby oil" means it is either immature oil or comes from an horrific source, so I'll stay with more conventional lubes. 

Best,

Dan.

[martinf]

More ecological than whale oil. Unless it comes from baby whales.

[John Saxby]

J & J have been savaged in court for unseemly additives in their baby powder.  Are there tight product boundaries here?

Or maybe we're inching towards marmite/vegemite thinned out with, I dunno -- Dettol?

I once knew a guy who ran a 750 Indian Scout V-twin with stick shift and suicide clutch. He used heavy-duty grease in the gearbox, thinned out with light fluid, and lived long enough to at least tell me the story. (I'm not making this up, tho' he might have been.) Maybe it's time for a Bonfire of the Inanities? (he said, wolfeishly)

[steve216c]

As I started to read your post I thought you were about to carry out a Rohloff hub oil change.

You still have quite a lot of your baby oil left.
Would you dare.....?

Come on, we all know that hub oil is pure synthetic oil. Baby oil is mineral oil. Now, if there were synthetic baby oil I might have wondered this myself.

But, if I do stumble across any synthetic babies, anyone have a tip how to squeeze the oil out of them  

[martinf]

As I started to read your post I thought you were about to carry out a Rohloff hub oil change.

You still have quite a lot of your baby oil left.
Would you dare.....?

Come on, we all know that hub oil is pure synthetic oil. Baby oil is mineral oil. Now, if there were synthetic baby oil I might have wondered this myself.

Having used a synthetic transmission oil successfully in Shimano Nexus 7 then in Nexus 8 Premium hubs for several years now I did give it a thought when I got my first Rohloff.

But decided against it, because at the time the Rohloff guarantee was reputed to be extremely good, so instead I bought bulk supplies of the expensive Rohloff cleaning and lubrication oils in order to reduce the unit cost of oil changes.

Both Shimano and Rohloff hubs have some plastic or nylon parts that might suffer from the constituents of non-recommended oils. But the special Shimano dipping oil kit cost about the same as the Shimano hub itself when I first started looking at the best way to maintain these hubs, so I decided it was worth the risk of maybe destroying my Nexus 7, which was past the guarantee period anyway.

This hasn't changed much over the years. Currently Nexus 8 Premium hubs are £69.99 from SJS cycles, so cheap enough to buy one as a spare. The Shimano Internal Gear Hub Maintenance Oil Dipping Set currently costs £79.99 from the same source. The synthetic oil I use currently costs about £10 for 1 litre, which has been enough to lubricate the 5 Nexus hubs currently in use on the family bikes for several years.
 

[PH]

Re Shimano hub oil - There's a long thread on the Cycling UK forum about this, those with lots of knowledge and experience of such things are not complementary of Shimano's maintenance regime.  What it does it refresh the grease that's already there, but over time that will have moved around and not be where it would do most good.  Some recommend a semi fluid grease such as that used in Land Rover CV joints. I used this on my Alfine and it's been fine, though it wasn't in use long enough for any meaningful analysis.
Re Rohloff oil - I'm just coming tho the end of the oil I bought sixteen years ago, 500ml of each, I have enough hub oil for a few more changes but am out of flushing oil. I know people go on about how expensive this is, but it's worked out at less than £2.50 a year.  I noticed when I recently bought a new hub that the oil is now different, in look and feel. I though that might just be the original fill, but you can see the difference in the size options available from SJS 
http://www.sjscycles.com/supersize/42810.jpg
http://www.sjscycles.com/supersize/42809.jpg

I don't know anything about brake fluid, I went with Shimano options because I like the idea of mineral oil, then totally overestimated how much I'd ever use and bought a bottle big enough for several lifetimes from Epic (Who I'd recommend for all things involved with brake bleeding).