New Oil Change Info ???

[mickeg]

  Maybe at that point, use excess lube oil as cleaning oil?

I seem to remember analyses of lube and cleaninig oils were posted here some time ago and the cleaning oil was shown to be just lube oil + white spirit.

I remember reading that as well, but also the way those with more expertise than I dismissed it.  ...

I was one of them that dismissed it.  The lab tests that I recalled seeing on a forum, maybe this forum, one of the tests was the type of oil analysis you can do on the oil after you drained it from your car engine, the theory being you might be able to figure out if something in your engine is going bad from the contaminants in the oil.

Or, I think I once saw a distillation test on it, but I could be wrong on that.  That is the type of test that is used in refineries to make sure you have the right type of compounds in your fuel, or oil, or asphalt, or whatever.

I used to work with pollution cleanups, have seen thousands of lab analyses, some more robust than others.  And I was quite surprised that someone did a very inexpensive test that did not say much and from that they concluded that they knew exactly what it was. 
 

[Andre Jute]

We had a broadband outage here and a post I was in the process of writing got lost. It described only some of the ways in which "white spirits" could be dangerous or even fatal* to your Rohloff, and was already pretty long. Now, broadband restored, I see the point has been mentioned, and made moot by George, who knows about these things.

* For instance, many artists' white spirits that look clear and are well-refined have alkyds added to them to hasten oil paints drying. Alkyds (blends of various alcohols and acids) are first cousins to resins which, when the spirit evaporates, set solid whatever they're added to, exactly what you don't want in your expensive hub gearbox. Many of these alkyds are undeclared but they're in the mediums (tech name among artists for stuff that modifies oil paint) which promise faster drying times. Another example: Would you pour ground-up citrus fruit peel into your Rohloff? I have two bottles of white spirits on my desk for instant use that are made from citrus fruits because they smell better; both are a beautiful clear spirit and you need to read the tiniest fine print to discover what they're made of. One, incidentally, is a pencil blender, in other words, a graphite, wax and oil dissolver. It'll instantly wipe the oil layer off your Rohloff's mating surfaces, again exactly what you don't want. And all these are beautifully clean white spirits, very well refined. The generic white spirits you buy at the hardware store, by contrast, is made from an unknown base, and is full of impurities which will remain in your Rohloff after the liquid part of the hardware store white spirits evaporates. Grinding paste is just dirt and oil... Not wanted. Okay, what about health-industry white spirits, usually (at least where I live) a byproduct of distilling whisky, available at the pharmacy as, for instance, hand disinfectant? Uh-huh, no. You don't want your Rohloff anywhere near it. It contains bleach which over the years will corrode the innards of your Rohloff. Anyone say sulphur yet? Even if your white spirits is a byproduct of oil refining, a corrosive component of the raw stock from which oil and petrol is made is sulphur.