Part of the lingo also came about because we got the attention of some genuine, professional Tribologists (lubrication engineers) and they speak a different language entirely. One of them, Bruce381, was kind enough to send us a whole bunch of samples of lube additives and lab-grade oils and pure stearates and other goodies to mess with as we came up with different philosophies to test. This was especially helpful because much of this stuff isn't commonly available outside of finished compounds, and we needed to test the effects of some things in an isolated and individual way. We got some stuff like yellow-metal-safe, patented sulfurized ester oil (I forget the trademark name) and a fully synthesized ester fat that Lubrizol makes as a cutting fluid additive called Syn-Ester HTO. Bruce had a solution to just about every problem we came up against. Thanks to him I got to try every synthetic oil type known to man besides fluorinated oil, which we all agreed might be dangerous in vapor state. I tried polyalkylene glycol oil (PAG for short, used in all modern R-134a automotive air conditioning systems because it's soluble in the refrigerant and takes heat far better than ac ester oil) and the stuff wanted to fall out of waxes. Bruce sent some special PAG formulated especially to blend with hydrocarbons so I could effectively test a wax/PAG lube which I called Zombie lube due to the neon tracer dye. We were itching to make lithium brick grease and try the inert bentone clay and silica thickeners, so Bruce sent out a variety of spices from his own lubricant lab and even sourced two kinds of lithium stearates (one was simple stearate and one was a complex) for us to try, and he sent a whole bunch of other odds and ends that he thought might be helpful to the learning process like valve packing lubricant (something I wanted to test and did) and printouts of technical product data sheets that the average joe will never have access to. I have about half a dozen pure base synthetic oil samples to work with ranging from polyolester based (POE) to polyalphaolefin (PAO, like Mobil 1 oil and the Amsoil line is based on) to several pure PAG oils. Fiver played around with some PAG-based valve lube that he had, too. Bruce also sent some Paratac to mess with (neat to have the pure form isolated), and I think Brad got some anti-oxidant preservative stuff. We tested all of it. Instead of going and buying grease, we MADE grease from scratch, and could control the NLGI (National Lubricating Grease Institute) numbers by how much stearate we added, basically #6 is a brick grease, #2 is a wheel bearing and chassis grease, and #000 is heavy oil. Having pure oils and various grease thickeners enabled me to test my wax-free theories to the fullest, making grease heavy enough for lube with only clay, silica, and at least five different metal salts and oils, something that is mostly not available at all unless you make it yourself. Bruce writes in abrupt tribologist jargon, so we had to learn the lingo or be lost. I can't attempt a synopsis of over 3K posts in one thread and many thousands more on other threads on other forums and all the emails, letters, and pm's and many, many late nights trolling lube discussion forums, patent applications, and international lube research publications looking for some magic. I'm still scared to go near Nebraska for fear Mrs. Troj will skin me.
Then there's the Three Amigo's own terms like Titch (a little), Bump (boost or increase a certain physical quality), Smearability and Feather (how a lube flows and thins under pressure), Middle Modifier (Vaseline, HTO, and Cetyl Esters are examples of that) and a whole lot of other made-up stuff that needed made up so we could communicate what we were observing over the internet.
In the middle of all that, Fiver came up with Simple Lube. In context, it's easy to understand why he would call it that, isn't it?
