Veggie oil?

I was wonderin what the opinion is of y'all yanks on using vegetable oil to run a chainsaw.. i don't mean bio oil, i mean actual cooking oil.

the lads at work reckon it's cool, but i'm thinkin there must be long term effects on your pump etc, aside from the obvious lack of lubrication to the bar and chain..

Vegetable oil?
Are you serious?
Do you mean as an oil/gas mix or for bar and chain oil?

I may be a n00b to the chainsaw world, but this is silly.

veggie oil

I blend about 35% canola oil with heavy bar oil, just shake it up before use. I haven't had any negative issues. Used for about 5 years this way.

This has been discussed numorous times on here before. There are a couple of guys, Elmore and TreeCo (I believe) That are experimenting right now, we are waiting to hear back from them as to the differences in bar wear and types of wood may hold.
Yes fumblar, it's the reall deal, I have considered iton my smaller saws, but am skeptical on the 25" and 32" bars.
Andy

I'm into my 4th year using strictly off the grocer's shelf cooking oil; canola, corn, safflower, sunflower, whichever is the cheapest.

I run 346's and 395's. I like to think I run em as hard as the next guy. Still, to this day, I have had not a single complication with veggie over petroleum based sticky oil.

Cost petro vs veggie, right now, are about the same.


I could ramble on for days on this topics, and have. But really, nothing has changed in performance.
Here are the links to Veggie oil 1 and Veggie oil. 2

Just yesterday I opened up the oiler mech in the 346. Actually, I went in there for the bar tensioner assembly, but to get there you have to pull off the clutch and a thin metal plate and then it's all exposed. I got the tensioner operable again and since I was in there, I pulled the plastic pinion drive gear and looked the oiler system over completely. There was a bit of sawdust particle buildup here and there, just as you might expect so I cleaned that out, made sure all the channels were channeling, etc. One thing I did notice: Where the plastic pinion gear meets with the metal oiler pump gear, exactly where the two interface and mesh, it was perfectly clean and shiny. To either side of these wear surfaces, there was a moderate buildup, not on the plastic drive gear, that one was spotless, but on the metal oil pump drive gear, to either side of the drive area, there was some buildup. I removed that with a tiny screwdriver. Everything elsein there looked fine.

As far as the age of that particular saw, had it power-ported three years ago, so that makes it 4 years old. It has never had anything but vegetable oil through it, and I can say that for all the other saws, too. I get about a year, year and a half out of a bar. Have never lost a sprocket tip, except when you normally would like plunge-cutting or an abusive bend.

Milling, using the 4-foot double-ended bar with two power heads, veggie did fine. 4-foot bar with a single powerhead and a stinger handle, also did just fine. When I put these lesser-used bars away, I clean the bar rail channel out and hit the channel and sprockets with WD.

Currently I am running 3/8 mini chain on a 14" titanium carving bar powered by an 8-pin sprocket on a power-ported 346XP. I'm pushing this setup hard and the veggie oil is performing as consistently as it has in any other bar/chain system. Tree Brothers, I would not lie to you. If you are a commercial guy and you USE your saws, it is fine to use veggie in your oiler tanks. If you are a homeowner and the saw sits on the shelf for long periods, I would recommend regular bar and chain lube. In doing the search above, I came across a thread I missed about occasional saw users and corn oil.

Commercial guys, I will offer to answer any question you could possibly come up with, but I know there are other guys who've been using veggie for multiple seasons. I invite them in to have a say.

aww you guys! thanks! you've really set my mind at rest!

that's an interestin idea, shakin sum standard oil in with some veggie..

it's nice to know that yu dudes even use it on bigger saws. i've just went and bought six litres of sunflower oil, for about £3. i think that's like $5. a fraction of the price oregon or stihl or husqy oil would cost. you know, even if veggie isn't quite as good as mineral oil (which doesn't seem to be the case lol), i don't mind buyin another bar and chain a year, rather than gettin cancer from handling the dodgy stuff.

thnaks again

Hey Tree-machine, any problems with using cooking oil in the cold? Usually have a couple months here where it stays around 20 degrees or lower. Does this stuff harden up in the cold?

With or without a tacking additive?

I find it a little hard to believe that you could run vegetable oil or any other light weight oil as a bar and chain lubricant without a tacking additive and not do any damage, especially with longer bars.

jomoco

treemendous said:

I blend about 35% canola oil with heavy bar oil, just shake it up before use. I haven't had any negative issues. Used for about 5 years this way.

Click to expand...

What would be the purpose of blending the oils together?

I use that crappy poulan bar oil...
and I have to replace the bars every couple / few months.

treemendous said:

I blend about 35% canola oil with heavy bar oil, just shake it up before use. I haven't had any negative issues. Used for about 5 years this way.

Click to expand...

why bother????

There are both environmental and health reasons for running vegie oil. Also, in this day and age, if you need to ask why we should reduce our dependence on foreign oil, you should be riding to work in a short bus, and then led to your work site with a leash.
A properly sharpened and adjusted chain needs very little oil. I can run a tank or two with virtually no oil, before the chain tightens up. Then a few drops of oil, and it's good to go some more.
Typical homeowner types need gobbs of oil to keep things going. Think about a dull saw, a two hundred and seventy pound guy leaning on it with one hand, the other holding a beer, a cheese dog, and at the same time smoke pours out of the kerf.
How do you know if you suck at sawing? You claim an oiler is not fast enough, or you put a faster oiler on your saw (unless you're milling).
Yeah, sure, the reason the bar is smoking is because the oil isn't good enough...Rolleyes
Chew on this: A sharp chain, with proper angles, feeds and cuts with almost no friction on the bar. If you're pushing in the cut, smoking bars, and feel the need to turn up the oil adjuster past half, you suck.

I think Mike hit the doggy on the noodle. If you don't or can't keep your chain sharp and bar maintained, you suck.

Of course, we say you suck with love and affection because there are probably dozens of threads going into the finer nuances of chain sharpening, from racing chain to pro chisel to homeowner chain. We would love to teach you how to properly sharpen your own chain. There's no real magic to it.

I had an apprentice once, a couple years back, thought he was hotshot bringing his own fairly new saw to the jobsite. I embraced this, until I saw him tipping the gallon jug to oil his bar. I ask why are you dumping oil onto your bar? "Frickin oiler doesn't work." Have you looked at the oiler to determine that?" "No, it just doesn't work." "Pull your bar and chain off."

Sure enough, the little hole in the chainsaw bar was plugged. As well, the rail channel was pretty impacted with crap. In severel minutes I had 'fixed' his oiler mechanism.

This stuff happens. Even if your oil is flowing well, a dull chain will wear your bar/chain system faster than ANYTHING. Not doing basic cleaning and maintenance on you bar will result in a new chain going bad more quickly.

jomoco said:

I find it a little hard to believe that you could run vegetable oil or any other light weight oil as a bar and chain lubricant without a tacking additive and not do any damage, especially with longer bars.

Click to expand...

That was my apprehension at first, too. But hundreds of tanks later, and a lot of other arborists coming up with the same results, the new awareness is out: Vegetable oil lubricates as well, or better than petro-base oil. Given all the environmental, health and foreign oil concerns, unmodified, supermarket-grade vegetable oil is superior.

Beo said:

Hey Tree-machine, any problems with using cooking oil in the cold? Usually have a couple months here where it stays around 20 degrees or lower. Does this stuff harden up in the cold?

Click to expand...

It never 'hardens up'. It does have a freezing point, like most all liquids, but it doesn't go from liquid to solid. It goes from liquid to a sort of gelacious slurry. This does not affect the lubricating properties and ya gotta know, a few moments in a warm saw and you're gonna have liquid oil again, and that part you have to keep in mind. When pouring from the bottle to the tank in sub-freezing temps, it still flows just fine. At around 5 degrees above zero, I have found, is the point where the stuff gets firm enough to be an issue (keep the oil in the truck on the way to the jobsite). For really cold weather I store the veggie oil into a bottle that has a smaller diameter spout than the opening of your saw's oil tank. This way you don't 'pour', but rather squeeze the oil bottle and shoot a 'tube' of oil into the tank. If the saw is hot, you can watch the opaque slurry turn into clear oil again soon after it gets inside there.

There are three or 4 veggie oils you'll find on the store shelf; corn soybean, canola and 'vegetable', which is either one of the above, or a mixture. One of these is less saturated (or more polyunsaturated), a term unimportant to us, really, but the more unsaturated, the lower the 'freezing' point (never really freezes from a conventional sense). One stays liquid down to a really low temp, I think it was Canola, but don't quote me, I can't remember which one it was.

treemendous said:

I blend about 35% canola oil with heavy bar oil, just shake it up before use. I haven't had any negative issues. Used for about 5 years this way.

Click to expand...

Woodchux: What would be the purpose of blending the oils together?
Juststumps: why bother????

Tree Machine: There really is no reason to have to do this. I offered my entire stock of saws and chains to test the veggie oil theory. If it didn't work, the worst that could happen is it would make the saws go defunct and I would have to replace the saws. I still have the same saws. Bars have been swapped, but along the timelines that they would have anyway.

Keeping your chain sharpened and bar maintained are what will keep you cutting efficiently and offer long lives to your consumable parts.

yep i reckon mike knows what he's talking about. i do very little felling work or even much ground work at all, coz i'm usually in a tree. so the saw i use most is a 200t, which obviously has quite a short bar and doesn't actually do that much cutting. it might be a bit different for the lads who do proper forestry. but, like yu guys say, chain and bar care is surely the trick.

by the way, tree machine, your comments are really great, but don't yu have a life?!! either that or yu type incredibly fast... lol:notrolls2:

Stihil makes a bio bar oil at 20 bucks a gallon.they don't have it stock most of the time .

I buy 5 gallons of canola oil and mix in 1 gal of LUCAS heavy duty oil stabilizer and blend with a paint stirrer on a drill. Works EXCELLENT, has the same tack as reg bar oil and is very cheap.

Bushman said:

Stihl makes a bio bar oil at 20 bucks a gallon. they don't have it stock most of the time

Click to expand...

You shouldn't have to shell out four hundred percent more per gallon, just to be environmentally conscious.

We did our research last year on what the tacking agent was, what it was made of and how much of it went into a gallon to make it sticky. Our interest was to see if we could find a source of tack concentrate and add it to veggie oil (for those who held tight to the belief that a tackifier was necessary in a bar and chain system).

I actually got some of this pure 'tack' to try out last Winter. It was VERY thick, sticky, viscous and water insoluble. It mixed and dispersed poorly, especially when cold, and if you got it on anything, ya might as well throw it away. I tried it out on one gallon of pure veggie and as you might think, the bar and chain were lubricated just fine. But, at that point, I had been two-going on three years on pure, unadulterated veggie and the bar and chain had been lubricated just fine.

This was a personal, unscientific comparison, and a one-time deal. My finding was that you could put more time and cost into tackifying your veggie oil, but it was truly not worth the effort. I may be biassed, but that doesn't change the results I have seen and what others have experienced.

tam said:

by the way, tree machine, your comments are really great, but don't yu have a life?!! either that or yu type incredibly fast... lol:notrolls2:

Click to expand...

Ha! I am the world's slowest typer. This reply alone I started yesterday, worked on some last night and will finish this morning over coffee.

I have a life, and a business that can work me from daylight til after dusk. If I'm contributing here at Arboristsite while I can be out climbing, I am losing money (opportunity cost). I have to accept that. However, this is an environmental and health cause that can have an impact industry-wide, in a positive manner. Other than those who sell petro bar oil, or those who produce 20 dollar a gallon sticky veggie oil, everyone, including the environment, is a winner.

It's past 10 am right now, another two hours of workday has slipped past. I'll continue sharing information and answering questions as long as it takes.

And please note, I am not the first arborist to use veggie oil as bar and chain lube, and it was not originally my idea to do so (credit my wife, Elizabeth). However, this is a topic central to every single arborist out there and I've volunteered my saws and efforts to find a better way. I risk being the class idiot if oiler mechanisms begin to self-destruct (woulda happened by now), but if your work clothing doesn't cross-contaminate your children's sleepwear in the washer, I'll gladly take partial credit for that.

If we consider ourselves stewards to the environment, spraying raw petroleum oil onto our clients' properties and onto our clothes and tools and onto the trees that sustain our incomes, well, we should all consider who we say we are, and what it is we are actually doing. Action speaks louder than words.

Switching to veggie oil is a painless, cost-free change requiring no modifications whatsoever. You just have to get over the longstanding brainwash that petro oil is somehow superior and that a tackifier is truly necessary. Big oil has created the distribution and manufacture and the successful mass mindset that sticky petro oil is what needs to be used in our saws. We have only recently questioned this longstanding socially ingrained belief, and it is just that; a belief. The actual lubrication and physics and biology make a clear statement that there is a better option.

Think about it. We are going along with the ways passed down through generations. Was this the best option out there at the time this all began, or was it just something that worked, so we went with it. Maybe we should look at the use of petro bar and chain lube as an old habit, a conventional practice that, like a complient flock of sheep we have just gone along with, 'just because' it's always been that way. We are not sheep. We are individuals comprising a sector of the green industry. We make our own choices.

bioplus?

I recently got some of the bioplus from Stihl, I thought it was a great way to go, so much so that I paid for it out of my own pocket for my guys to try.

TM it seems like you don't believe it is any better than grocers shelf cooking oils, is it any worse? is price the only reason for this?? I only ask because as a municipality I have to put out purchase orders for equipment I need. I can only imagine what the guys in purchasing would say if I tried to get a P.O. at the local grocery store!

I also got some environmentally friendly synthetic oil for our 2 stroke mix, any thoughts on this?

I appreciate your sharing of knowledge and agree that if you're gonna talk the talk about being a steward of the environment........................

Thanks

OTG BOSTON said:

TM it seems like you don't believe it is any better than grocers shelf cooking oils, is it any worse? is price the only reason for this??

Click to expand...

I mention price, only because it's one of those universal tipping points. I mean, 20 bucks a gallon??? The commercial bio oil, we found last year was comprised of something like 98% canola. The Tacking agent itself was like 4% active tacking agent dispersed in 96 % canola (or something) making the whole mix better than 99% canola. So for the fraction of a percent of tacking agent in the veggie oil, you pay dearly for that right to say "I'm environmentally friendly." My point is, it doesn't have to be so painfuly expensive to use something that will ultimately be spun off your bar and chain and into the environment. The reason I don't believe a tackified bar oil is any better than straight veggie oil is because the results have shown this to be true. Untackifed bar lube (straight veggie) lubricates just fine. I have run hundreds of tanks of veggie through at this point. So have a lot of other guys If there were negative implications, it probably would have surfaced by now.

OTG BOSTON said:

I only ask because as a municipality I have to put out purchase orders for equipment I need. I can only imagine what the guys in purchasing would say if I tried to get a P.O. at the local grocery store!

Click to expand...

If I were a municipality, I would purchase the stuff in 55 gallon drums. If you're convinced tack is necessary, mix in a bottle or two of LUCAS heavy duty oil stablizer, available at most auto parts stores.

OTG BOSTON said:

I also got some environmentally friendly synthetic oil for our 2 stroke mix, any thoughts on this? Thanks

Click to expand...

That's out of my realm of knowledge. The chainsaw forum guys would definitely have the know on that.

Thanks TM