At 19:58 -0700 3/7/08, somebody wrote: >...One of its selling points is that it is not petro-chemicalÊbased, >and uses biodegradable ingredients... This comes from the Wikipedia article and this contains a link to a quite nonsensical article on White Oil ("White oil is a home made insecticide spray"!!). One needs to read Wikipedia with great care. I use White Oil daily as a lubricant in French polishing, as do most French polishers. I buy it by the gallon, very cheap. Some years ago I asked my supplier what this oil was and all he could tell me was that it is a _mineral_ oil. French polishers in France call it vaseline oil, and vaseline is petroleum based. If it is a mineral oil, whether got from coal or oil, then it is most certainly "petro-chemical". You can also buy white oil for burning in little decorative lamps and it is also almost certainly the pricipal ingredient in Johnson's baby oil and a host of other pharmaceutical products. If Ballistol is mainly "pharmaceutical White oil: CAS RN 8042-47-5", then I guess it is very little else and can therefore be got for fractions of pennies rather than dollars. There have always been huge profits to be made from putting valueless liquids into small containers and pretending they're something special. I doubt very much whether any harm would be done by wiping centre pins with white oil when re-centring would do any harm, but I'm not about to begin doing so. JD
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