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Penetrating oils
such as WD-40, Break Free, TriFlow and others, are a mixture of solvent
and mineral oil. They are thin enough to penetrate rusty nuts and
bolts and help to separate the rusted parts. Because of the
solvents used in these mixtures, they are extremely harmful to o-rings
and seals. They are not capable of functioning as real lubricants
for machinery- you wouldn’t use them in the crank case of your car or in
the bottom bracket of your Mountain bike. Using penetrating oil in
your Paintball gun will destroy it very quickly.
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Mineral Oils
such as Unique, Gold Cup, Eclipse.: Mineral oils are simply
one of the fractional distillation products from a barrel of crude,
The crude oil got there from animals and plants being crushed by
geologic formation and cooked by geothermal activity over millions
of years. Because crude oil comes from so many different animal
and plant sources, it is a “stew” of millions of molecular elements.
Refining crude
oil into the thousands of products that we take for granted, like
gasoline, solvents, diesel fuel, propane, motor oil, roofing tar,
etc., is a matter of separating gasses, liquids and solids according
to molecular size. Gasses, liquid fuels and solvents have the
smallest molecular size. Thin oils have larger molecules and thick
oils have still larger molecules than the thin oils. There can be
undesirable items no amount of refining can entirely remove. Depending
upon the oil's geographical and geological origins, corrosive
acids, paraffins and other waxes, heavy metals, asphalt, napthenes
and benzenes, as well as countless compounds of sulfur, chlorine, and
nitrogen, remain in the finished product.
All mineral oils have small molecules in them
that are volatile, meaning that the smaller molecules evaporate into
the air. As the smaller molecules evaporate, the remaining liquid
becomes progressively thicker and stickier. This is SLUDGE, and you
can see it whenever you take your gun apart to clean it. It’s that
black stuff that holds all of the abrasive dirt and dust (unless your
gun is lubricated with OUTLAST Oil).
Paraffin is another
chemical component of crude oil, and it can’t be completely refined
out of mineral oil. All mineral oils contain paraffin. Paraffin is
that white stuff that you use to wax your skis, snowboard, or surfboard.
Paraffin is also the part of mineral oil that makes it freeze solid
at a high enough temperature to cause a C02 powered gun to jam in
cold weather or during rapid firing.
The reason why so many Paintball
marketers sell mineral oils is that they are CHEAP.
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Synthetic oils
are made by chemically combining, in a laboratory, lower-molecular-weight
materials to produce a finished product with planned and predictable
properties. Don't be confused by this technical double-talk. What this
means is that synthetics are custom-designed products in which each phase
of their molecular construction is programmed to produce what may be called
"the ideal lubricant." This process departs significantly from that of petroleum
lubricants, whose physical components, both desirable and undesirable, are
inherited from the crude oil from which they are refined.
Synthetic oils are not pumped from the ground. They are man-made. The
synthetics that you will most often encounter in machinery applications
are “Ester based” synthetics, but there ore other types such as
glycol-based and silicones. By mixing certain types of acids with
certain types of alcohols, you get an entirely different type of
chemical called “esters”. The advantages of this type of oil are
that there is absolutely no paraffin to make it freeze solid at high
temperatures, and all of the molecules are the same size so there is
no problem with volatility. This type of oil will not evaporate and
become sludge. NO SLUDGE...EVER.
Other advantages of the ester-based
synthetic that is used in OULAST paintball gun oil are that
it is non-toxic. We blend it with anti-wear and anti-friction additives
that are also non-toxic, and it is completely harmless to all o-ring
and seal materials.
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