Lubricant Substitution - Safe or Sorry?

There are tables of comparisons available but I would strongly recommend against using them if you do not know what you are doing. By far the best way is to know all that is needed to know about the equipment that you want to lubricate and then choose a lubricant from a reputable manufacturer to suit that duty.

The original equipment manufacturer's (OEM) recommendations are a very good place to start. After that a good lubrication engineers advice is useful (not many of these guys are any good never mind which oil company you use) and then read the specifications for yourself and decide what is best for your equipment.

Follow the manufacturer's recommendation if you can. If the equipment manufacturer sells some special stuff for lubricating your equipment go ahead and expect to buy that or do some good engineering to find a substitute (after the warranty is done).

On the other hand the product recommended may be just what's written in the literature or website and is simply another company's brand name lubricant.

Contact the equipment manufacturer and ask them if they can recommend an alternate brand.

If the recommended lubricant has a generic spec in its description like "SAE xxxxx" or "NLGI xxxx" then another lubricant manufacturer will likely have an alternate they can recommend especially if you can give them a more specific description of your application.

A lubrication engineer trying to recommend a lubricant will likely be interested in:

1. the type of machinery,

2. what kinds of bearings, gears, and other moving mechanism parts it contains,

3. operating temperatures both highest and lowest,

4, corrosive dusty or wet conditions in the environment,

5. hours of use per day, week, or year

6. duty cycles,

7. frequency of maintenance opportunities,

8. monitoring methods for machinery condition in general and lubricant levels in particular,

9. consequences of breakdowns,

10. quantities of oil needed at maintenance intervals,

11. methods of lubricant delivery both to the machine and within the machine (could be anything from a squirt oil can in the hands of an operator to a centralized pumped and filtered lubricant distribution system for an entire system.)

Note that the old line oil companies in the USA like Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Texaco, Chevron have long had industrial lubricant product lines. A lot of good application engineering capability applicable to large machinery (like over 3-5 hp) is available there. Their local industrial lubricant distributors will likely have ready access to that body of information or at least be able to tell you how to find it on the internet. (try to sound like a maintenance engineer or foreman when you call them).

Ed Weldon