Sealing Agent

Might be suitable for very short term use, however almost every "plant origin" oil will putrify to an acidic product when exposed to air and certain other conditions.

Acid and metal usually don't make for a good combination.

Don't know your intended use, but there are foodgrade petroleum jellies and such that might be useful.

It really depends on the application (I would say probably no).

Can you please elaborate on your application?

Double boiled linseed oil was used extensively for joints including steam turbine parting planes, like axially split joints. Now a lot of sealing agent are commercially, conveniently available, so we all have almost forgot that wonderful stuff, 'linseed oil'.

Linseed oil was often used as a solvent for Pipe Joint compounds which were a mixture of calcium carbonate and graphite. By itself it would not be as effective I would think as mixed with one of those. Aboard ship we always had cans of an oil/kerosene and graphite mix that was used as a pipe joint lubricant on some services except potable water and steam. Always used it on the steam piping flange bolts/nuts since we didn't want them to rust up on us.

We did use a tan-ish colored pipe joint compound on the smaller threaded connections which looked similar to the Teflon filled pipe joint compounds of today.

I have seen millwrights use a thin layer of linseed oil between the flanges on shell halves of large steam turbines. The steam turbine rep said that the linseed oil was used more as a layer to make the two halves easier to separate years down the road when the turbine was to be repaired or rebuilt than as a way to seal the shell halves. The studs on this particular turbine were around 4-6" OD and each nut had only about an inch of space between it and the next nut. The nuts/studs were torqued to nearly one million foot pounds and according to the rep. if they didn't use the layer of oil it would be very hard to ever separate the shell pieces. I am not a millwright by any means but I have worked around a few when I was installing piping to several turbines over the years. I can only take the guy at his word as far as why they used the linseed oil but It sounded feasable to a pipefitter at the time it was said.

I'll go along with that use. Having had to scrape away a few gaskets in my day because they stuck to the casings and swearing up and down at the idiot who assembled it before me I can see it as being a solution. Some high pressure turbines used a metallic gasket rather than asbestos fiber gaskets and they didn't stick as much, hardly any in fact.

You torque down that casing you mentioned and you just know that any gasket material will be bonded to the metal surface after it runs long enough. We would use the oil/graphite mix on both sides of a gasket on sea water pumps and their flange gaskets but that was more because of corrosion. We did have linseed oil in the stores locker.