White Oil [was Customising a piano]

[John Delacour]

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