As I said in my first post and restated in my second, my main beef was people purporting that you "need" grease in high stress points, as if it is somehow better at handling stress/shock/wear than oil. This is as untrue (to the degree that anything can be untrue, which is better left to debate by philosophers), as perusal of any lubrication engineering textbook will verify, and unless serendipity had a very good quarter century, the same texts were consulted to concoct these modern high tech greases and lubes. As to "synthetic grease", most modern greases of which people are talking about here (lithium complex, sodium complex, other non-petroleum complexes) are "synthetic" greases. SAE standard tests specifically designed to test properties of greases and lubes indicate that they do not perform as well as the synthetic oils when it comes to lubricity, shock resistence, temperature stability, wear resistence, film strength, etc. Do they work? Yep. I like and use tetra grease, and am becoming increasingly fond of "mid-weight" slide glide.
Actually while discussing this topic at work someone recalled Enos saying the same thing about his cleaning regimen in a phone call. I guess I picked the wrong greaser pro-shooter to use as an example, and I wish I would have heard that earlier. I've read a lot of these grease vs oil debates, and those names are among the most common that pop up in defense of grease. Oh well. Besides, I'm merely discounting what they say about what they say about grease properties, not the experiences of the users who here post. Grease may work better in their guns, but it won't be due to any increased physical properties of grease other than its resistence to displacement/dispersal. Until someone can explain the mechanisms that make grease superior to oil in terms of stress/pressure/load, and can create experiments that repeatably produce these results, I will side with the engineers.
Is it possible that greases in the future might surpass the best oils of today? Certainly, and I hope that they do, as that will make them even more useful.
To keep things civil I shall refrain from any prolonged discussions towards what I think about modern science and theories, much of which I believe will be proven wrong by a certain great event coming in the future.
Ooooh. Spooky!
Besides I believe that my bee example expounded on the lack of barriers to science and the dangers of perpetuating falsehoods.
As harrydog said, its all academic really. Both will do the job, provided proper selection and maintanence. Just be careful of the "it works for the competitors, therefore it must be the best for me" argument. Or you might end up like me, still waiting for my Air Jordans to improve my free throw shooting.
