HAH
i wish i had some, but i'd have to stand in line for an hour to get like one or two stickers, and well, let's just say the window workers at my local PO do not. like. me. at all.
so, someone has been asking me about how to use the lube kits, and for some reason i wrote a novel in response (and this is separate from the instructions i wrote and am including with every order.
So if I'm understanding correctly, I want to use a mixture of oil and grease on the sliders of the switch and the little feet things, and just oil on the spring and stem.
Is there any specific ratio I should be going by for the mixture?
the irony here is that i don't personally lube switches so i have no idea what people actually do with this lube. i just know they want it and they've had to do weird shady things to get it in the past. i'm providing a way to put a single drop of lube OR lube/grease mix anywhere you want. i'm not actually sure if this is how people use the krytox, it's how i personally use krytox, but i tend to lube machine parts, joints and other bushings and bearings with it.
i would just go to the lube thread and ask people how they do it. i know some people (i was talking with nubbinator in particular) like to use a fine paintbrush and just get a sheen, and they use the grease/oil mixture everywhere. however, some people like to do other stuff. i know limmy also uses a heavier mineral oil, but i don't recommend mixing krytox with a mineral oil. krytox doesn't like petro oils, and krytox lasts much much longer than petro oils. just replace the petro oil with a more viscous krytox mix.
as far as ratio is concerned, i've done some testing with the specific combo i have on hand and you can go pretty high, as high as 3:1 oil to grease and still get something that's quite viscous at room temperature. however, the dupont chemist felt that somewhere between 1.3:1 and 2:1 was about right and you wouldn't get much better performance above that ratio; my feeling is that he is probably right. you want the oil to seem a bit heavier and more viscous. viscosity is actually separate from lubridicity. oddly, and especially with these fluoropolymers, you can have a viscous oil that significantly reduces the coefficient of friction. it's kind of the beauty of PFPE and PTFE, actually. you can have this viscous oil that stays in one place, but has an extremely low coefficient of friction.
to see an example of this in a less exotic situation, think of PTFE mouse feet. they are quite slippery, right? however, they're completely solid. although we normally think of coefficient of friction as being proportional to viscosity, that's really only true for certain types of oils, specifically petro-based oils and silicone-based oils. it's not true of fluoropolymers.
the secret to fluorinated materials is that they just don't like other substances. they don't mix with them, they don't get along with them. they're just kind of like
the reason why is very basic chemistry. fluorine is an incredibly reactive halogen, but because it's so reactive, once it forms a stable bond with something, it becomes exceedingly inert. so PTFE and PFPE, which are the class of polymers that krytox belongs to, are all fluorine capped. their polymer compounds are these long strings of organic compounds with really nice properties that we want, and then to protect the polymer stringest, fluorine is placed in a highly stable bond as a cap on every endpoint. to make a macroscopic biological analogy, these polymers are kind of like micro-organisms that form hardened cell membranes and hibernate to hide and survive over long periods of time; tuberculosis does this, as do many other very highly drug resistant bacteria.
that said, there are a lot of friction points in a cherry switch (same with an alps switch, buckling spring, etc.). some of those friction points make the switch more pleasant to type on -- like the distinct tactile bump on a factory green. some of those friction points make the switch less pleasant to type on -- like the scratchy sliding action of a factory cherry black. so it really depends on your preferences. where do you want there to be less friction? _those_ are the points that you want to put a drop or a sheen or what have you of lube on.
once you get into it and realize how amazing this stuff is, you'll find that there's a ton of stuff that can benefit from krytox as well. i lubricate box joints on hand tools with it (feels... so... good..), nearly anything with a bushing or bearing on it, and so on...
just remember that the grease has a 260C hard limit at which the PTFE matrix melts (although the oil in the 206 may start off-gassing before then, it is generally good up to 200C), so it's also definitely good for some automotive applcations, small machines (like 3d printers
), and all kinds of other junk. heck, if you have a particularly noisy door...
so anyway, what you want to remember is that what i'm doing here is trying to get literally the highest end bleeding edge lubricant to everyone as a nice reasonable price. using it is really up to you. it's been a lot of work to get to this point, but i have no doubt that you guys can come up with cool and effective ways to use it.
in fact, here's one: you now how some caps are tighter than others on cherry cruciforms? have a particularly tight cap? a single drop of oil is probably enough to clear that up without contaminating every other part of the cap.
