"White gas" used for cooking stoves (think Coleman stoves, laterns, etc) used to be unleaded, additive free gasoline. It's not gasoline now (according to wiki: cyclohexane, nonane, octane, heptane, and pentane.) Naptha also works in those stoves but doesn't last as long. Apparently you can still run the stoves on gasoline if you'd like.
Soybean oil is used in a wide range of lubricant and functional fluids applications:
Gear oils and lubes
Chainsaw bar oil
Compressor oil
Two-cycle engine oil
Metalworking oils and
Wire rope, chain, and cable lubricants
General purpose and penetrating lubricants
Transformer and transmission line cooling fluids
Greases - automotive, machinery, rail curve, track
Food-grade, industrial, and elevator hydraulic fluids
Obviously this is a backwards example (food-grade oil used for non-food applications), and my question was using this plastic oil for food applications.
Fascinating and makes sense. I've recently gone down a rabbit hole on the uses of linseed oil pre fossil fuels, but it's too gummy to ever be used as a lubricant. Do you know off hand which seed oils were used for lubricants?
Haha that's amazing! Hopefully the pilots weren't too phased. Thanks for sharing
Did some further digging and it looks like it does have a tendency to gum. From wikipedia, "The viscosity of castor oil at 10 °C is 2,420 centipoise,[28] but it tends to form gums in a short time, so its usefulness is limited to engines that are regularly rebuilt, such as racing engines. Lubricant company Castrol took its name from castor oil."
"Gutter oil", digou you is any illegally recycled and refined oil. It's not necessarily from actual gutters: the "gutter" can be figurative. To be clear, does include, rarely and in the most egregious cases, literal sewer skimmings, but is also buying used cooking oil from food vendors (like from deep fat fryers and grill traps) and animal carcass rendering. Then refining and selling that oil for food use rather than as biofuel or other industrial uses. It can even apply simply to just using once-virgin frying oil for longer than regulations allow.
It's more common to unsafely reuse oil than pull it from the sewer. This is done everywhere to some extent (bad grease at a fast food joints, etc), but China does it on a bigger scale.
