4 ms·
The magnitude of the claim is contradicted by the lack of circumstantial evidence. If the difference was that stark aren't there old timers talking about how t
by dsfyu404ed 4y ago
The magnitude of the claim is contradicted by the lack of circumstantial evidence.
If the difference was that stark aren't there old timers talking about how the old whale oil stuff was so good and why don't people find gallons of it saved here and there the same way you find lead paint or R12 refrigerant? Why isn't there some body of tribal knowledge saying that transmissions sucked in the 70s like we have for engines?
I don't doubt for a minute that the government would ham-fistedly ban something without a viable alternative and that the textbook engineer types would crunch numbers on the replacement and conclude that "it'll be fine with no changes to our hardware, run it" leading to a higher failure rate, but 8x failure (or even 5x failure rate, to account for increased number of automatic transmissions out there) rate? That's absurd.
I'd love to read the source for the claim but it's a paper version of a trade publication...
- giraffe_lady 4y ago> If the difference was that stark aren't there old timers talking about how the old whale oil stuff was so good When I was wrenching on cars in the 80s there absolutely were! We're talking about 50 years ago so you might need to find some older old timers but this was totally a thing.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoDue to my hobby I hang out with mechanically inclined men aged ~30-70. I have heard them praise all manner of things from years past. If there's one thing they agree has pretty much constantly gotten better with no regressions along the way it's automotive lubricants, at least up until the point where they took the zinc out of motor oil. Now, I suspect there definitely are some regressions, but they're definitely small enough to get lost.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoI don't know how good whale oil transmission fluid actually was btw, I didn't experience the transition. I remember older people talking about how much better it was. But like most times when people talk about how much better something used to be, I assume it was mostly not as good as they remember it.
- zokier 4y agoBut even 70 year old today would have been only 20 years old in 1973 when whale oil was banned, so likely they would have had only very few years of experience if any of using whale oil
- ROTMetro 4y agoThe positraction in my 1967 GTO REQUIRED whale oil to the point I was buying 'New Old Stock' in the 90s.