Is it possible to get Liquid Wrench in quarts

[mm]

Is it possible to get Liquid Wrench or the equivalent in quarts. Instead of the 4 oz bottles which is the largest size I've seen "nut busters" in.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Page 2016 You can even get 5 gallons

[Richard J Kinch]

Don't be a sucker for "tiny can big label" marketing.

Liquid Wrench is just a petroleum distillate of about kerosene weight. Gallons of (overpriced) kero at the paint store. Diesel fuel would be the cheapest ready source of kerosene plus a few smelly additives.

I've never seen evidence that any of it really loosens nuts, although it does lubricate them after they're loose.

[mm]

I don't think I'm a sucker. I've been using liquid wrench for 30 or

40 years and I think it is different from other things.

That's for sure. I needed kerosene too and it was 7 dollars a gallon at Ace Hardware, (which did have the square U-bolts I was looking for. I think I posted to say that already, follow-up to another thread, where someone said to look in Ace Hardware and he was right.)

I think I'm going to buy kerosene at a fuel oil place. At another hardware store I asked for kerosene and they sent me out to the yard, and the guy there refilled my quart can from a big tank and charged very little.

It worked just today, although it was the stuff that comes in the "Zoom spout oiler", a cylindrical almost clear plastic bottle with a long spout, in which is a movable tube which comes out to make the whole tube about 6 inches long. I call it an oiler because I see the oil for sale a lot of places, but the nut buster or whatever they call it, I've only seen at 2 places, one of which doesn't sell it anymore.

Today I couldn't remove the distributor cap from my 95 Chrysler and was starting to damage the screws, even with a good screwdriver. I think perhaps it had never been opened and certainly not in the 4 years I've had the car. I put some of this on each of them, and waited a couple minutes, and I got both of them. I don't think kerosene is that thin, or that diesel fuel would work at all.

I have 3 bottles, one with this liquid wrench type stuff, one with light oil, and one with 10W-30. Plus 3 empty bottles and I'm tired of buying it 4 ounces at a time, or paying for 4 ounces more than what they sell a quart for at McMaster (2.98) I'm going to make a list of things and order from them. Thanks Edwin and Richard.

[Al Bundy]

mm wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Yes, just pour 8 of them in a quart container.

Sorry, couldn't resist :-)

[Pete C.]

Ditch the Liquid Wrench and order a gallon of Kroil, vastly better stuff.

try it and you'll never go back to LW. It's highly regarded and recommended in the various metalworking, auto and machine related groups.

Pete C.

[hallerb]

call manufactuer and ask.....

they will love your $s

[cornytheclown]

Penetrating oils are just naptha and machine oil...... buy a quart of light grade oil...even automotive oil...get the thinnest viscosity...and a quart of naptha... mix them together.

Its just oil that is thinned down with a solvent....nothing magical about them....they are all the same though many folks think one is better than the other.

[dpb]

...

Well, it's not "just" kerosene, it's a mixture with naptha-like fractions for its penetrating ability. Kerosene or diesel alone don't have the lower viscosity and reduced surface tension to penetrate nearly as well. It definitely has some beneficial effects. One could, of course, make their own blend, but the packaging in aerosols is one beneficial result altho OP was apparently looking for the liquid. Here's Section II of the MSDS which, of course, never gives away the entire secret, but certainly gives a clue as to what is in any product...

Liquid Wrench MSDS Chemical Makeup Info

CAS No. Chemical Name % Range

64742525 Naphthenic Petroleum Distillate 40 - 60 8008206 Petroleum Base Oil 40 - 60

I won't argue w/ the other poster that some more recent entrants may be more effective (Kroil was mentioned, so here is the data from the MSDS for it as well. More stuff, w/ some other trace ingredients, but interestingly (yet not _too_ surprising) the two primary ingredients are essentially the same...

Liquid Wrench MSDS Chemical Makeup Info

CAS No. % Range Chemical Name

64742-46-7 30%- 50% Petroleum Base Oil 78-92-2 1% - 10% Aliphatic Petroleum Distillate 64742-95-6 1% - 10% Petroleum Solvent 111-76-2 1% - 10% Aliphatic Hydrocarbon Solvent 1% - 20% Proprietary Mixture 64742-47-8 20%-40% Petroleum Naptha 123-42-2 1% - 10% Hydrocarbon Solvent

[cornytheclown]

just another thought... buy a nut splitter....they work really well on rusted nuts if you are not planning on reusing the nut....which you shouldnt be planning to anyway unless you are really that cheap.... different sizes of nut splitters but they are inexpensive.

[Pete C.]

Try a few of them side by side for their intended use and you'll find there are tremendous differences. If you're just going to sniff them as you must if you think they're all the same then for that purpose they probably are.

Pete C.

[Chris Lewis]

According to mm :

Look for varsol or ordinary paint thinner. It's all the same stuff. Approximately kerosene.

You can also get a "descented" varsol which is rather more pleasant to work with than regular varsol or kerosene.

[mm]

To elaborate, Ace Hardware had 8, probably 10 sizes of square U-bolts, more than it had of round U-bolts.

Lowes and Home Depot had none. I don't know if you can judge the whole chain by this one thing, but it's nice to find ways that Ace Harware excels.

One size of the square U-bolts was the same that I saw on the web, where I would have had to order 10! These were more expensive, but I'd rather pay more and have nothing left over. They were to attach the ladder stabilizer to the ladder, and they worked fine.

[Richard J Kinch]

No. Naphtha (pronounced naf-tha, not nap-tha) would evaporate quickly on the shelf and change the characteristics.

Read the MSDS. They're just kerosene.

[mm]

Sniffing Liquid Wrench is really bad for you. One of my buds did it and he's still in the sanitarium.

Stick to glue.

This reminds me of a time maybe 15 years ago I was camping during July

4 week with Rainbow (nothing to do with the "coalition".) And it was the middle of the night and I was up for some reason, some non-controversial reason, and Rainbow discourages drugs, but with 10,000 mostly young people camping together**, there are bound to be those using drugs. So some guy comes by in the middle of the night to one of the "kitchens", and he has mushrooms, which he diligently informs us are hallucinogenic. Now I've never use illegal drugs, and I avoid legal ones (and it's a good thing too, because if I had, I'd think my short term memory was bad because of drugs. It's actually just getting older. :) )

So the guy offers the mushrooms, and there are 3 of us there, and a girl about 9 or 10 wants some, but the guy won't give her any because she's so young. Amd she says "I had my first pot when I was 5 and my first hit of acid when I was 7 and there's no reason I can't have mushroom." and the third person there (besides the itinerant mushroom provider), a guy around 15 or 16, pipes up, "I think one should wait until his brain is fully developed before he damages it [with drugs]."

Then he took some mushroom for himself, and, given that, his statement was one of the stupidest I had ever heard or have heard since.

**Over 500 or 1000 acres or more.

[Richard J Kinch]

No, you're confused. Naphthenes (cyclic hydrocarbons) are not naphtha. Kind of like paraffins (chain hydrocarbons) are not wax. These are confusing terms from 19th century petroleum biz, kept alive to baffle consumers. In those days, they distilled petroleum to get kerosene for lamp oil, and threw away (!) the gasoline and naphtha, which had little use before the invention of the internal combustion engine.

The two CAS items are similar light petroleum distillates resulting from different processes. No doubt this is to let them to optimize different raw materials depending on the market or availability.

[Richard J Kinch]

They hide these at Wal-Mart on the boat trailer aisle. Or Boater's World, West Marine, Bass Pro Shops, etc.

[jackson]

I agree. I've worked as an auto mechanic, Kroil is the only way to go. Liquid Wrench is useless, and throw WD-40 in that list too....... IMHO.....

One thing though, once you use ANY of these "penetrating lubricants", be sure to clean and coat the part(s) with protective lubricant if you want it to not rust out in 6 months to a year.......... Again, just my 2cents.

[Chris Lewis]

I did a brief google search for the two items, and came to the conclusion that the "Napthenic petroleum distillate" was a distillation fraction somewhat lighter than kerosene - indeed, naptha, whereas "petroleum base oil" was a light lubricating oil with a rather higher boilpoint than kerosene.

Yeah, the terminology drives you nuts.

I had a summer job in a refinery for several years, testing the stuff they produced. [Distillation curves, viscosity, pen tests, flash points, etc.]

Meanwhile, earning a scholarship in chemistry. I think I knew more chemistry than the permanent employees in the lab who'd been there in some cases for decades. And I still couldn't make sense out of the names. Rubber solvent? Wha?

In this particular refinery, I believe they called "naptha" light kerosene.

In the sinks, the two faucets ran rubber solvent and varsol (I now forgot what they called _that_) for cleaning the glassware.

[mm]

Just like ophthamologist.