What is the yellow coating you put on steel to prevent it rsuting in storage?

[Thomas Prufer]

Maybe a pound of silica gel, too.

Thomas Prufer

[David Hearn]

It's also known as crowdsourcing

and is often used on Twitter - lazyweb hashtag)

D

[Nightjar]

Not a bad idea, although probably better to put that in a second, outer, layer of plastic, so that it can be taken out and reactivated from time to time without disturbing anything else. Thanks for the suggestion.

Colin Bignell

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Nightjar saying something like:

I know exactly the stuff you mean and never really found out what it was, for sure. Otoh, I'm fairly sure Shell sell drums of something similar. Many times I've found machine tools and smaller items covered in what seemed to be Waxoyl, which just solvent washes off.