Almond Oil or Bore Oil?

[jemtheflute]

Wax lyrical! Go chill out with your flute!

I'll stick to bore oil. BTW, hydrocarbon mineral oils are of course ultimately still organic, plant based materials - OK, moderated in nature by Nature, by heat, compression and time and maybe the admixture of other inorganic minerals with which they came into contact in the process, but nonetheless.......
I haven't seen anyone mention that before in these interminable oil bore-wars.

Chris Wilkes says "bore oil", Casey Burns says.........
'Nuff said.

[Tony McGinley]

"The Oily Rag Debate" rages on and is both informative and amusing.
Thank you Talasiga for your kind remarks earlier in this debate.

Here is another very informative piece on the subject. It includes some
of the science but not so much as to cause the eyes to glaze over.

http://www.recorderhomepage.net/wood.html

I use oils therapeutically in my work and know the feel of the
different oils from daily handling.

Some oils are thick, some waxy and tend to dry out easily,
linseed or flax is one of these that dry and harden. I would
only guess that sticking much of this oil up the bore of my old
flute would lead, eventually, to layers of "wax" building up. I
would be looking for a thinner oil, without strong oder, and one
which did not wax or oxadize easily. But here is where I back-out
and say I have no experience with oils and wood - I will let that
to people who have generations of the business in their blood!

.
.

[mahanpots]

Rob,

Your mind amazes me.

Picture this:

You're driving with your friend's friend, lynn, and he's a maniac driver. You're telling him, "Slow down!", "Watch out!"

He reaches into his glove box and pulls out that pillow-sized bag of seeds, tosses it back to you and says...

"My rendition of an air bag Rob, Hold it in front of your face and you no longer have to see my crazy driving, it'll protect you in case of an accident, and best of all, you're no longer a backseat driver, you're a..."

Michael

[Jay]

How would you go about switching oils, for example from commericial bore oil to almond or raw linseed? It wouldn't be necessary to strip the old oil off would it?

Jay

[sbfluter]

I have some oil that I use for my skin. I think it's possibly almond oil. It seems to get all gooey around the plastic cap after a while. I can also sense that it gets rancid when exposed to air, at least the oil that spills on sheets or towels can smell rancid after a while (and it's difficult to wash out that smell sometimes.)

I think I trust the bore oil as it has had a long history of use, it's recommended by makers, it feels very light, absorbs pretty quickly, and hasn't shown any propensity to get all gummy or rancid.

[Tony McGinley]

There appears to be two approaches to oiling flutes in this debate;
1. Use commercial "Bore Oil" or 2. Use Linseed/Flaxseed or Almond oils.

Commercial Bore Oil is not any one single type of product. Bore oils
from different manufacturers care different things altogether.

Here is an extract from the last link I posted to an excellent article
on the subject:

DO IT YOURSELF: Does that mean you have to purchase commercial bore-oils? Moeck Recorder Oil can be analyzed using C13 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) which clearly shows each type of carbon atom and allows you to count them. The Moeck Recorder Oil is a semi-drying triglyceride oil (Table 4), perhaps with some antioxidant added.

It is possible to add your own antioxidants to a semi- or non-drying high grade food oil you have selected. Find a friend who is taking Vitamin E capsules. Each contains 200 I.U. (200 mg) of alpha-tocopherol, enough to treat a pint of oil. Slit just one capsule open and stir the contents (not the capsule wall) into the oil. Then, keep the material in an amber bottle to prevent air and photo-oxidation. Moeck very carefully uses a brown PVC plastic bottle for their product to avoid light and oxygen diffusion through the container. Polyethylene containers are not safe, since they pass both light and oxygen.

What if you wanted to avoid vegetable oils? Yamaha Bore Oil, analyzed by NMR, is a low viscosity mineral oil (Figure 4). It is a mixture of long carbon chains with hydrogens attached at all points (hydrocarbons). A good grade of Baby Oil clearly labelled as Mineral Oil will suffice. The mineral oil used internally is more viscous.

As you can see two VERY DIFFERENT commercial "Bore" oils. One
vegetable and one mineral based.

Choices - choices - so difficult to choose an ice cream from 20
flavours. Much easier when there is only the one choice!!!

The "Bore Oil" brigade will have to divide into two seperate files here please!

On the right; the Minerl Oil - Commercial Bore Oil people please, and on
the left the Vegetable or tri-glyceride - Commercial Bore Oil supporters -
which one are you???

Sorry for 2 things guys - the lousy typing - needing several EDITS,
and causing you such heart-ache with the science bit and the choices!!!


.

[Casey Burns]

I have been recommending raw Linseed oil for years. In its raw form it is relatively non-drying and is what I originally oil the flutes with. However, expose it to the sun and it begins to polymerize, as does Almond. However, unlike Almond oil I have never seen it go rancid.

I have never had any troubles with flutes oiled with commercial bore oil. Some of these oils are made from Linseed.

A recent experience convinced me to start recommending the commercial bore oils over Linseed for the end user. A keyed flute arrived for servicing all covered in polymerized oil inside and out. The thing had to be stripped down, reamed and refinished on the outside, all the holes also needing to redone. Even the keys were covered. And glued shut. Obviously the person who owns this flute was using old oil or oil that had been exposed to the sun. I've seen other flutes similarly afflicted.

There is no trouble using a mineral oil based bore oil over linseed.

[Denny]

Tony, I'm sure that we've warned you before about trying to confuse us with science....behave!

[mahanpots]

(cont'd).... flaxseed driver.

Michael

[Rob Sharer]

Ouch.

[johnkerr]

How would you go about switching oils, for example from commericial bore oil to almond or raw linseed? It wouldn't be necessary to strip the old oil off would it?

If there's ever any old oil on your flute to be stripped off, it means you have been oiling your flute incorrectly. The intent in oiling a flute is not to provide a layer of oil on the outside of the wood, but rather to have some oil soak into the wood via the grain. This in a sense "clogs the pores" of the wood and prevents moisture from being absorbed in them as the flute is played. If the wood has been allowed to dry out, it's better to fill it up again with oil rather than water molecules because the water molecules would fairly quickly dry up again whereas the oil molecules won't. It's the quick changes from hydrated to dry that will cause the flute to crack, not the mere fact of being either hydrated or dry. If you play your flute often and you don't live in an extremely dry climate, it may well stay hydrated all the time, and in this case you may hardly ever need to oil it. But if you live in a dry area or don't play the flute often enough, it's a good idea to oil it periodically to help keep it from experiencing any extremes of drying or hydration. The proper technique for oiling a flute is to apply a thin film of a non-drying oil (e.g. raw linseed oil rather than boiled linseed oil, since boiled linseed oil is a drying oil), allow it to soak in over the course of perhaps a day at most, and then wipe off any excess oil from the flute. There should never be any buildup of oil on the flute. If there is, you're doing it wrong. Strip off the old oil buildup (consult with a maker to be sure you're doing it right, especially if you have a lot of buildup) and then start oiling your flute the right way. Once you're doing it right, then there would be no implications if you just for some reason decided to change the kind of oil you were using from one application to the next.

[Jay]

Thanks John,

All that makes sense. I play daily, but live in Arizona; so I oil as per the maker's recommendation. Currently using Yamaha bore oil, which feels identical to mineral oil and seems to work fine. However, I'm on the wait list for a flute whose maker recommends raw linseed oil. I'll probably switch to that at some point so I can get familiar with it before the new flute arrives.

All the best,
Jay

[johnkerr]

All that makes sense. I play daily, but live in Arizona; so I oil as per the maker's recommendation. Currently using Yamaha bore oil, which feels identical to mineral oil and seems to work fine. However, I'm on the wait list for a flute whose maker recommends raw linseed oil. I'll probably switch to that at some point so I can get familiar with it before the new flute arrives.

I think that most if not all of the reservations many flute makers and players have about using commercial bore oil or so-called mineral oil on flutes stem not from the effect that those oils might have on the wood, but rather from the effect they might have on the player. Unlike almond oil, flaxseed/linseed oil, etc, those mineral oils and commercial bore oils are not generally thought of as the kind of oils humans would want to be ingesting on a regular basis. Not that they are necessarily poisonous (although they may well be in large enough doses for all I know), but rather just that the health effects of ingesting them (or at least having them on the lips for extended periods of time) are largely unknown or are thought to be detrimental in the longer term. None of the instruments that these commercial bore oils are created for and marketed for (clarinets, oboes, bassoons, etc) have the player placing oiled wood directly on the lips as the wooden flute does. Indeed I would not be at all surprised if the makers of these commercial bore oils don't even realize that people are still playing wooden flutes nowadays and might be using their oil on them. Really, this is all a huge gray area - may be a problem, maybe not. But in the face of that uncertainty, it's probably prudent to use and recommend oils that are known to be okay for human consumption for wooden flutes instead of the commercial bore oils or mineral oils, since the effect of those oils on the wood is virtually identical anyway.

[Rob Sharer]

John Kerr has a good point. There should never be loads of oil loafing around the bore, just waiting to turn bad. I have seen some folks just dragging an oil-soaked rag through their instruments and leaving it at that. Myself, I put a good quantity of oil in the bore (flax-/lin-/Lynn-seed oil), making sure to avoid the corks, and leave it on either all day or overnight. I then swab every bit of it out of the bore, presumably leaving only what has been absorbed. If too much remains, it does tend to travel around a bit, including into the pad seats and through the walls of the tenons to the corks, if you have them. Pads get wrecked, and contact-cemented corks shear off in this case. I am of the belief that even raw flaxseed oil will eventuallly turn to gum; after all, don't we all struggle to get the cap off the damn bottle? However, if it's only in the pores of the flute, what's the harm? Cheers,

Rob

[Akiba]

About the oil touching the lips of the player, perhaps one should use almond oil for the outside on the headjoint, and bore oil on the inside, in the bore of the flute. That makes some sense to me.