TOPIC:

Yes we did have a thread about greases, but this one is about oil. Folks! Meet my family!

 

.. sorry, wrong picture, nevermind. I've been experimenting some with available oils, as you may know I'm also toying with motorcycles these days, and I'm the type of character who likes to buy my oil *in quantity*. Tamiya's little flasks are very cute, but they're just that - very little. So I'd like to ask you guys if you're using some other oils for your shocks, like real fork oil for motorcycles perhaps?

I've done some silly things earlier, I put gearbox oil into several shocks, and it work very well. The oil was nice and thin, but it smelled like rotten eggs!? So, at one point I tried a regular "fork oil", just some cheap one from a local shop (Biltema), and it worked very well too. I mean oil is oil, right? Any one know what exact type of oil the Tamiya type is? I know it's usually somewhat thicker than the normal *real oil*. And my rubbers and plastics seem to be OK with other real oils.

I don't think it's quite as simple as "oil is oil", my thought is you'd wan't some sort of anti-foaming additive (so fork oil might be a good choice), and you wouldn't want to go go manky (so K&N filter oil? it's also red...) ...

I'm pretty sure we had some discussion about oils when I seemed to be getting through a lot of it (restoring lots of CVA equipped cars), IIRC i bought a "bulk" (not really) bottle of Ansmann 400 CTS oil & I don't think there were any issues with it.

I found threads at tamiyabase.com/...lour-codes and tamiyabase.com/...erminology that are relevant, but no really conclusive.



 

i currently use walnut oil, olive oil was too thick and sunflower seed oil was too thin for me.

Liquid dish soap work too. 

Regarding the size of the Tamiya shock oil can size. The #53025, #53026 etc comes in as pairs, and they are actually a lot bigger than the kit bottles.
Those bottles are of the size of a small Coke can - 35cc for the shock oil bottles vs 33cc for small Coke can.
So I would say those are even bigger than the average shock oil bottle from other brands as well.

I did not understand the size of them before I saw one package in a YT channel I follow.

The above numbers was for the vintage bottles, the modern units is #53443-53445 and comes in pack of 3 in 20cc bottles, nearly the half of the size they used to be.