Mark Betner admits that grease choices are often an afterthought in many maintenance shops. Specifically, Citgo’s product manager, heavy-duty lubricants, puts it another way: “They’re unloved, un-thought about, un-talked about.”
Unloved they may be, but the choices behind different chassis lubricants are becoming more important with every passing year.
“When I started out in this industry, there were people doing their ‘A’ maintenance at 3,000 miles,” Betner recalls.
When oil drains were extended, however, shop personnel also needed to wait a little longer for opportunities to apply a fresh layer of grease to king pins, slack adjusters, cam bushings, unsealed U-joints, springs and shackles.
Then the challenges can emerge.
Perhaps it starts with a small amount of water coming out of a U-joint; maybe it leads to other corrosion-based issues. The growing popularity of de-icing solutions such as magnesium chloride has certainly compounded the problems that can occur.
“If the grease is displaced and water intrusion is the next step, then that water is not coming in as distilled water. It’s coming in with magnesium chloride,” Betner says. “So your corrosion rates of your needle bearings and your U-joints or any articulated pins are multiplied many times over. You have to have a very good anti-corrosion product in place to handle that.”
