Old Baldor Grinder: need grease specification

A buddy gave me an old Baldor grinder. Old is likely an understatement, as this grinder has a "square" stator with the laminations visible, and Baldor's address is in St. Louis, Missouri. The general data on the nameplate is 1 1/2 HP, 1725 rpm, and 3 phase. The grinder is old enough that it has screw type grease cups on the motor shaft bearings.

I found the grease cups screwed down hard, no more grease to left to push into the bearings. The grease has the brownish color and smell of the older greases, not what you'd find with automotive greases. I know that is not a lot to go with as far as spec'ing a grease to use in this grinder's bearings. I know the greases from the 50's often were soap based, and did not have the extreme pressure additives nor were they made for higher temperature service like the newer lithium based greases. I know it is not good to mix different types of greases, so want to try to get the correct grease (or at least something with the same type base, that is reasonably close). I'd appreciate any recommendations as to what type grease would be a good match.

The grinder is a bit of a time capsule. It has cast iron wheel guards, work rests, and end shields. The tongue strips (to keep chinks of a disintegrating wheel from flying off the top of the wheel at hitting the operator) are made of 5 /16" thick steel. It has a large brass toggle switch rather than the OSHA=mandated push buttons. Instead of glass shields, there is a porcelain enameled steel sign that says: "Wear goggles when using this machine". I believe the wheel size is 10". I have a Dayton US-made 7" grinder (bought new from Grainger by me some 34 years ago) which I can pick up with one hand. This old Baldor grinder easily weighs close to 200 lbs. The cast iron pedestal it came with (from some other machine) weighs more like 300 lbs. It's a nice old addition to my machine shop. My buddy got it an auction some years ago when an old machine shop on the Brooklyn-Queens border went out of business when the oldtimers retired. The fellows who had that shop were in their 90's, and may well have bought this grinder new. The fact the grinder has the "square" stator and grease cups may well date this grinder to the 30's or 40's. I look forward to using it, and with the good cast iron and plenty of mass in the motor as well as the pedestal, it ought to be a quiet and smooth runner. I'm also curious as to when Baldor moved from St. Louis to Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Thanks-
Joe Michaels

That's an old one for sure. I thought I had some old grinders, but none of mine have grease ports.

The year you want seems to be 1967. Just a couple years before I got here.

Baldor Electric Company - Wikipedia

As for the grease, you probably do not want to do it, but I'd suggest getting the bearings out, washing them clean, and re-greasing. Then there is no issue of compatibility, plus the old grease may have dropped-out soap, etc that would be good to remove. You might be the first to take it apart.

I usually use a good wheel bearing grease for most such, but electric motor bearing grease would be another possible, as it is made to last for a good while.

I'd ignorantly stuff lithium base wheel bearing grease into the cups. If it starts making noise tear it down and see what's up then.

Just went completely through an older floor model 10" grinder, took it all down, shimmed the preload on the ball bearings, stuffed a VFD in the base, and rebuilt one of the cut-off cast wheel guards.
Doesn't see near the use I thought it would. I still walk over to the 6" baldor for almost everything.

With the mileage it's likely to see, it's just not worthwhile to pull it down and wash the old grease out.

ETA: mine's got grease zerks, but the dataplate's been scratched clean.

Old Grinder

Hello: I have a very old three phase Cincinnati grinder similar to the one you mentioned...Mine has a brass grease cup on each end to lube the bearings.. I completely disassembled my unit and cleaned out the old grease then used #2 ball bearing grease lithium I think.. ... Now and then give them a turn and you should be fine for several years..

Be sure not to over grease any electric motor or the grease will wind up in the windings and cause temperature rise and eventual failure of the stator..

Joe Michaels said:

The grinder is old enough that it has screw type grease cups on the motor shaft bearings.

Click to expand...

And, even so, probably "new" enough that a standard sealed bearing will be a drop-in fit. Less hassle. Better outcome. And it is worth it.

I'm in the "Take it apart" crowd Joe.

It's been greased for sure over the years, and that grease had to go somewhere.

Time to take a peek inside and clean the grease off the windings
if it got flung there.

NLGI Number 2 or Number 3 Calcium-based Grease

Joe,

You surely want a Calcium soap-based grease.

Here's a useful Wikipedia entry:
NLGI consistency number - Wikipedia

Maxolene No. 2 or No. 3 would be good candidates except I cannot find a USA source for it!

Maxoline - The lubricants specialist from the Netherlands - Cup Grease No 2

If I were in your shoes, I'd call Black Bear in Long Island City, NY You surely remember them! They are still around; I saw one of their delivery trucks in NJ a few months ago.

<On Edit:> I'd suggested a possible local NJ vendor, but I've learned that they do NOT carry this type of grease. <Off Edit>

Don't be afraid to buy a 5-gal pail. You could put it up in jars and sell it at antique engine meets! <WINK!>

It's been fun to think about this. It reminds me of the Engineers on the old side-wheel steamer Alexander Hamilton filling the crankshaft grease cups at every stop. Makes me feel like a fossil to realize I rode a side-wheel steamer in actual service !

John Ruth
P.S. How about calling Conrad Milster to ask where he would buy it?

Monarchist said:

And, even so, probably "new" enough that a standard sealed bearing will be a drop-in fit. Less hassle. Better outcome. And it is worth it.

Click to expand...

I have a 12" with all the same characteristics as the OP's grinder, and did exactly what Monarchist suggests. New sealed bearings. Runs silent and should definitely last my lifetime of use....

There are some spacer sleeves that made bearing removal a bit confusing, but rest assured you just need a bearing puller to get them off.

Cost was maybe $25 for 2 bearings...I left the grease cups in place

Carl

Joe --

The old "rules of thumb" for selecting lubricating grease were -- and here I'm paraphrasing a guest lecturer in one of my college classes over 45 years ago -- are easy to remember if you remember that the old-time auto parts stores sold two types of greases, one the sodium-soap thickened "Wheel Bearing and Universal Joint Grease" that was best suited to most rolling-element-bearing applications, and the other calcium-soap thickened "Chassis and Water Pump Grease" that was best suited to sliding elements and rolling-elements-bearings that were likely to get wet.

John

The sealed bearing idea is good, so long as the size is available. Since either way you have to disassemble and clean up, the existing bearings can be evaluated at that point, for re-use or replacement, just as you choose.

Sealed Bearing Don't Have the "Cachet" of Brass Grease Cups

Yeah, I know we are on a board called Practical Machinist, but some aspects of old school equipment have a certain non-practical aesthetic appeal.

Brass Grease Cups are one of those aspects. Whenever I touch one, my mind goes back to the bronze gear-type raw-seawater cooling pump in my father's first cabin cruiser or the Engineers of the S.S. Alexander Hamilton.

If you follow Carl Laniak's suggestion to leave the grease cups in place for appearance sake, you'll have to tuck a note inside cautioning future owners not to lube them ! (We are only the temporary custodians of the long-lived machines which we own. They will outlive us!)

JRR

John:

It is my intention to leave the grease cups in place on the grinder. I took a feel, look, and sniff of the grease in the cups. It looked, felt and smelled like older generation automotive wheel bearing grease. I know this will likely fly in the face of a lot of the folks who responded to my inquiry, but I remembered I had a steel can of automotive wheel bearing grease I bought in about 1966. I opened that can and took a dab of that grease and compared it to what was in the grease cups on the grinder. By "sniff, feel, and look", the automotive wheel bearing grease from 1966 (described on the can only as "fiberous wheel bearing grease") was a perfect match.

I punched some of it into the cups and gave them a light screwing down.

I like the appearance and tie to the past that things like grease cups and drip oilers have on a piece of machinery. On my LeBlond roundhead Regal lathe, there were "Gits" oil hole "covers" on the headstock bearings and input shaft bearing. One Gits cup was missing its cover. That was all the excuse I needed. I got some 1/8" NPT Essex drip oilers off ebay. I machined some adaptor nipples tapped for 1/8" NPT and the male ends are threaded to match the fine 5/16" thread on the Gits cups. I milled hex flats on the adapter nipples. The drip oilers are only turned on when the lathe is being started. Once it is running, I am sure oil slung around inside the headstock gets into the spindle and input shaft bearings. I did not polish the drip oilers as they have a nice "aged patina" that goes with the lathe.

You mention the water pump on your father's first cabin cruiser. You evoke a memory of my own father. Dad never referred to long-handled offset pliers as "Channelocks", but simply as "water pump pliers" or "pump pliers". Dad was born in 1917, and his first exposure to cars was helping his buddies get a junkyard rat of a '28 Chevy running. They all worked on that car using used parts (a nickel for a used valve spring, a dime for a used/patched inner tube), learned to drive on that car, took one big trip with it, and sold it back to the junker for about what they had in it. Dad would, at most, get fancy and say "slip joint pliers" instead of "water pump pliers". A pair of wire cutting pliers such as Klein makes were "lineman's pliers" to Dad. Nowadays, people on jobs will refer to those pliers as "Kleins". Putting grease in a grease cup was referred to as "punching in some grease". Dad had a wire carrying rack out in our shed with oil bottles when I was a kid. He had a '46 Chevy that used oil. When I was a little guy, he had the bottles filled from a bulk tank at the local Shell station and kept them in our shed to top up the oil in the Chevy.
I do not know what happened to the oil bottles and rack over the years and moves. I mentioned it to my wife one time when we passed through Hemmings' museum in Bennington Vermont on a motorcycle run. My wife surprised me with an oil bottle she found at a yard sale. It had the residue of engine oil still in it. I took off the cap and sniffed the spout and it took me back to when I was a kid. So, as unscientific as it may be, I applied the same sort of process to the can of wheel bearing grease vs the grease in the grinder's grease cups.

BTW: I keep that oil bottle on a window sill in our garage, and have never cleaned it, as it reminds me of my boyhood.

Wheel bearing grease seems fine. I'd have opened it up, at least to see where the grease from before had gone, and to clean out any hardened grease, (and see how the bearings looked) but..... I'm just LIKE that.

I was not born in 1917, but those pliers you describe surely are "pump pliers" to me. Sometimes described as a "hillbilly socket set", etc.

Joe Michaels said:

Dad never referred to long-handled offset pliers as "Channelocks", but simply as "water pump pliers" or "pump pliers". A pair of wire cutting pliers such as Klein makes were "lineman's pliers" to Dad. Dad had a wire carrying rack out in our shed with oil bottles when I was a kid.

Click to expand...

Joe -

As usual you are doing a good job of kicking off my memory with your post. I still call them 'water pump pliers' and 'lineman's pliers'. The guy I worked for in high school and college (he worked for my Dad) was an old time one man contractor - give him a hole in the ground and he'd give you a house. The last house he built prior to retiring is the one my wife and I still live in - finished it in 78. He was born in 1913 and always used those terms and it got burned into my brain.

We also kept a 55 gallon drum of oil for the various antique machines we had - oldest was a 1928 Buffalo Springfield roller. And had the old wire basket and bottles - most of them were, I think, remnants from the small filling station my farmer ancestors used to have in the 20s next to the farmhouse. That roller was a hoot - 4 1/2 inch bore, 4 inch stroke with the bottom end one casting and twin two cylinder 'jugs'. Crank start, magneto - but you positioned the crank so you could swing your whole weight up on one leg and use your body weight to get a half turn out of the crank. Started surprisingly good.

Had one other guy at work who used to laugh when I called them water pump pliers - said it reminded him of his Dad.

Have to add on edit that I thought I was the only guy with that old of a metal can of Quaker State 'fibrous wheel bearing grease' that I'm working my way through.

Dale - wishing he still had one of the oil bottles on the window sill in the shop. But I do have the brass data plate from the roller with a picture of the roller hanging on the wall!

Joe Michaels said:

John:


You mention the water pump on your father's first cabin cruiser. You evoke a memory of my own father. Dad never referred to long-handled offset pliers as "Channelocks", but simply as "water pump pliers" or "pump pliers".

Click to expand...

Joe you jogged an old boyhood memory of mine. Water Pumps is what my dad calls 'em too.(he is still with us) I have no idea when I started calling them channel locks, probably during my Air Force days. But Water Pumps is what they are!

Warren

History - Channellock

Channel lock is a particular brand of the water pump style pliers, the dovetail or "channel" is
the patent, and what makes them better.

New, Old Stock ?

It just occurred to me that the next time I'm in one of the few remaining old-school auto parts stores, I should ask if they have any dusty old cans of this sort of obsolete grease.

Also, I just recently passed up a grease can at an estate sale. I should have at least looked inside!

John Ruth

We had a waxey grease at the big shop that would not evaporate .. so very good for making up a spindle..forgot the name.. may have been Kluber...

But grease cups are good because one can add new grease.

KRYTOX 24AC GREASE 8 OZ TUBE by Boca Bearings :: Ceramic Bearing Specialists

No I have never used this so?

Dale:

Thanks for the great post. We are of the same generation, as are a lot of other members heres- give or take a few years. It's great to have the kind of memories we do of our fathers, and great that something real like using the terms "water pump pliers" or "lineman's pliers" is a tie to our Dads. We are the products of a great generation, for sure.

If I ever see another oil bottle, I will get it for you. In the meanwhile, there is one other bottle we ought to get together and get into- Slivovitz.

My Dad is with me in spirit, and I use many of the tools he accumulated, some old when he got them before I was even thought of. When we built our house and settled in, Mom arrived for a visit. She brought my father's last pair of bib overalls, "hickory striped" rather than denim. Mom draped them over the handrail on the landing going down to the basement machine shop. She put my father's "Scotch" winter cap on top of the bibs. That was 27 years ago and the bibs and cap remain there to this day.

I have my father's old "Yankee" push screwdriver. It was the "cordless screw driver" of its day. Lots more tools of varying sorts, and even some "wicking" for sealing pipe threads on joints that have been apart and together one too many times. Using my father's tools is a nice tie to him, and when I do certain jobs that he taught me to do, it is always special.

I have one pair of water pump pliers made by Crescent Tool when they were still in Jamestown, NY. There is a story with those pliers. I was working as a young engineer on a nuke construction site in Connecticut in 1973. It was a winter weekend and snow had fallen, more expected. I was heading to Brooklyn to visit my folks, and with the weather what it was, I decided to take the train from New London to NYC, then subway out to Brooklyn. Dad had mentioned his old pair of water pump pliers were kind of worn, slipping from one jaw position to another as they used a bolt with flats and some slotted holes to change jaw positions. These were OLD pump pliers. Dad asaid he'd like to get hold of a pair of the newer "rib joint" type. As luck would have it, I was walking in the turbine building at the nuke site that Friday morning. It was a rain forest of scaffolding, rigging, temporary bracing steel, welding leads, air hoses, oxyacetylene hoses, temporary power wiring, and plywood and plastic temporary partitions aside from the permanent plant equipment and piping packed in. Little light came through the gratings so it was kind of like walking in a rain forest. Stuff ranging from welding rod stubs to small scraps of pipe and steel, bolts, worn out cutoff and grinding wheels, busted drill bits and small tools constantly seemed to be raining down. As I shuffled in the semi darkness of all of this, I saw a glint on the floor. It was a perfectly good pair of Crescent rib-joint water pump pliers. Someone had ground the chrome plating on one side, and they were used, but plenty good. I put them into the back pocket of my khaki work pants and got on with my own work, forgetting about those pliers.

That evening, I caught a train out of New London for NYC. It was delayed hours due to weather, but eventually got in some time after midnight in the wee hours. I made my way to the subway and got to 42nd street/Times Square to change for the BMT Brighton train out to my parents' home in Brooklyn. I went thru a rat maze of corridors and stairs, finally getting onto the platform for the train to Brooklyn. I was alone on the platform, or so I thought. A hulking man appeared and eyed me up and down, then let go with a wad of phlegm, landing it neatly between the toes of my boots on the platform. My safety valves instantly hit the popping point, and as I got my wits together, I looked at the man who'd confronted me. All I focused on was his nostrils, which looked as big as sewer pipes. My mind galvanized into one thought, and it turned the guy in front of me into a bull, and I saw myself taking control of that bull by grabbing his septum with the pliers- as farmers and ranchers grab ornery cattle. I was wearing a Carhartt coat, which covered my back pockets. I reached around for those pliers, keeping eye contact with the guy. It was like I was on auto-pilot: grab the S.O.B. by the septum with the water pump pliers, squeeze as hard as I could, twist and throw the S.O.B. onto the subway track. I had lost any sense of fear and it was more of a boiling rage to put the S.O.B. out of action for good . I never got the pliers out from under my Carhartt coat. The S.O.B.'s eyes got wide and he backed away for a few paces, then ran for the stairs. Chances are he figures I was packing a piece under my coat. The 70's were dangerous years to be riding the NYC Subway system at night.

I got to Brooklyn, gave Dad the pliers and told him the story. He got some whisky and we got into it. He laughed good and hard about my wanting to use the pliers on the guy's septum, handling him like an ornery bull. Dad had those pliers until he died in 1988. He and Mom had moved to California for his last years. After Dad died, Mom told me to take whatever tools of Dad's I wanted- they were living in a condo with a garage. Dad had been wheelchair bound for the last 10 months of his life, but he'd had me hang up an assortment of Rigid pipe wrenches, a crowbar (which he always called a "wrecking bar"), framing square and to mount a small old Athol Machinist vise, vowing he'd use his tools again. Condo or not, Dad needed to have his tools around him. It was not meant to be, and those tools came back from California to rejoin the rest of Dad's tools in my shop.

I still recall that night on the Times Square subway platform in 1973 when I use those Crescent water pump pliers. It was after that night in 1973 I took a vow to stay off the NYC Subways. I did that for 33 years before my wife and a visiting friend from the midwest persuaded me to take the subway when we showed her NYC. A lot had changed for the better, and I did not have the water pump pliers on me.

Dale-a bit off-topic, I don't know where you are located upstate, but speaking of old road rollers, when I was at Alfred University in the late 1960's I recall driving through Naples and stopping to look at a steam roller parked in front of the town DPW garage. I don't know if it was operational then or something the DPW had managed to hold on to. Anyone know of it?

Tom B.