The long story of it is, when Mobil first started taking the tackifier out of the Vactra series in the late 80's they took all of it out on the west coast imediatly and 1/2% per year everywhere else. Their belief was that they were only concerned with the machining industry and they needed to cowdown to the EPA, and the machining industry would just have to suffer. Equipment failures on the west coast within the printing industry lead to investigations that revealed the lack of tackifier in the oils at the failure locations. Mobil was called in to explain the lack of peritack in their product. We had been, up until that time, specifing only the use of Mobil Vactra 2 for our equipment lubrication. Our customers tended to follow our recomendations religiously. When the numbers were counted up the results proved that the newspaper printing industry was the major user of Vactra 2, by about 60%. Unfortunatly in todays society it is considered a sin to say, "oops, we screwed up", and with Mobil it was no exception. However, when faced with the loss of the newspaper industry as a customer, they hustled out the new Vacuoline series to accomodate our requirements. Unfortunatly for them, we no longer specify Mobil, but rather publish the specifications of the oil required. There are now several oil suppliers that produce a product that meets our specifications, some better, some worse than Mobil. We aren't angry at Mobil; it actually helped us grow. I don't hesitate to recomend the Vacuoline 1409 to any of my customers. I just don't steer them down that narrow path, when other products are also available.
So now the mask has been ripped from my face and you all know I work for Goss.