Lathe headstock oil. B5

I am cleaning and servicing a lathe I bought last spring. French built HES cholet 550. I have most of the operator manual. It says to use B5 oil in the headstock and lower gearboxes. I am not sure what this translates to for common USA oils. Help please?

Its a light bodied engine oil

"ACEA B5" - Google Search

I would buy the HES some machine tool oil such as Mobil DTE Light and see how it likes it. If the machine has HYDRAULICS served by this oil - like assisted shifting or the like, then DTE 24. Both of these are ISO 32

Seconding John on upgrading to the DTE family. "Named" if neither power-circulated nor filtered, "numbered" if pumped and filtered.

It's an additives thing.

ACEA B5 may be common in France for "benzene" and light-duty auto-diesel IC engines, but "common" is about ALL it would be.

It's just... wrong.. for a machine-tool. That, too is an "additives thing".

Mobile dte light, ok. Hhhmmm. I have bulk, name brand hydralic oil, for the farm, on hand. I will do some research to see what iso weight it is. And if it look like similar specs. Thanks for the info.

My bulk John Deere HyGaurd hydrlalic/transmision oil is a bit too thick at between iso 49 and 68 grade. But I might have a couple gallons of Deere low viscosity hyralic/transmission that is iso 32. Hhhmmm more reading.......

Main thing is you don't want high pressure additives that can eat bronze plain bearings and you don't want automotive detergents that keep contaminants in suspension. Keeping contaminates in suspension is great for an engine oil as it lets the filter pull out the big stuff and it carries the rest away when changed, but you want contaminates in a machine tool to drop to the floor of the sump, instead of floating around.

D6Joe said:

Mobile dte light, ok. Hhhmmm. I have bulk, name brand hydralic oil, for the farm, on hand. I will do some research to see what iso weight it is. And if it look like similar specs. Thanks for the info.

My bulk John Deere HyGaurd hydrlalic/transmision oil is a bit too thick at between iso 49 and 68 grade. But I might have a couple gallons of Deere low viscosity hyralic/transmission that is iso 32. Hhhmmm more reading.......

Click to expand...

"Similar" isn't going to "necessarily" do you harm "suddenly". But the very Devil is in the details.

Mobil "named" DTE Light is meant to carry no debris, just drop it on the floor of anything resembling a "sump" and go back around, hopefully clean enough, under slosh, slash, dip, etc. for as long as made economic sense at the time.

Machine tools were, after all, MEANT to be pushed, and hard, to earn their cost, become "used up" worn. Few makers wanted a sale to be the last one ever made. They hoped to sell a newer and better machine in due course, and to every customer possible.

Mobil "numbered" DTE 24 expected a circulating pump and a filter. It WILL carry nano-fines, just not as aggressively as a detergent motor oil that has to deal with far higher rates of wear, PLUS contamination from combustion blowby of carbon and acid-forming byproducts. IC engine oils also have to deal with far wider swings of temperature, generally operate at higher pumped pressures and encounter different alloys.

"Details" of this sort have had a great deal of money and time applied, and all the way back to when DTE began its journey as "Gargoyle"-wotever and such.

Be happy it is only a few machine-tools you need to cover rather than an aircraft carrier and its "guests".