Mr Thermite, Sir --
Can't speak of the High Spot Blue that sold by today's ITW Dykem, but the original High Spot Blue produced by the Dyestuffs and Chemicals Company of St. Louis, Mo was colored with a dye.
Dykem Hi Spot Patent
John
Read that thread a while back - good one.
Have to take the word of others word for it. The oldest tube still under-roof - lost in the back of a drawer by accident - is "Permatex" branded, mebbe 1960's? Still flexible and usable, but needs thinning. each go. So mostly it DOESN'T. Go. Anywhere! Mebbe the NEXT fifty.. ah.. not likely..
I have new stock bought more recently, but have gone-over to Stuart's Micrometer blended with a bit of oil to suit.
If nothing else, their red just seems easier to clean-up, afterwards.
Mind - I NEED less of it in fifty years than a pro might use in fifty HOURS or even fifty MINUTES prepping for a large and long SE transfer!
Then, too Herr Pelz taught scraping markup exactly backwards from the younger German who taught Herman King.
- We don't dirty the SP, nor necessarily even HAVE one to-hand.
- We don't transfer to an SE, nor necessarily even HAVE a heavy camelback in the zone.
We prep the target surface, use even a heavy steel rule to drag for high spots, attack those, measure, repeat.
Might not get yah below a half-thou, but nobody NEEDED that to get a Mercedes six aero engine into the air, World War One when it was going to be shot-down long before it wore-out anyway!
Two other drivers were that Pelz and his team were all scrawny guys as hadn't had the best of nutrition before the war, and got less as it dragged-on.
Neither were tools and transfer blue ever in surplus, a blockaded Kaiser's Germany not so much bombed that go as it was starved.
No time nor energy for toting heavy SE's about, even if they had them.
Needless to say, that reduced-effort wartime-desperation "good enough" approach is a lot more welcome to me when all I need to do is "improve" Old iron to decent usability, not make it beat OEM factory specs.