Have you ever wondered what the secrecy's all about? I do. Sometimes I really wonder. After more than thirty years in the business, I've come to the conclusion that there are probable only two real reasons for secrecy: you've either got something to hide, or you don't. And I'm becoming increasingly sure that, in the grease trade, it's the latter. "Don't tell anybody, but we still use castor oil derivatives in our soaps", or was it zinc dithiophosphate? I mean this commodity grease stuff is hardly rocket science, is it? We all still owe a lot to good old Clarence. My old economics teacher, Ebenezer Scrooge, used to tell me that maturity is the elimination of differentiation. So in our mature and commoditised grease market, are there any real differences and, if so, what makes things different? What separates my EP 2 from the rest? It might contain a secret potion with some quasi-name like "Cucumberjuice^TM", but that's probably calcium carbonate anyway. And does anybody really buy it? So we all do the same thing, don't we? And we mature greasemakers ourselves; have all our differences been eliminated? Me too? You two? They say that we're all unique. Except me, that is. Since I'm mature, I must be the same.

So why am I going on and on about this? It's REACh isn't it? The ELGI has set up a consortium to consider sharing the costs of testing our "common soaps". Please note "common". We believe that we actually might make the same soaps (but don't tell anybody!). And even so, we still need fifty-eleven or so meetings to discuss the confidentiality issue. "Don't tell anybody else that we use 12-hydroxy-stearic acid and lithium hydroxide, and we won't say anything either". How on earth can we test common soaps if they're not common and seen to be common?

So who's really got something to hide?

Only time will tell, when everything becomes transparent in Helsinki.

 Posted 12.09.2008

During the first "Oil Crisis" in the early 1980's, many of the international oil companies and other eminent lubricants manufacturers were forced to streamline their operations and only very limited recruitment programmes were undertaken. This meant that, for quite a long period of time, hardly any "new" people came into the grease business. As a consequence of this, I have found myself in a very strange situation indeed where most of the people I have to work with are (or at least, have been) either five years older or five years younger than my good self. I am in the middle of the "lost generation". And, as you all know, time unfortunately waits for no man. My older colleagues are slowly but surely reaching the age of retirement and they are falling away, one by one.

If we also consider the state of our business today with endless mergers and closures and continual reorganisations and changes in ownership, people seem to be changing jobs all the time. Friends and acquaintances I expected to meet at the recent ELGI and NLGI meetings are no longer there and many new faces are appearing. This must mean that there are tremendous opportunities for a new generation of "grease gurus" and I hope to see and meet all you new grease enthusiasts before I, myself, come to the conclusion that it's time to say goodbye.

It is therefore becoming more and more difficult to recruit and maintain a highly qualified staff of development engineers and, for a company like AXEL with extensive plans for geographical expansion, this will be a critical factor for future success. It is therefore very surprising to hear that quite a number of experienced grease scientists are considering changing jobs because their companies (or rather their management) seemingly do not appreciate their contributions to the business. At both the recent ELGI and the NLGI meetings, people that I have had the privilege of knowing for many years have confided in me that they will very probably move on sometime in the near future. In Europe, one very talented guy is preparing to set up his own business. In the USA, another is just waiting for the right opportunity because he gets no rewards for a job well done. The qualified and talented grease specialist is becoming a rare species and we need to nurture the resources in hand. With the ambition of becoming an influential global player, AXEL recognises the need to secure competent scientists in our international operations. So if your company does not appreciate their own talents, we most certainly will. Anybody for a job in Sweden ??

 Posted 07.10.2008

Coming back to the subject of sticky business, where certain types of greases need to exhibit different degrees of tackiness (adhesion, cohesion, whatever), wouldn't it be great to be able to control and steer this phenomenon in one and the same product. Materials used in modern devices need to exhibit desirable nano-scale tribological and mechanical properties and there is a need to develop lubricants and lubrication methods suitable for such applications. To fully understand the mechanism of adhesion, we should perhaps study the extremes, beginning with the "lotus effect". At this years meeting of the South African Institute of Tribology in Pretoria, Professor Bhushan of Ohio State University in Columbus described the characterisation of the surface layers on lotus leaves in trying to understand the mechanisms of superhydrophobicity, where water simply "rolls off" the leaves taking any surface contaminants with it. This has been used, for instance, to develop self-cleaning windows. Now what can we greasemakers learn from that? He also explained that the feet of a gecko have a surface structure capable of smart adhesion - the ability to cling on to different smooth and rough surfaces and detach at will. Now wouldn't that be great in grease. It could be easily pumpable and yet immediately stick to the bearing surface. Mother Nature, it seems, is the most creative force of all and we should perhaps spend more of our development time studying how she has designed the basic mechanisms and adapt this to our own situation. So should grease be a lotus or a gecko? Answer ; yes please !

 Posted 03.11.2008

October 31^st, 1888

Oh what a very special date

A day when AXEL came to be

An entrepreneur for all to see

And now for 120 years

Bearings, bushings, couplings and gears

Are running smoothly with axle (Axel) grease

Giving engineers peace

Of mind

And substantial rewards of an economic kind.

So happy birthday Axel C

Be proud of us, your legacy.

With apologies to William McGonagall, the worst poet of all time

 Posted 06.11.2008

In September 2008, the Department of Geography at Edinburgh University celebrated its 100 year anniversary. We graduates were all invited to an Open Day and had the opportunity of catching up on the latest research and, of course, of meeting old friends and visiting old "watering holes". It then struck me that there was, in fact, a life before grease even if it was some 35 years ago. My own research studies involved mapping and analysing the surface morphology caused by glacial re-advances, and especially the buried "blue clay" beaches. In the Gothenburg area of Sweden, such phenomena have been the root cause of dramatic landslides where exposed layers of clay have slipped on each other causing significant landmasses to slide down into the river valleys. And that's where it all started of course. I wasn't a chemist. I was a geomorphologist with some rudimentary knowledge about the rheology of landslides (laminar flow). And what is lubrication, if not microscopic landslides. Physics, not chemistry. And so it came to be. We at Axel were one of the first grease companies to introduce rheological measurements into our product development processes and quality control. It has taken a very long time but it is now a pleasure to see that different papers on grease rheology are getting the attention and appreciation they deserve. And how strange it was to hear a paper at this year's ELGI conference in Lisbon by Giovanni Ponti of ENI describing a new application for bentone grease, as a raw material for geological studies to be able to study and predict landslides. So now we've gone full circle. The study of landslides helped me understand the bulk mechanisms of lubricating greases and now lubricating greases are helping to understand the mechanisms of landslides. The chicken and the egg ?

 Posted 18.11.2008