Cooking oil as lubricant

Let’s imagine a rock hits your rig’s sump, creating a hole, and all the engine oil ends up on the ground. You can’t continue on, because, as you read on previous pages, oil is essential to prevent your engine from seizing.

Collect all the metal shards, clean them properly, and use Pratley Steel epoxy glue to patch the hole in the oil pan, much like a jigsaw puzzle using the shards. Yes, it can work – we have firsthand experience.

Yes, there is a can of oil in your toolbox, but that’s just to top up the engine and not enough to replace all the oil. You heard somewhere that you can use cooking oil… Could that be true? Cooking oil is, after all, a Newtonian liquid, just like engine oil. (A Newtonian fluid, named after the physicist Sir Isaac Newton, is a fluid whose viscous stress arising from its flow linearly correlates with the local strain rate over a given period – more on this later when we get to Pascal seconds.)

The 4x4 Professor could certainly have carried out this experiment, but why? The thinking has already been done by university students.

In 2014, Lemuel M. Diamante tested the viscosity of various cooking oils at different temperatures for the Department of Wine, Food and Molecular Natural Sciences at the University of Lincoln in Christchurch, New Zealand.