It's probably OK. But you can get clock oil (in many different thicknesses) from companies like H S Walsh. It's not _that_ expensive either (or wasn't last time I bought some), you only use it a drop at a time so a small bottle lasts a long time. -tony

Indeed. That's one reason I use it. There is claimed to be a substance you can put on mechanism plates, etc, to stop the oil spreading. Some camera manufactures specified it (Nikon?). I am sure I was flamed either here or on a camera repair forum for making much the same point. I regard fluching a mechanism with solvent as being a real bodger's trick, likely to do more harm than good. Assuming you have a digital camera. Fortunately (as I don't), I've never had a problem putting something back together if I've taken it apart. I'd use grease on the detent mechamism of a switch, too. Watch out for graphite grease. It's mildly conductive (of course) and can cause major problems if it gets onto insulators, etc. I don't normally use that on anything electrical unless the manufacturer specifies it. There is a reasonable 'special plastic grease' available, I think from Farnell (it's actually an Electrolube product). Unlike some other greases, it doesn't attack most common thermoplastics, and is good, therefore, on plastic mechanisms. Most, if not all, clock repairs would disagree with you there. Oil on clock gears tends to attract dust and accellerates wear. And oil on some parts of the escapement will cause the parts to momentarily stick and will cause all sorts of timekeeping errors. Gettign abck to classic computers, though, I don't think a drop of oil on any of the gears in, say, an adding machine will do any real harm. And obviously if a mechnaism was designed to run in an oil bath (e.g. some Tally punches) you need to keep that oil at the right level. Maybe. The gears should be designed to have essentially rolling contact, and therefore almsot no rubbing or friction between the teeth. And thus no wear. That's not to say you can run you car's gearbox without oil [1], but smaller mechanisms, trasmititng minimal power, shouldn't need much. [1] Not least because it's likely to use helically-cut gears which do have sliding contact between the teeth. -tony

Completely OT, but when you dismantle a Citroen hydraulic system, you do clean round the unions (unleaded petrol is the recomended cleaner in the factory workshop manual..) before undoing things, to prevent said dirt ending up inside the sytem. However, any antique clock repairer will tell you not to clean a clock before dismantling and inspecting it. Often marks in the dirt will give information as to the size of a missing part, of what's been rubbing where it shouldn't and so on. In the case of computers, I think the latter applies. They're unlikely to be as dirty as the underside of a car :-). And as with clocks, a mark in the dirt may show where a linkage has been scraping on the chassis or something. -tony