I odn't know how it's oiled (mist probably) but it's oily enoug that if you leave it on a stack of paper, magazine, clothing, etc it leaves a nasty stain the next morning. Haven't touched the horrid stuff in a decade or two but I bet it ozidizes faster. Unless you're punching out the assembly source to your FORTRAN compiler or something I doubt you'll wear out you punch with casual use of dry tape. You might try running a manually oiled foot or two of tape (punch RUBOUTs) once in a while to manually oil it. Just a guess. Chadless 5-level oiled tape is the most 'fun'. Instead of holes it punches little toilet-seat-shaped "U"s. Umm not so good for optical readers, but fine for mechanical readers what stick a little rob up the hole to read. I have an article about different types of readers talka about readers that blow air through the holes, detected with a little 'sail' on a microswitch, and running the chadless tape over a corner to tilt out the flaps for optical reading. Sheesh, why bother.