Wintergreen oil for revitalising rubber parts

[alke46]

A bit of an update.Wintergreen oil is not a snake oil cure for renewing boots.Had to take the carbs out of the 85 750 and the boots are softer now than when I installed them.Pretty cool stuff IMHO.

I want to add an update to the wintergreen oil use for the carb to airbox rubbers. I found in my garage today a large baggie that contained 4 smaller baggies each with one rubber boot that was soaked in the wintergreen oil/xyleen thinner concoction.

I had soaked them overnight and then placed each one in a quart sized sealable plastic bag. The date I put on the bags was 9/28/2015. Now 2+ years out, the rubbers are as hard as a frozen hockey puck.

That surprised me as they had been treated and then sealed in an airtight bag, but I guess it just shows that the re-newing is only a temporary thing and will likely need to be redone occasionally.

Hope this is a help to somebody.

[Rust_to_Redemption]

Interesting thread. In the industry I work in, we have rubber gaskets that are operating at high pressures. To be able to maintain pressure in the system the rubber must be pliant and soft. One "trick" we use to get more life out of these expensive (and PITA to replace) rubber gaskets is to use a very light coating of silicone lubricant (Think its made by NovaGard). May work as a stop gap to prevent the effectiveness of the wintergreen oil revitalization from reversing as quickly as it would otherwise.

[Nessism]

I want to add an update to the wintergreen oil use for the carb to airbox rubbers. I found in my garage today a large baggie that contained 4 smaller baggies each with one rubber boot that was soaked in the wintergreen oil/xyleen thinner concoction.

I had soaked them overnight and then placed each one in a quart sized sealable plastic bag. The date I put on the bags was 9/28/2015. Now 2+ years out, the rubbers are as hard as a frozen hockey puck.

That surprised me as they had been treated and then sealed in an airtight bag, but I guess it just shows that the re-newing is only a temporary thing and will likely need to be redone occasionally.

Hope this is a help to somebody.

Great update. Thanks for sharing. I trust you are not trying to flex cold rubber parts right?

[chuck hahn]

I tried the Glycerine and the wintergreen oil. The glycerine did nothing where as the wintergreen softened things up. Also note the time needed varies on the thickness of the rubber. Airbox boots left too long turn into unusable globs of crap..ask me how I know.

[alke46]

Great update. Thanks for sharing. I trust you are not trying to flex cold rubber parts right?

No, I bought new boots at the time but thought I would keep these for spares or if someone needed some. After discovering how hard they were, I just tossed them in the trash can.
Maybe I should retrieve them?

[themess]

I want to add an update to the wintergreen oil use for the carb to airbox rubbers. I found in my garage today a large baggie that contained 4 smaller baggies each with one rubber boot that was soaked in the wintergreen oil/xyleen thinner concoction.

I had soaked them overnight and then placed each one in a quart sized sealable plastic bag. The date I put on the bags was 9/28/2015. Now 2+ years out, the rubbers are as hard as a frozen hockey puck.

That surprised me as they had been treated and then sealed in an airtight bag, but I guess it just shows that the re-newing is only a temporary thing and will likely need to be redone occasionally.

Hope this is a help to somebody.

Rubber, as used in hoses, gaskets, tires and so on, is not a material. It is a mixture of materials. The predominant material in those products is one or several polymers that are also called rubber. The rubber polymer provides a flexible molecular lattice to which other chemicals are added. That rubber mixture must be cured to provide dimensional stability needed in the rubber product. Typically, 1/3 to 2/3 of a rubber mixture are the added chemicals. Books can be written on how rubber mixtures deteriorate with age, heat, light and other chemicals.

My guess is that the boots are made from a relatively inexpensive type of rubber, without a lot of attention how the boots will age. GS motorcycles are now at least 30 years old. Those boots have been exposed to a lot of heat, hydrocarbon fumes, UV light and flexing. With enough time and money, a rubber specialist could design and mold 100-year boots. They would cost too much to make sense on a machine that will probably not be on the road more than 15 years.

[Dogma]

Rubber, as used in hoses, gaskets, tires and so on, is not a material. It is a mixture of materials. The predominant material in those products is one or several polymers that are also called rubber. The rubber polymer provides a flexible molecular lattice to which other chemicals are added. That rubber mixture must be cured to provide dimensional stability needed in the rubber product. Typically, 1/3 to 2/3 of a rubber mixture are the added chemicals. Books can be written on how rubber mixtures deteriorate with age, heat, light and other chemicals.

My guess is that the boots are made from a relatively inexpensive type of rubber, without a lot of attention how the boots will age. GS motorcycles are now at least 30 years old. Those boots have been exposed to a lot of heat, hydrocarbon fumes, UV light and flexing. With enough time and money, a rubber specialist could design and mold 100-year boots. They would cost too much to make sense on a machine that will probably not be on the road more than 15 years.

I'm not sure about that last sentence. For sure 100 year parts would not make sense, but a lot has been learned about rubber parts since the '80's. I've had OEM GS boots go bad in just a few years, but my '01 ZRX has a lot of rubber intake parts showing no sign of degradation. I think we should add add that GS rubber was designed with no anticipation of the fuel formulations they would eventually have to deal with. I don't really have any knowledge that points at ethanol, but why should that stop us blaming it? I sometimes toy with the idea of making molds for my GS intake parts and casting some replacements from modern fuel-rated silicone.

[roeme]

(...) I've had OEM GS boots go bad in just a few years, but my '01 ZRX has a lot of rubber intake parts showing no sign of degradation. I think we should add add that GS rubber was designed with no anticipation of the fuel formulations they would eventually have to deal with.(...)

Eh, I suspect that was just bad/insufficient QA back then, a bad batch that slipped under the radar, or the manufacturers simply didn't know yet what to measure.

[themess]

Rapid degradation indicates either very harsh service conditions or a gross mistake in the ingredients.

In the 70s and 80s rubber products manufacturers definitely knew what to measure.

It would be more likely that someone made fakes and found a way to put them into the OEM distribution stream. I know that sounds far-out, but it happens all the time with drugs in the US. Buy Chinese crap and sell it at huge mark-ups.

[Dogma]

Maybe. More data: The 850 and 1000G airbox boots both shrank & hardened over the same winter. I rode the 850 to BC that May with the shrunken 1000G rubber. The 850's boots were about twice as old as the 1000. On one set, I noticed a sticky substance on the bottom of the boots when I removed them. So, I think something attacked them chemically. I don't remember if I was storing them with Sta-bil yet.

[themess]

You'll never know for sure what the proximate cause is.

A possible problem is that Suzuki might be selling off its old stock, without new boots being manufactured.Rubber deteriorates as it ages. Good conditions can minimize degradation, but not eliminate it.

[jabcb]

Its also worth remembering that some of the available NOS parts may have been sitting on a shelf in some closed dealership with the end result being not so good.
We completed two Suzuki two stroke cafe builds last year and are working on two more. For these projects, I’ve had some bad luck getting rather awful NOS parts.
This has been a problem for the hard-to-find Suzuki two stroke parts and probably will eventually become more of a problem for the GS bikes.

[Griffin]

Resurrecting a dead thread because useful information is at hand now.

Good YouTube video on rubber softening experiment using (among other things) wintergreen oil (Methyl Salicylate): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnGsllKvheQ


Where to get it in industrial form for WAY cheaper than drugstore OTC medicinal form: https://www.amazon.com/Methyl-Salicy...hyl+Salicylate

I have used the above-referenced product (mixed 3:1 with Isopropyl Alcohol) soaked for three days on several sets of carb boots and other rubber parts (side cover grommets, seat and gas tank bumpers, etc...) with excellent results.

My original 1 pint bottle is about empty now, and I have been able to treat a lot of parts with it quite economically.

[bwringer]

I just treated a set of GS intake boots with Rubber Renue with good results. The boots were in good shape, but I needed a little bit of softening so I could get the carbs off and on without extreme measures.

That said, Rubber Renue is the most expensive route; if you look at the MSDS, it's simply 25% Methyl Salicylate and 75% Xylene. You can buy cans of Xylene at any home improvement store for less than $20 a gallon, and Griffin posted a link to the methyl salicylate above. As he noted, you can also use isopropyl alcohol as a "carrier" for the methyl salicylate.

I wouldn't expect any such treatment to resurrect damaged rubber bits, but it can work great on things that are just old and a bit hardened and shrunken.

[themess]

An occasional "prophylactic" treatment might extend life considerably. Rubber boots will not harden uniformly. Areas that are stretched, and/or exposed to flexing, sunlight and so on will start to harden first. The flexing will be concentrated in softer areas, so those areas will flex more than if the entire boot flexes. Concentration of stress will lead to micro-cracks, and the process will accelerate.

So, maybe an annual application of something like Rubber Renue would extend the life considerably, by interrupting the hardening at an early stage.

I wonder if it would help windshield wipers? We certainly shell out too much for them.