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Cutting Oil: Lard Oil Pressed Out of Lard
No machine-readable author provided. Peter G Werner~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.5
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14. October 2026NO
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Cutting Oil: Lard Oil Pressed Out of Lard

Before mineral oils, machinists cut, drilled and tapped metal with animal fats, lard above all. Lard is part liquid oil (oleine) and part solid fat (stearine); chill it and squeeze it in linen bags and the oil runs out, as Andrew Ure (1839) describes. That lard oil is the cutting oil. The picture: a cake of home-rendered lard, the starting point.
Beginner
Two days

Instructions

1

Cut and render the fat

Cut or grind the pig fat small, melt it slowly in a pot with a splash of water, without browning, and strain the clear liquid lard through muslin.

Materials for this step:

Pig Fat (Leaf and Back Fat)Pig Fat (Leaf and Back Fat)7 kg
WaterWater0.2 liter

Tools needed:

Butcher Knife & Processing SetButcher Knife & Processing Set
Meat GrinderMeat Grinder
StockpotStockpot
Hot PlateHot Plate
Muslin ClothMuslin Cloth
Balance ScaleBalance Scale
2

Let it grain cold

Let the lard set and stand somewhere cool, around 10 °C (our choice), for a day so the solid part grains out.

Tools needed:

ThermometerThermometer
3

Press in linen bags

Spoon the cold, grainy lard into linen bags and press them slowly. The clear oil runs off; the hard white stearine stays in the bags.

Tools needed:

Linen FabricLinen Fabric
Cheese PressCheese Press
4

Settle and bottle

Let the oil settle, pour it off clear and bottle it. Brush or drip it onto the work when cutting, drilling or tapping.

Tools needed:

Amber Glass BottleAmber Glass Bottle
5

Oil in the lard

Loading Jupyter Notebook...
6

Limits

Lard's make-up and the pressing are Ure's; lard as a cutting fluid is from Wikipedia. The rendering, the pressing temperature and the recovery are ours. Lard oil goes rancid with time: make small batches.

Materials

2

Tools Required

10

This blueprint makes

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Cutting Oil

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