WD 40

Quote from the company history page>Link

In>Link 1953, a fledgling company called Rocket Chemical Company and its staff of three set out to create a line of rust-prevention solvents and degreasers for use in the aerospace industry, in a small lab in San Diego, California.

It took them 40 attempts to get the water displacing formula worked out. But they must have been really good, because the original secret formula for WD-40�which stands for Water Displacement perfected on the 40th try�is still in use today.

Convair, an aerospace contractor, first used WD-40 to protect the outer skin of the Atlas Missile from rust and corrosion. The product actually worked so well that several employees snuck some WD-40 cans out of the plant to use at home.

A few years following WD-40's first industrial use, Rocket Chemical Company founder Norm Larsen experimented with putting WD-40 into aerosol cans, reasoning that consumers might find a use for the product at home as some of the employees had. The product made its first appearance on store shelves in San Diego in 1958.

In 1960 the company nearly doubled in size, growing to seven people, who sold an average of 45 cases per day from the trunk of their cars to hardware and sporting goods stores in the San Diego area.

In 1961 the first full truckload order for WD-40 was filled when employees came in on a Saturday to produce additional concentrate to meet the disaster needs of the victims of hurricane Carla along the U.S. Gulf coast. WD-40 was used to recondition flood and rain damaged vehicles and equipment. In 1969 the company was renamed after its only product, WD-40. WD-40 Company, Inc., went public in 1973 and was listed Over-The-Counter. The stock price increased by 61% on the first day of listing.

Since that time, WD-40 has grown by leaps and bounds, and is now virtually a household name, used in numerous consumer and industrial markets such as automotive, manufacturing, sporting goods, aviation, hardware and home improvement, construction, and farming. End quote

WD-40 was developed to fill the need for a water displacing lubricant for the Army and Marine Corps boys' rifles in the Pacific Theatre of WW II. The humid, swampy environment of the Islands (Guadacanal, Iwo Jima, etc.) took a toll on the M-1 Garands reliability. They were jamming up due to rapid rust formation in the jungles and swamps. A small company in San Diego came up with the contract winning formula. WD does stand for water displacing.
It was not the Corvair Company, but the CONVAIR company (also based in San Diego), makers of the numerous CONVAIR aircraft including the B-36 before they built missles and were absorbed into General Dynamics, Rocketdyne.

At least that's the way the story is told here in San Diego.

By the way, if you like WD 40, You'll love PB Blaster. It's actually a much better penetrator and water displacer than WD 40. It works when WD 40 doesn't.

go here

http://fanclub.wd40.com/Members/FanSpeak/uses.cfm?CFID=276859&CFTOKEN=78067687

I also used it for removing black permate marker lines when laying out sheetmetal. It disolves the black ink very easy.

T_Bone

I've used WD-40 to aid in starting engines too, but lately it doesn't seem to work as well as it used to.. I mentioned this to a friend and he said it's because they stopped using propane as a propellant. Do you know if this is true? If that's true, that would be a good reason that it doesn't work as good as it used to..

Dick