Intro
13%
Lubrication fundamentals: graphite, water-based, synthetics, and what's actually in the drum
Read a forge lube SDS instead of the marketing sheet, tell carrier from active solid, and know which lube families fight nitrided surfaces.
A forge shop swaps lube suppliers mid-program. The new product is sold as a "drop-in replacement" for the previous graphite-in-water lube. The TDS lists the same viscosity, the same dilution ratio, the same flash-off behavior. Six weeks in, the maintenance crew pulls the first die from the new lube run and finds the compound layer thinning faster than the same job under the old lube on the previous die. Six months in, average die life on the program is down 18% and nobody can isolate the change. The drums look the same. The TDS reads the same. The SDS would have told a different story if anyone had read it.
This lesson is about reading the lube the way Course 2 read the nitride certificate. The label is not the spec.