Filling my Grease gun -- OPTIONS

[farmboy555]

Don't they make a pump that will fit on a 5 gal. pail of grease that will refill a grease gun? I'm getting a lot of waste with the tubes. :confused:
thanks for any input you may have. Dennis

[RonG]

There might be problems these days with using a grease gun without a tube in it as I don't think the piston will seal well against the walls of the cavity that the tube goes in.
You can buy a pump for a 5 gallon pail or you can stick the grease gun into the pail and suck the grease into the gun but that is kind of messy and might be wasteful as well by the time you get it cleaned up.
Can you share with us the problems that you are having that is causing the waste?
There may be a solution that you have not tried yet that some of us has dealt with successfully.Are you bleeding the air from the gun after you change cartridges?Sometimes you have to burp them again as you are using them but if you have a quality gun and use cartridges with no dents in them there should be very little waste,almost none in fact.
Release the spring into the cartridge before the top is fully tightened and pump the pressure up until it is pumping grease and then tighten it down.
As I said before you sometimes have to do it again before the cartridge is empty but if you are wasting grease them something is wrong with your hardware or your method.Ron G

[Squizzy246B]

Down here Alemite, McNaught and Lincoln have a Loader pump that goes on a 5 gal pail of grease. You just push the bleeder nozzle of the gun into the loader and pump the handle.....no more screwing around with bloody cartridges and grease at near half the price of cartridges. In most guns you need to reverse the piston or shift an O-ring to switch from cartridge to bulk.

The Alemite Loader pump comes with adaptor nozzles to fit Lincoln.

The Loader pump is the ducks guts cause you don't really need to carry around cartridges that get busted and damaged. Every time I'm at the yard wondering what stuff I need to do or organise I just put the gun on the pump and give it a top up. I'd say there is substantially less waste than cartridges although for the last load in the bottom of the drum you need to suck it up the old fashioned way.

On an older gun, if the sealing on the piston is not good you just leave the gun with an empty cartridge in it and re-fill from the loader pump without changing anything....the cartridge acts as a sleeve....and lasts for awhile.

We actually did the cost comparo today....20 litre (5gal drum) costs A$130 and equals 42 cartridges at almost A$6 a pop...or $240....and the Alemite Loader pump costs just under A$200.....so two 5 gal drums and you are in-front....not to mention the convienience.....thats all in Aussie Dollars.....which, the Aud by the end of next week should be worth about $3 US:rolleyes: :D

[farmboy555]

Thanks for the reply. I've never changed a tube of grease that didn't have what I considered to muck left in it to be not pumping / empty. Just looking for a clean, cheaper route, with less wasted.

[DPete]

I buy bulk grease in 120lb drums for which I have a pneumatic pump. To fill my handguns I put a zerk in the head of the gun and fill with the pump. Very rarely do I buy tube grease.

[Dwan Hall]

I buy bulk grease in 120lb drums for which I have a pneumatic pump. To fill my handguns I put a zerk in the head of the gun and fill with the pump. Very rarely do I buy tube grease.

Same here.

Dwan

[Kgmz]

What you are looking for is a Lincoln 1296 5 gallon bucket pump for filling grease guns.

[farmboy555]

Thanks again

[atgreene]

I've gone to the same set-up. 5 gallons of Amsoil grease and an older pump that I had works much better than tubes. I do run an old tube in my gun, although I don't know if I need to.

I have the Napa #'s for the addaptors you need them. My Napa guy laughed when I first called him for the adaptors I needed. In 20 years of heavy equipment work at Napa he had never been asked to find the set-up for this.:Banghead He got a good laugh out of it, even if it did take a day to find what I needed.