Grease Review: Harvey's brand "Plumbers Faucet and Valve Grease"

This week we take a close look at an exciting and often overlooked viscous lubricant: "Plumbers Faucet and Valve Grease" made by the William H Harvey Company of Omaha Nebraska.

Omaha, Nebraska, United States of America.
Image by Ron Reiring.

But first, a little about Omaha that you probably don't know. (We call this background information the "etymology of grease"!)

• Omaha is the largest city in Nebraska
• Scandinavians first came to Omaha as Mormon settlers in the Florence neighborhood. Who would have guessed!
• Omaha is very international: according to Wikipedia, where we blatantly steal most of the information for these grease backgrounders, "By 1910, 53.7% of Omaha’s residents and 64.2% of South Omaha’s residents were foreign born or had at least one parent born outside of America."
• Enough of the background already, let's get to that juicy grease review!

Up for analysis is a 29.6ml/1fl. oz. tube of Faucet and Valve Grease. Breaking down its qualities one by one, we find the following:

• Cost: this is cheap stuff! At only $3.60 a tube, this is an entry-level grease for those just starting a collection. I've heard time and time again from my readers about the prohibitive cost of starting a serious grease collection. Well, this is the answer: at $3.60 a tube, how can you say no?
  
• Ease of opening tube: We did have a little trouble getting this open, as the tube-end was molded shut. We give it a B- in this area.
• Ease of flow: This puppy flows with nice control from the tube. Of course this is of no interest to collectors who will just be storing this in its original package on a display shelf, but for the rare few who actually need a good lubricant, this has to be mentioned.
• Color: Has a sickly sort of congealed urine color. Just seeing it makes me want to scream "Nurse, it smells like you're in here!"
• Rubbing on ass factor: Would you want to run this on your ass? Although possible, since this is a non-toxic grease designed for water supplies, it's not likely that you would want to rub this anywhere on your body, or even have someone else (say, an attractive Swedish woman) do this for you either. We chalk this up to the color: if the manufacturer down in Omaha had just added something to get it away from that sickly urine color, it might indeed be butt-rubbable.
• Package design: The design here is sort of contemporary derivative of modernist typography and layout principles. To wit: we note the graphical call to a single authority, in the form of a brand, as is common in modernist structures. The general layout harkens back to the good old 1950's; which is perhaps understandable when we think of Omaha, the rise of suburbia and life in middle America. The graphical message here is that this is grease for your average Joe plumber, for your Average Jack and Jane's suburban faucet. Compare this to the graphically fantastic Tamiya grease we featured last week. There was an opportunity here for this week's grease to project an inclusive, perhaps postmodern vibe, but it was missed by its package designers. Just have a look at this bilingual instruction panel:

While we'll always appreciate humorous value of the words "ball cock" when they are put together, there's a banality to the overall description.

Assuming you are still awake after reading that label, we'll move on to our final comments!

• Overall Aesthetic grade: we're calling this a solid C for aesthetics. The package design is lacking, the color does not have the aesthetic appeal to make you want to rub it on your butt.
  

Conclusion: this is an average-looking grease with equally average packaging. On the upside, its low cost makes it an excellent entry-level grease for the collector.

Overall Grade: C+

PS: Here are a few bonus shots from our photo shoot, which happened right next door to where they take those racy American Apparel photos: