Recommended Pill Lubricant

Is it recommended to apply any type of lubricant on the threads of the pill,
or is it best to just keep the pill as clean as possible using an eraser or
contact cleaner pen.

Recently I started using A.S.(Arctic Silver) on a generic 18650 Q5 light that uses a regular threaded aluminum pill.


At first glance A.S. seemed to me, like a very good pill lubricant with favorable qualities for this particular point:

1. Excellent thermal conductor.

2. Very electrically conductive.

3. Does not cause oxidation on aluminum.

4. Does not harden, dry up or liquefy under high heat.


I have only been using A.S. for a few days so the only comment I can make so far is that it doesn't seem to affect the performance negatively, but it's way to soon to tell.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

No version of AS is electrically conductive. Under the right circumstances the silver bearing version is slightly capacitive. If the light design depends on the threads conducting electricity you can buy a proper conductive grease, BUT you wrote that it works ok so it may not be necessary, a tightly threaded part will cut through the grease enough to conduct without depending on the grease conducting. However it is not meant to be a lubricant, the solid particles are formulated to conduct heat but are the opposite of providing good lubrication of the threads as grinding small solid particles when you screw or unscrew will wear the threads a bit, but probably not enough to matter unless the flashlight uses a twisty off/on switch and you put it on those threads. This is especially true for the AS formulations named Ceramique or Alumina, I actually use these to polish heatsink surfaces out in the field when I don't have a real "polish" with me, as they are pretty abrasive. What is with this forum software? It is stripping my post of all the blank formatting lines so it looks like a big blob of text. Ugh.

The older arctic silvers (up to version III) are pure silver and synthetic grease, and won't seriously abrade your threads. The newer versions have some of the boron and alumina ceramics that the non-conductive greases use, so they WILL be abrasive. I tried some MX2 once on some threads to see how it would work, you can definately feel the grinding of the particles in the grease, so I don't recommend it. Since it's in a sealed part of the light I would just use a small amount of temperature stable silicone or krytox grease to prevent the threads from corroding or seizing. At the same time it's already in there and once tightend down won't hurt anything, so as long as you aren't swapping pills out all the time it should be fine.

AS 3 was the first version with synthetic grease, it and v5 have boron nitride. v5 even has aluminum oxide. Since the silicone oil in v1 and 2 separate out over time, it seems there is no ideal AS to use unless it is intentional to finely polish threads. If there were regular thread maintenance so the AS1 or 2 didn't sit long enough to get hard, their separation probably wouldn't matter though I like the idea of having a flashlight able to sit unused for a long time, to only need maintenance after a certain period of use except you still have a battery discharge to deal with if not running primary cells.

http://www.arcticsilver.com/msds.htm

I like whiskey when i ingest my pills.