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Alcohols or even acetone is a somewhat better alternative
Rubbing alcohol is cut with nasty oils, both to soothe your skin (pure alcohol is drying and irritating) and so you can't drink the stuff (and evade the whiskey tax).
In this case a little oil might be OK, at least at first. I don't know how long-life the oil is: in the intended use, you'll wash it off or shed it.
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Stay away from carbon tetrachloride. This has been determined to be not too good a thing for exposing humans to.
If you scrub the floor with carbon tet (it has been done), your liver and kidneys will curl up and die. Your death may be slow or quick.
If you work with carbon tet every day, you get "liver and kidney damage in humans." Not unlike the massive overdose, just takes longer. Because carbon tet is a VERY useful chemical (it cuts most oils and many inks, and dries instantly without residue), it is widely used in industry and in commercial laundry, but these occupational exposures have mostly been identified and regulated. "Dry cleaning", which once used lots of carbon tet, is now a closed-drum process, the room is ventilated, etc.
If you feed carbon tet to rats, they get liver cancer. However,
"Human data on the carcinogenic effects of carbon tetrachloride are limited" and
"Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen based on sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals (IARC 1972, 1979, 1982, 1987, 1999)." Considering the wide and heavy use of carbon tet in the past, I'd think any major cause/effect would be clearer.
Until recently, carbon tet was available in small bottles anywhere, as "Carbona", a felt-top bottle that you rub on stains on your clothes. That's what Daven expected you to use: engineers' pocket protectors did NOT eliminate ink stains, so every white-shirt engineer had Carbona in the desk. And I really doubt that an occasional snort of Carbona would shorten your life.
However I just looked on Carbona's website, and they have 50 different products, 10 different formulas put up in the old carbon-tet-type bottles, and a pull-down list of 100 different types of stains to tell you which formula to use. I can't find any reference to their former flagship solvent, the one that gave Carbona its name.
Carbona always came in glass, and everything is plastic now. Maybe they can't put carbon tet in plastic.
Also I have heard that you can snort carbon tet for a weak "high". Probably as much fun as sniffing gasoline or acetone or toluene (model airplane glue), less fun than beer. But perhaps Carbona did not want to be seen in that crowd and switched to less attractive (to glue-heads) solvents.
100-proof American vodka and a hair-dryer? It is half water, but the hairdryer will drive the water away before corrosion sets in. (Most other whiskey has flavor-scum; American vodka is not allowed to have flavor.)
Acetone is old-fashioned nail polish remover. Except NPR was always cut with hand-lotion (if you try pure acetone on your hand, you will know why). And many current NPRs boast of non-acetone formulas (a dash of Hexachlorobenzene, anyone?). However the hardware store often has acetone in the paint aisle. (Maybe not in California.)
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i thought dextron was brake fluid (dextron 2, 3, 4, ect for various weights)?
Nope. There is brake fluid DOT2, DOT3, DOT4, etc. These are not for "weight". They are mostly about how new and sophisticated the car is. To over-simplify: it is boiling point.
A classic 1940s-1980 drum brake system will get very hot, but there is a practical limit. The drum expands away from the shoes, which means it will go all goofy and useless around red-hot. Also the fluid cylinder is not in direct contact with the brake shoes. We often used a heavy alcohol (and yes, people drank it and went blind). I guess they finally standardized that as DOT1, and then banned it. IIRC, my '79 Ford's big iron brakes could take DOT3. They were disks, but designed in the days of drums, and didn't work all that hard (or well).
More sophisticated disk brakes can work much hotter, because disk-warp is not a big deal. But because the pads are right on the fluid cylinder, the fluid boils. DOT 4 is harder to boil. It has other properies too (including being "softer" than the old stuff). There are rules about mix-n-match the different types of brake fluids: read your car manual and the bottle, every word.
I do remember days when boiled brakes were common on the long hills above LA. Mostly the shoes went soft and lost their grip, but if you didn't get a clue then next the fluid would boil. At first the brakes try to grab. If you let off on the pedal a second, the fluid boils back into the master cylinder. Next time you press, you are pressing on vapor, not liquid. Pedal drops to the floor and the shoes may not even graze the drum. Hello, deadman's curve!
Dextron is slushbox juice. But the history is interesting.
Mopar (Chrysler, Dodge, et al) had the idea a slushbox should work with anything slippery. Engine oil is handy. For obvious reasons, it is wise to have separate oiltanks for engine and gearbox. (Engine oil is full of soot and acid, gearbox is full of metal filings.) But they tricked one major US city into putting a specification on their police cars that engine and transmission would use the SAME oil. Mopar could meet this strange spec, by plumbing the tranny off the engine oilpan. None of the others could.
GM had big experience with turbines and their oils. GM used sophisticated oil technology to harmonize the shift action and the cost of all the bushings in an automatic transmission. Dextron is pretty fancy oil, but available everywhere.
Ford came late to the party, and all the good tricks were patented. Ford had some awful slushboxes: the Ford-O-Matic was such a mush-a-matic that they changed the name a few times to hide the fact that they kept selling the same lame tranny. The C4 was incredibly cheap, and the C3 was cheaper. Ford invented "Ford type FA transmission fluid", which is nothing special, except it tends to hide the flaws in Fordomatics and C4s. If you use Dextron, a C4 will shift harsh. (And on the older Fords, if you put Dextron on the orginal Ford seals, they would leak bad.)
I had a C4 with all new seals and the shift action tuned to use Dextron. It worked better than new (the third time they rebuilt it). But I later had a bone-original Ford0matic (then called C6), and it begged for Type FA. After mine was made, Ford gave up and adjusted their production to use Dextron type fluids. They have their own name for the post-FA fluid, but I believe they licensed Dextron. (There were several queer deals between Ford and GM. Ford invented a FWD layout, but couldn't figure out where to use it. GM licenced it and made the Toronado. Not that the first Toronado was a big seller, but that design saved GM's butt in the sudden down-sizing of the 1980s. A lot of their new-mid-size V8 cars, like Riviera, were small-block Toronados. Maybe when GM produced that design by the millions, Ford was able to trade for the use of the Dextron formula.)
