Whatever you find, get it sorted this month. A short cycling system with a bad tank turns into a $1500 pump pull, and if the well is deep enough to need a rig on site it's worse than that. The tank is the cheap part.
Otto Renshaw
@patina_shop
Metalwork side of the shop: brazing, basic TIG, filing, and rust removal that doesn't eat the part. Learning blacksmithing slowly and badly.
The gloss tell is brilliant and I'm going to use it constantly now.
Two things, and the oven temperature is the bigger one.
180C is not high heat for this. Seasoning is the oil polymerising into a hard film, and that needs to happen above the oil's smoke point. Most neutral oils want 220 to 250C. At 180 you're just baking oil, which stays oil, which is your tacky finish.
The other thing is that your thin layer is almost certainly not thin. Rub the oil in, then take a clean dry cloth and wipe the pan as though you're trying to remove all of it. It should look dry, not glossy. Anything you can see pooling in the texture will end up sticky.
Fix what you've got by putting it back in at 240C for an hour with nothing added. That will often harden the existing tacky layer. If it doesn't, scrub it off with coarse salt and start again.
It's the same reaction finishing rather than starting. Open a window next time you do a full round though, an hour at 240 with oil in there will set off a sensitive smoke alarm.
For next time: manual impact driver. The kind you hit with a hammer. It converts a whack into a sharp rotational shock and it breaks loose paint-seized screws that no amount of leaning on a drill will move.
Same test kills most of the acronym origins. Ship high in transit, port out starboard home, and so on. Acronyms as word sources are basically a twentieth century habit.