Buzznrose,
The liquid Ballistol (clear oily stuff ) when mixed with water in any sensible proportion emulsifies with the water to form a white oily water/oil "milk" that never separates into oil floating on top of water. It just stays looking like milk forever. Steel tossed into that milky emulsion doesn't corrode. Simple as that.
Black power fouling is soluble in water, and so the Ballistol/Water mix is what many of use for black powder cleaning. I was familiar with the stuff from that, and had a case of it on hand. I used what I had, and it worked out.
Non de Forum: My tools weren't stored in salt water.. They were rinsed off in a little fresh water but rust had already started and there was no way for me to see to oiling and drying anything in the short time I had to put effort into this one very tiny part of the 1000 things I was worried about. The next best choice was to keep them wet in a corrosion preventative bath until I could spare the time to attend to them. That bath was fresh water and Ballistol. It couldn't have come out any better, as the results were perfect: Zero corrosion on the tools kept in the bath. The key is the emulsion that Ballistol forms with water. I suppose 50 gallons of diesel oil would have worked as well (harder to clean up later though) but what I was able to do was to use the few quarts of Ballistol I had on hand to make up perhaps 50 gallons of protective bath. That's the lesson to be taken. If you need to make up a large protective bath using a small amount of concentrate, this is your stuff. I doubt that anything in any different family of lubricants would work the same way. Try anything mixed perhaps 50:1 with water and see. They key isn't how they perform straight, or how things sprayed with anything do when submerged in water, but how well a they mix with water to form bulk quantities of a emulsion that guns etc can be tossed into and then ignored while other more pressing things are attended to in an emergency. I doubt that any of the other "excellent in their own way" lubes could duplicate this, and certainly none could do any better as the Ballistol worked perfectly in this role.
Willie
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