Cartridge bullet lube with petroleum jelly added, ok to use?

I know the advice about not using certain types of petroleum products in BP guns, but I was wondering if any of you had actually tried a cartridge bullet lube that contained some petroleum jelly, and what your results were. Specifically, did it make a mess that was really hard to clean out of the bore and cylinder?

The reason I ask is that I want to make up some 45 Colt loads, and I have some cast bullets that a friend of mine makes from a 270 SAA mold. He lubes these with his own home brew bullet lube. I can't remember all of the ingredients, but the only one in any sort of volume I was questioning was the petroleum jelly. This lube is very soft and gooey, not at all hard like the typical commercial cast bullet lubes. It has worked very well in our smokeless guns, leaving a little lube ring on the crown of the barrel, and leaving no leading in the bores.

I'd like to try these bullets in the BP cartridges, but if the petroleum jelly is going to cause a mess, I'll need to lube with something else.

Any experience you can share would be appreciated.

Can you just take Wonder Lube or Bore Butter and squirt it in the lube groove of the bullet? Or will it run down and foul the powder once the bullet is in the case? I can't see how that could happen, if the bullet is pressed into the case....

Ok, you guys have convinced me. We'll cast some more bullets and lube with SPG or a beeswax/crisco/olive oil mix. I think my buddy already has the beeswax and paraffin that he uses in the other lube, we can just make up another batch without the petroleum jelly.

First attempt at pan lubing

Well fellers, I gave this a try last evening. I melted down a 50/50 mix of beeswax and Crisco, placed my de-lubed commercial cast bullets in a 8" plate, and poured in the lube up to just before the crimp groove. Let it cool for a bit, until the edges of the lube cake receded from the edges of the plate, and tried pushing some of the bullets out. I broke the cake pretty quickly, and the majority of the bullets came out with no lube in the grooves.

Ok, that was wildly unsuccessful, lets try again, but this time I'd put the cake in the fridge for a short period and see if that helped. Well, that was worse.

Hmm, maybe I need to space the bullets further apart from each other, and further in from the edges, to help prevent breaking the cake. I let it cool 20 minutes or so, no fridge this time, and very carefully pushed out the bullets. This time I made it all the way through without breaking the cake, but I still had about half the bullets not keep lube in the grooves as they were pushed out.

I think this was mostly due to the shallow, small lube groove in these bullets (255 lswc from Magnus Bullet Co.). We tried a 270 SAA style bullet which has a much wider, deeper lube groove, and those worked better.

For my fourth attempt, I decided to let the cake cool for a shorter time before trying to remove the bullets. And, while it was cooling, I thought about trying to just pull them out of the cake while still in the pan, using forceps or pliers. So I waited until the whole cake looked like it had just set up all the way through, then very carefully grasped the nose of the bullet with some pliers and pulled.

This worked fairly well, however the technique which paid off the most was giving the bullet a twist before removing it from the cake. This seemed to prevent pulling a chunk of lube out of the lube groove as the bullet was being pulled up out of the cake. Most of the bullets removed in this fashion looked like they had been run through a lubrisizer. Very neat.


So, in short, this is definitely one of those trial and error processes, and I'm still refining the technique and the lube mixture. The 50/50 beeswax is very slick, but it almost seems like it needs something to make it more sticky, like peanut butter (no, I'm not going to add peanut butter), to stick in the lube groove better. I dunno, maybe that will make things worse because it will stick to all the other surfaces of the bullet better too, and won't release from the mold clean.

I can see now why someone invented the lubrisizer....

Yes, I'd like to make up a cutter for next time around. That's a good article, thanks!

I'd like to try the Gatofeo blend, but I'm wondering where to get mutton tallow around here...

What's funny is there was a perfectly good, new lubrisizer right next to me on the bench while I was doing all of this. I was over at my buddy's house last night and he has a lubrisizer, but he's been running his other lube mix through it (the one that has vaseline and STP trans fluid in it) and we didn't want to get any of that mixed in with the beeswax/crisco blend. Hence the pan lubing.