Bacon grease & beeswax?

[Gewehr98]

I've been using lard and beeswax as my BPCR bullet lube of choice for the last year or so. To get it working well in my Lyman lubrisizer, I've had to go heavy on the lard and not so heavy on the beeswax ratio, otherwise I'd have to get a heater for the device.

They say idle hands are the tool of the devil, and sure enough, my wife has this can of bacon drippings that I'm looking at, so I drill around on the Intarweb (dangerous, I know...) for info on this potential source of lube.

Yesterday, I warmed up the bacon grease, then ran it through a coffee filter into a pot of boiling water to get the barrel-rusting salt and other soluble impurities out of it. Then I let it set up in the fridge until this morning.

It looks a lot like the lard I've been using for my bullet lube recipe, just a bit softer. I'm going to try a small batch w/beeswax later, then lube up 20 or so 535gr Postells to sit on top of Goex Cartridge for use in my Sharps.

Anybody else try this source of bullet/patch lube? I figure if trappers and mountain men used bear grease, ssomebody must've used bacon grease at one time or another. It's cheap, I have a lot of it, and maybe it'll serve a good purpose.

 

[zxcvbob]

You might need to heat it again to get the water out.

I just tried a BP lube stick in my Lyman 4500 lubrisizer this weekend, and I had a lot of trouble with it. It's sqeezing out under the bullet when size them; I get more lube on the bullet base than I do in the lube grooves. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? (I think I might be cranking up the pressure too high, or the bullets are slightly undersized.) The lubrizer and the bullets are at cool room temperature, and the lube is commercial stuff from White Label; it's a lot softer and stickier than the Lymans smokeless lubes I've used previously.

If I could find a cheap source of beeswax, I'd try beeswax softened with castor oil, or maybe goose fat because I have so much of it in the freezer.

 

[ArmedBear]

NO!!!

The oldtimers specifically didn't use bacon grease. It has salt in it and rusts the gun.

Update: Well, you're right. Someone must have done it at some point, and ruined his barrel...

Update 2: Oops! I didn't read that you tried to remove the salt. I still wouldn't do it, and I agree with Bad Flynch: the idea is right, but the actual process you describe can't be trusted to remove everything.

 

[Bad Flynch]

This really has been covered, but allow me to give you another perspective on it.

Bacon grease will, as stated, contain trace amounts of table salt. That sets it apart for use as an expedient only.

When curing meat, salt and nitrate/nitrite are added. Since the salt is technically not soluble in the fat, only the meat portion contains much salt at all. In fact, many meat curing recipes, e.g. Polish Sausage, call for adding the salt and nitrate/nitrite to only the meat and then adding the fat and cured meat together to make the sausage.

If we lived in a perfect world, bacon grease, therefore, would not contain salt. However, the natural and added water in today's bacons cooks out of the meat and evaporates in the pan, leaving the salt behind in the fat. The fat also has trace amounts of moisture that can carry salt.

Bacon grease is pretty much identical to lard chemically, except that lard will not hve been smoked or have liquid or powdered smoke added to it.

You are correct to try to eliminate included salt by the process you describe. That process, and others that are essentially identical, is used in chem labs to accomplish processes much like you intend. However, it is not perfect and the transfer of salt from the fat to the water will be, to an extent, incomplete.

 

[DuncanSA]

Bacon, and its grease, is meant for eating. How can you waste such a precious commodity when cheaper and less tasty lubes are available?

 

[Gewehr98]

The different perspectives are useful.

Honest - and I will watch things closely after this first batch of 20.

I negated to mention we go through a lot of bacon here - locally raised, butchered, and cured by family members in the farming community. This ain't Oscar Mayer nitrate-cured stuff, so that's why I figured I could use the leftover grease for something other than lubricating the kitchen disposal.

I may heat it again to remove any water trapped in the grease, but I'd wager the brisk boil in water for a dozen minutes or so did a lot to remove what little salt there already was in the grease. It almost looks like Crisco or the lard I was using earlier. I'll give it a taste test just for giggles later.

I'm not terribly worried about small amounts of salt in my black powder cartridge bullet lube, anyway. Lest we forget, I'm shooting Holy Black, which is corrosive as heck. Corrosive (supposedly) bullet lube and corrosive black powder fouling all go bye-bye when I clean the rifle. I'm not planning on using the stuff for a protective coating and barrel lubricant after cleaning, anyway.

 

[Curator]

Geweher98,

I've used bacon grease/bee's wax lube in my muzzle loaders and it worked just as well as lard. As a boy we made our own bacon (we called it Sow-belly) and it was smoke cured, not salt/nitrate cured. Bacon drippings were almost the same as lard which was used mostly for baking (and in some demand) The only problem your modern bacon grease lube will give you compared to comercial lard is it will go rancid a lot sooner.

Commercially packaged lard has a preservative added (polysorbate 80, I think) That's why it isn't refrigerated at the super market. My patch strips made with bacon fat lube would smell pretty bad by the end of summer. Now-a-days I use the commercial lard in a 50/50 mix with hard, yellow bee's wax, and once mixed it seems to last a long time (more than a year) without becoming sour or rancid.

 

[Gewehr98]

That's good to know!

I planned on keeping the purified/de-salted bacon grease in the garage fridge or freezer until I mixed a batch of bullet lube, then if the mix in the lube grooves on my big Postells decide they want to get rancid after loading into .45-70 BP cartridges, I'm not too worried.

BTW, I did the taste test. It needs salt if I want to keep eating it on crackers.

 

[Misfire99]

I suspect one of the reason you will not be able to get all of the salt out of the fat is oil and water don't mix. So there will be droplets of oil that have salt in the that never come in contact with the water. So the salt can't go into solution in the water.

Now maybe if you put a little egg yolk in the oil and water you could make an emulsion that would get more of the salt into solution but now you are doing a lot of work for very little reward. Lard is cheap you know.

 

[Gewehr98]

I don't argue that point at all.

Lard is indeed cheap. So, however, was this abundance of bacon grease, especially when it comes from the family-raised porkers. It may go rancid when I take it out of the fridge, but with the beeswax mixed in and bullets being immediately lubed and sized just prior to their loading in the .45-70 brass, I'm not too terribly concerned about that, either.

I just want to hit all the pros and cons so I haven't forgotten anything in the process. It's good to farm the idea out to my fellow BP shooters in this subforum, kind of a mental checklist as it were.

Again, I'm not worried about a little bit of salt in the lube, because it pales in comparison to the nasty effects of the black powder that propels said bullet down the bore. It's really a non-factor in my book, because all byproducts of salty bacon grease and black powder residue will be quite thoroughly removed from the barrel by the cleaning that I and every other good BP shooter do after a day at the range.

I'm really more worried about the lubricity of the product when mixed with beeswax. My rule of thumb for my 32" Sharps Business Rifle is that I had better see a good lube star on the muzzle after just a couple shots. If not, that means the lube in the bullet grooves isn't enough to keep things slick the entire 32", and I'll have leading mixed with hard BP fouling the last couple inches of the barrel - no fun at all.

However, I'm only substituting one kind of rendered animal fat for another, basically the lard I used earlier (and still have a bunch of) with the filtered and de-salted bacon grease I'm playing with now. If I discover after this first batch of 20 rounds is fired that it didn't work too well, no harm, no foul - back to lard or Crisco in the mix. Otherwise, I'm sure the smell of bacon cooking as I touch off a round or two will endear myself to my fellow shooters almost as much as when I used butter-flavored Crisco a year or so ago.

 

[scrat]

Bacon Grease. ok i have not read all of this. I cant i keep wanting to laugh as i think how it will be to smell rotten eggs from the bp and bacon. Might make everyone hungry at the range

 

[4v50 Gary]

Concur with Armed Bear. No bacon grease as it has salt in it.

 

[Gewehr98]

Understand the salt bit.

Discussed at length in this thread - as was my de-salting of the smoke-cured bacon.

I'll post again after I try out this batch of 20 soldiers.

 

[scrat]

Ok Goex Cartridge. What is that like 4f or is it completely different.

 

[Pancho]

I'd be interested to know if anyone has ever used toilet bowel wax rings as part of their lube formula. I know it isn't beeswax but what is it? Is it fossil fuel based? If so would it cause the dreaded "tar fouling". It is a lot easier to get than beeswax and is a bit softer.

 

[Cosmoline]

Just eat the bacon, open a vein and use the residue buildup to lube the patch.

 

[zxcvbob]

I'd be interested to know if anyone has ever used toilet bowel wax rings as part of their lube formula. I know it isn't beeswax but what is it? It is a lot easier to get than beeswax and is a bit softer.

I have a few toilet rings to experiment with; the wax is certainly sticky enough. I wonder what temperature it melts at? I'm afraid it would melt on a hot day and run off the bullets.

(I'm pretty sure it is paraffin-based, so you might not want to use it around BP)

 

[Gewehr98]

Paraffin-based wax isn't recommended.

Nor is any other petroleum-derived lubricant when dealing with real black powder. It creates some horrible fouling compared to the vegetable or animal fat lubes.

I learned that the hard way when I fired some 535gr Postells that had been lubed with smokeless lube that I thought was SPG or a variant. It took me some time to clean out my barrel afterwards.

Goex Cartridge is somewhere between FFg and FFFg in granulation, but they sift it to remove the "fines" - giving better consistency shot-to-shot. You can tell by sprinkling a scoop full onto a sheet of white paper and looking at the granules.

 

[Pancho]

zxcbbob, a lot of our members use paraffin in their bullet lube and lube pill fomulas with no problem which gets me to thinking that the "no petro based" rule is not all that cut and dried. In fact the felt wad lube formula used by Gatefeo in the saved primer thread at the beginning of this forum uses paraffin.