Burning lube?

[Gewehr98]

Took a buddy shooting with me yesterday, along with my Model 1874 Sharps Business Rifle. As he's plinking away with his Colt Sporter, zinging little 60gr pills into his 100 yard target, I'm lighting off my 500gr swaged spitzers, with 70gr black powder loads.

The storm front moved in fairly quickly in the afternoon, and the range got somewhat dark as I was finishing up my last few rounds. I was focusing on the target and follow-through, when my partner yelled "Wow, did you guys see that?"

Evidently, both he and the shooters nearby my bench saw something exit the muzzle of my rifle immediately after the shot, it dropped to the ground while still burning brightly. Now I know the Goex Cartridge black powder I use has a really bright flash and fireball from my 32" barrel, even I can see that from behind the trigger on a dark afternoon. So after checking the bore for obstructions or big chunks of powder fouling, I handed the rifle to my buddy with a couple more of the same 500gr loads, the intent being that I could watch the proceedings from a different angle while he sent rounds downrange.

I saw a big fireball, lots of white smoke, and sparks in a cone-shaped pattern going downrange. But I didn't see anything bloop out of the muzzle and drop to the ground burning.

My home-spun bullet lube is a combination of Crisco, lard, and beeswax. The bullets are pan-lubed, then seated on top of a card wad. The 70gr Goex Cartridge charge is then compressed about 0.300", leaving the case mouth and bullet bore rider transition flush. Then I crimp just enough to get rid of the case mouth flare, bullet tension is fine without crimping into it.

After just a few rounds of the above handloads, I have a nice lube star on the crown of my barrel, so I know that there's adequate lubrication all the way out to 32". My guess is that my fellow shooters saw either a dollop of excess bullet lube lighting off and blooping out the muzzle, or maybe one of the card wads separated from the bullet early and fluttered to the ground while burning.

Anybody else experience such a phenomenon? Weird!

 

[Low Key]

Strangely enough, my 58 revolver will do the same thing with goex and only goex....pyrodex p doesn't do it. I knew it was burning lube, but thought I was the only one in the universe that something that strange would happen to.

 

[Gewehr98]

I may have to try and light off a sample of my bullet lube...

Granted, beeswax is used for candles, so I know it burns at a given temperature and rate, but I would've thought that the act of firing a black powder round and subsequent burning of organic bullet lube would be a topic of discussion and explanation before I saw something that alluded to it. Odd, that.

Maybe, as Low Key stated, it's not necessarily that rare a thing. Now I'm going to have to take the camera with me, and see if I can capture the event again.

 

[gezzer]

Are you using any wads under the bullet? They will be seen and sometimes be on fire when exiting the muzle.

 

[Gewehr98]

Yup.

Some of my swaged 500gr spitzers are gas-checked, but for the most part they're nekked as a jaybird, just lubed in the two lube grooves. So I use either Ox Yoke Wonder Wads, or if I need the space for more Goex, I'll use the Blue & Gray Products card wads. The loads were using the card wads for this batch, an experiment because I was using Remington nickel-plated .45-70 brass. Black powder loads in nickel-plated brass clean up really easy in my ultrasonic cleaning tank afterwards, because the fouling doesn't stick that well to the inside-plated cases. The bad part is the Remington Nickel cases don't hold as much powder as others I've tried, and I'm getting split necks fairly often. I may go back to my stash of vintage Rem-UMC .45 Gov't balloon head brass, it was more accomodating and the cases didn't split.

It was fun trying to drop tube the full 70gr of Goex Cartridge into the case, seat the wad, and have the bullet compress things further. I ended up deforming the bullet noses, which means I'll be buying a powder compression die pretty soon.

I wanted to see where my max powder load was, and whether or not I could generate a "crack" on firing like my smokeless .45-70 loads. Even with 32" of burn time in my Sharps, there was no "crack" from the 500gr bullet/70gr black powder load. So it must still be subsonic in velocity. Just for grins, I ran a 485gr Whitworth bullet on top of 22gr of Alliant 2400 in the same gun. A very pronounced "crack", a different type of recoil (but still very comfortable), and an entirely different point of impact lower on the target.

 

[gezzer]

You will need to try some of the Swiss powder if you are looking to go above sound level.

I'll bet it was a wad on fire!

 

[Derek]

Tracers

Howdy. I had a similar experience with an original 51, Navy. Buddy had made up some very sticky greased wads and we loaded up with a full chamber of fffg, wad and ball. At 25yds, both his Whitney and my Colt were drawing lines of smoke from muzzle to target . Then the stump the targets were pinned to started returning fire! At least, that's what it looked like, little spurts of flame and smoke from the target, and finally one of the targets caught fire. The felt wads were the culprits, of course, with half killed powder forced in to the sticky lube.Fun, in a pyromanic sort of way.