Ever try using old style lard in your lube?

[Oyeboten]

Thanks junkman, I shoulda 'googled' it before goofing it up!

Been a while since I saw those signs...


I believe Whale Oil is what was recommended, and, used for the lubricaiton of the Mechanical parts of Time Pieces and Firearms and other expensive smaller kinds of mechanisms, prior to the advent of readily available Petroleum-based Lubricant products.

Rendered Animal Fats, from Porcines particularly, were also used for lubricating Machinery and Mechanisms which were of larger scale.


I am sure any sort of rendered clearified Animal fats will work well for preserving and Waterproofing Leather, and, for preserving the surfaces of Steel, particularly if they are applied warm and allowed to form a film which can oxidise in place...even if some will work better than others.

Just about any Vegetable Oil will do likewise for preserving the surfaces of Steel in humid climes.

I htink Almond Oil or Walnut Oil were often used for this years ago.


Rendered Fats from various Animals were certainly a useful item for tens of thousands of years for treating Wood, Leather, Baskets, Cloth, and who knows what all else.


Vegetable or Animal Waxes, similarly.


It would be very easy for anyone who eats meat, to simply save the fats from Roasts, seperate them out from the other juices by cooling, and, use them if they wished.

Usually, these are used for making Gravey though, of course.

 

[Jaymo]

I've thought about clarifying bacon grease to use in my lube mixes, but it's to useful in cooking. I've used Crisco, mixed with beeswax, canola oil, and lanolin in one of my BP lubes.
I like the smell of olive oil and have used it in some of my lubes, but canola handles high temps better, and is cheaper. The only olive oil we keep on hand is extra virgin, for cooking.
Lanolin works well, because it lubes, is easy to apply, and sticks to the bullet like cosmoline. It's just a bit expensive to use it straight.

My favorite of my homebrew lubes is a mix of beeswax, lanolin, and canola oil for winter, and beeswax, lanolin, and Crisco for summer.
Both make a good lip balm, as does straight lanolin. Straight lanolin makes the best lip balm for me.

Guess I need to buy some mutton and leg of lamb.

Can you use beef suet?

 

[Hellgate]

Here comes some heresy: I have been putting automotive grease as an over ball lube on my C&Bs for about 15 years for SASS shoots and it works fine. I also put it on the arbors and front & back of the cylinders and it works just fine. I also place a lubed wad (straight deer tallow or 50/50 beeswax & lard or BW & olive oil)under each ball. I have NEVER had a chain fire in over 20,000 shots fired but I am ANAL about loading with over ball lube, wads & tight caps. The auto grease gets all over everything but stays close to the same consistency during hot or freezing weather and is easily applied with a trimmed irrigation syringe. It never melts and is pretty cheap.

 

[Norton Commando]

I shot my 158 Remington this weekend and used Vaseline over the balls. I guess it worked because I didn't have a chain-fire during the 54 rounds that I shot. However, things were getting pretty messy and slippery toward the end of my session.

Assuming that chain firing takes place at the nipple end of the cylinder and you have a tight fitting ball, you may not need anything over the ball. If you cut a thin lead ring when seating the ball, then the ball is making a metal-to-metal seal with the cylinder and should keep out any spurious sparks.

Do we know for sure which end of the cylinder is responsible for that diabolical chain firing phenomenon?

 

[junkman_01]

I've always been of the belief that chain firing happens at the nipple end of the cylinder.

 

[arcticap]

Do we know for sure which end of the cylinder is responsible for that diabolical chain firing phenomenon?

It has been reported to occur at both ends due to either poorly cast "pockmarked" balls and/or pitted chambers which causes issues with how well the ball seals the chamber.

 

[mykeal]

+1 arcticap

 

[damoc]

ive used lard mixed with beeswax with very good results
tallow is a little better i think but i would not think twice about using lard

i will never use crisco again its not the same its not as good as lard unless
you are one of our resident fanatics LOL that likes to
disasemble and clean after each shooting session you will end up with
"glue" not just grease all through your mechanism.

bacon grease/lard is perhaps a little salty but not to bad still better than crisco.

 

[makos_goods]

I've always been of the belief that chain firing happens at the nipple end of the cylinder.

Junkman,
I have to agree with you. People will give a lot of anecdotal "evidence" if you can call it that and more often just opinion, or something they heard from their next door neighbor's friends second cousin's boyfriend.

There have been a few that even claimed it happened to them, but to date after questioning them their stories usually end up being they "think" it initiated from the front. But they don't know. The only way they would know be to find all of the caps relatively intact and still hard on the cones. That's not likely to happen in any case as the chambers not under the hammer would blow the caps off. How do I know? Because we did some controlled experiments a while back trying to determine how chainfires actually happen.

We were unable to initiate "flash-overs" or chainfires or whatever you want to call them from the front. I chronicled this on a different forum once, we pretty much tried everything including cutting notches on the sides of balls and even adding powder to the chamber faces around loose fitting balls with grooves cut in them.

Below is a series of time lapse shots most of you have probably seen before from
Arthur Tobias in his article In The Blink of an Eye: The Percussion Ignition Sequence in Civil War .44s
you can see what causes a percussion revolver to chainfire. There is an enormous cloud of burning gases that blasts back out of the cone and hits the recoil shield area covering the entire rear portion of the cylinder. If there is a loose cap or a missing cap it is obvious how that flaming gas bouncing off of the recoil shield could find its way down a flash hole or even ignite the priming compound of a loose cap.



There is definitely a path from the rear, it is intentionally put there and the caps themselves can be set off, to imagine an equivalent path to the front is tough on my part.

Regards,
Mako

I'd like to add I think it is poorly fitted caps that potentially have the biggest problem. Pinching caps creates a crease where the hot gases can enter the cap and set it off. I have never been an advocate of pinching caps for a multitude of reasons.

 

[arcticap]

With all due respect, read the posts by Pohill who had several chainfires caused by poorly cast balls from a bad mold, and with different guns, and on one of the chambers the cap remained in place unfired.
Please explain how a cap can be left unfired after the cylinder goes bang unless ignition came through the front?

tkendrick also induced misfires through experimentation simply by using the wrong size balls.

1. http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=458438&highlight=chainfire

2. http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=352530&highlight=chainfire

3. http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=242627&highlight=chainfire