Noz
Member
What Acorn said about bacon grease. I won't cover my guns with a sodium chloride product and store them away. No bacon grease and watch the label on the crisco type products for high salt content.
Natural Lube?!?!
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Gatofeo
Member
I use cheap olive oil for preserving bores and coating the exterior of my black powder guns. No petroleum-based oils for me.
I live in the desert, which is usually low humidity but can get high humidity during rain. Yet, never had a speck of rust appear when using olive oil as a rust preventative.
Great-great-great-great-great (10X) Grandpa Gato used mastadon grease. His cave paintings swear by it. His later descendants used Dodo Bird grease drippings. Both are kinda hard to come by today.
I heard that one of my ancestors, long ago, used an oil rendered from the crop of velociraptors. I hear that worked good, but that's even harder to find.
I live in the desert, which is usually low humidity but can get high humidity during rain. Yet, never had a speck of rust appear when using olive oil as a rust preventative.
Great-great-great-great-great (10X) Grandpa Gato used mastadon grease. His cave paintings swear by it. His later descendants used Dodo Bird grease drippings. Both are kinda hard to come by today.
I heard that one of my ancestors, long ago, used an oil rendered from the crop of velociraptors. I hear that worked good, but that's even harder to find.
Busyhands94
Member
What were the guns like back then?
doubleh
Member
I guess I'm doing most everything wrong. I scrub them with HOT, soapy water after shootng. It dries quickly but just to make sure they get a blast of high pressure air also. Then they get lubricated with the same thing I use on my smokeless guns, Mobil 1, and wax on the outside. I've been shooting blackpowder off and on for a long, long time with no problems and no rust. Before Mobil 1 I used gun oil. Of course I wipe the bore and cylinders before a shooting session.
Driftwood Johnson
Member
Ballistol
If you can't find it locally, just call them up and ask for a dealer near you.
http://www.ballistol.com/
As for needing to wipe it off before shooting BP, hogwash! I have been lubing my BP guns with Ballistol for years. C&B and Cartridge, revolvers, rifles and shotguns. Never bothered to wipe it out of the barrel or chambers of a revolver or rifle, just insert cartridges and shoot. That business about petroleum products not being compatible with Black Powder is an overgeneralization. As for the chambers in a C&B revolver, treat it no different than you would any time you are shooting C&B. Wipe the chambers clean and fire a cap on each empty chamber.
Ballistol is basically paraffin dissolved in mineral oil. Not much else.
http://www.baileysonline.com/msds_sheets/PDFs/ballistol.PDF
If you can't find it locally, just call them up and ask for a dealer near you.
http://www.ballistol.com/
As for needing to wipe it off before shooting BP, hogwash! I have been lubing my BP guns with Ballistol for years. C&B and Cartridge, revolvers, rifles and shotguns. Never bothered to wipe it out of the barrel or chambers of a revolver or rifle, just insert cartridges and shoot. That business about petroleum products not being compatible with Black Powder is an overgeneralization. As for the chambers in a C&B revolver, treat it no different than you would any time you are shooting C&B. Wipe the chambers clean and fire a cap on each empty chamber.
Ballistol is basically paraffin dissolved in mineral oil. Not much else.
http://www.baileysonline.com/msds_sheets/PDFs/ballistol.PDF
Driftwood Johnson
Member
I have been hearing for years that petroleum products are incompatible with Black Powder. It is a blanket statement that is not always true.
Ballistol is made from paraffin dissolved in mineral oil. Both of those are petroleum products. As I said, I always lube my BP guns with Ballistol and I never remove it from chambers or bores before shooting Black Powder. I never get the dreaded hard crusty fouling that is supposed to come when using Black Powder with petroleum products. That is an example of generalizing that all petroleum products are incompatible with Black Powder.
Each example must be examined on its own merits.
bluethunder1962
Member
All you people talking about butter crisco grease has got me hungry. Now I have to go find a little bit of food and I will be right.
It's possible to specify which petroleum-based products cause the tar-like fouling and which don't based on their properties. I thought you might get into that as a part of untying the generalization.
Low distillate oils are bad, high distillates are not. The reason is that the low distillates are not fully burned by the relatively low combustion temperatures of black powder while the high distillates are, or at least are more fully burned. Partially burned hydrocarbons are essentially tars. It's that characteristic - how complete are the hydrocarbons broken down by the combustion chamber temperatures - that lets you make that case-by-case determination.
You don't need a degree to tell low from high distillates. The rule of thumb is that the low distillates are darker in color, while the high distillates tend to be lighter. Just don't confuse clarity with color and that will usually be good enough.
Low distillate oils are bad, high distillates are not. The reason is that the low distillates are not fully burned by the relatively low combustion temperatures of black powder while the high distillates are, or at least are more fully burned. Partially burned hydrocarbons are essentially tars. It's that characteristic - how complete are the hydrocarbons broken down by the combustion chamber temperatures - that lets you make that case-by-case determination.
You don't need a degree to tell low from high distillates. The rule of thumb is that the low distillates are darker in color, while the high distillates tend to be lighter. Just don't confuse clarity with color and that will usually be good enough.
You can clarify the bacon grease to remove the salt.
I like to use bacon grease when cooking. I add it to hominy and corn for flavor. I also use it when making biscuits and cornbread.
I like licorice, so Ballistol doesn't bother me. It's one of my favorite gun and knife lubes.
Now Kroil, on the other hand, smells like Pine Sol.
I quit using Rem oil because it didn't protect from rust.
I've had my best luck waxing the outsides of my guns with carnauba paste wax.
I like to use bacon grease when cooking. I add it to hominy and corn for flavor. I also use it when making biscuits and cornbread.
I like licorice, so Ballistol doesn't bother me. It's one of my favorite gun and knife lubes.
Now Kroil, on the other hand, smells like Pine Sol.
I quit using Rem oil because it didn't protect from rust.
I've had my best luck waxing the outsides of my guns with carnauba paste wax.
BCRider
Member
scrat said:
As someone that prefers Woodfords, Buffalo Trace or Basil Haydans I'd say you finally found a legitimate use for JD....
For use during the "active season" I've reported here before how I found Canola cooking oil worked very well. I even ran a rust test with it against a couple of other oils. The Canola actually won out up to the point that I noticed that the sun on it had hardened it into a varnish like coating after about 10 days to two weeks. Mind you it was during the hot summer.
For use on the guns I've used the Canola and put the guns away in a cool dark place and the oil showed no sign at all of congealing or polymerizing even up to two months from application. So the key is to keep them in the dark when not shooting.
For longer term such as the winter time layover I switch back to Ballistol just so I don't need to check for the Canola hardening.
One aspect. On occasion when I notice the cylinder beginning to stiffen up from foulding during a shoot a drop or two of the Canola and spin the cylinder melts away the fouling and frees things up nicely. I've had no issue with shooting 6 stages during my CAS matches with my Uberti Remingtons lubed with Canola before and with the odd drop on the cylinder pin during the day.
I would seriously avoid bacon fat for the salting mentioned before. Actually animal fats obtained from cooking for long term storage generally have lots of nasty things in them in terms of acids, likely salt and probably other bad things. Without testing samples on raw sanded steel test pieces I would not trust any of them sight unseen.
Busyhands94
Member
I've used coconut oil before, it seems to work well as a patch lube. I've also used it to preserve steel, no rust at all.
Levi
Levi
Probably the best stuff is ATF as its a artifical replacement for sperm oil. 150 plus year old watches still run just fine on the sperm oil they where lubed with back in the not so civil war. Up to well after WW-2 all auto trans fluid was sperm whale oil and synthetic sperm oil aka ATF was one of the most amazing synthetics they managed to pull off for years.
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