Lessons of the Extreme Lube Quest, says me.

[Ian]

Some things I've discovered myself or because of the ideas of others, in my guns that may be of interest. Not carved in stone, and in no particular order:

1. Too slippery is bad. This means most synthetics. This means anything with uniform molecules from a slice of the spectrum.

2. High viscosity index is over-rated. Some of the best lubes I've shot had oils in them with a VI of around 45.

3. Paraffin wax makes lots of smoke when shot. It also adds some consistency to bore condition when cold.

4. Solids are of little use. Some like moly disulphide, graphite, mica, etc. in their lube, I don't. The only exception from my testing has been hBN in the 5-micron range, and organo-metallic zinc and moly compounds, but those are so small as to not be considered particulates. One thing I never did test was acetylene black, that one might show some promise. Generally, if it won't stay suspended in molten lube, forget it.

5. Lithium greases are a double-edged sword in lubes. Lithium stearate is a much more effective "lube" by itself than some other stearates (sodium in particular), but it is a very small molecule and doesn't hold the lube concoction together very well in very hot weather, high-velocity, rapid fire scenarios unless it's boosted with another stearate or some good microwaxes. My mileage.

6. Sodium stearate is very useful in all sorts of lubes, but is also a double-edged sword. It has been shown in some instances to improve and extreme cold-weather lube, but I feel it's principle benefit is keeping things consistent in hot weather. SS is a huge molecule, almost a fiber. I think it physically scrubs itself out of the bore and, like all the metal salts, is highly polar and really holds on to oils and melted waxes well. It seems to work best with NON-polar, straight-chain paraffin oils and branched-chain micro-crystalline waxes. Drawbacks are moisture absorption and narrow list of ingredients that play well with it.

7. Consistency Of Residuals Encountered (term coined by Eutectic from the CB and other forums) is the absolute most important characteristic a lube can have. Simplest way to have consistent bore condition is for the lube to leave very little behind, but still leave enough to even-out rough or pitted bores so they shoot as consistently as do hand-lapped, stainless-steel barrels.

8. Lube has to go liquid to work. I've made a variety of lubes that either didn't melt or didn't change state at all and got lube streaking, sometimes leading down the last part of the bore. Never good. Gummy bores and dynamic CORE don't make for good shooting. Several heavy, full-synthetic, non-melt greases I tried and one type of copper-based polybutene brake caliper slide grease rounded out my non-melt lube quest and results were dismal without a wax component. Even then, not good to have high amounts of non-melting ingredients. This is one of many reasons I never pursued the DuPont Krytox non-melting oil and grease line, no point to even test the stuff, particularly considering the toxicity and $200/ounce price tag.

9. Lube can be made to go liquid under pressure alone or by heat. I think we need a little of both, but mostly the pressure thing. You get this with certain oils and using some sort of metal soap and wax.

10. Calcium soap sucks at high velocity and/or pressure. That means Alox and most marine greases. The calcium drops out and builds up in the bore like soap scum in a bathtub, requiring frequent cleanings to maintain accuracy. Short version, it is anti-CORE.

11. Calcium sulphonate also sucks. Not sure why.

12. Alternative thickeners like wood flour, powdered paper, Metamucil, corn starch, baker's cake flour, and a few others I'm probably forgetting have all been dismal failures that caused leading at any speed.

13. Leave the lanolin and Carnauba wax OUT if you shoot in temps below 40'F. Never use more than 5% of either one.

14. I have found exactly zero benefit to any of the traditional "EP" or extreme pressure additives in bullet lube. Lead alloy bullets are too soft to benefit from the way these lubes work in steel-on-steel applications. In fact, about the only reason I can see to use an automotive grease in lube is for the lithium soap content, the color dye, the tackifiers, and the anti-oxidant and/or anti-corrosion package. Tackifiers are easily obtained without grease (Lucas oil stabilizer, bar and chain oil, bird repellent gel, etc).

15. Ester-based oils will blend with just about anything, and help other types of oil blend with each other. Just be careful of the esters because they are scary slick and 1% is sometimes too much. Same with castor oil being slick and very much polar, except you have to stand on your head to keep castor oil from weeping out of finished lube.

16. "(lube) either needs to all stay or go at the muzzle"---Runfiverun. All go is much easier to achieve and is more predictable through the spectrum of lube groove designs, rifling dimensions, type of gun, caliber, twist rate, and velocity, says me. If I only shot one gun all the time, within a 40-degree temperature window, very little of this would matter and I'd just make a custom-fit lube. If lube doesn't all go, accuracy suffers badly, even with large-bore revolvers at 15 yards. At 100 yards with rifles it can make an inch or more difference if some chunks of lube are hanging on long enough to splat on the paper. I've seen too-sticky lubes take a gun/load that does a 3/4" ragged hole at 15 yards and turn it into three inches, and turn it back to 3/4" within one two or three shots of going back to a softer, less sticky lube. Seen it more than once, in more than one gun. The only kind of sticky I like is that which beeswax and microwax impart, and it goes right away by the time the bullet is through the rifle's throat. Not so with some tackifiers. This is why lanolin sucks in the cold, and too much polybutene gets you into trouble.

17. Lube doesn't have to be "hard" for high velocity, but it does need to be "soft" for low-velocity. If all your "soft" lube is getting blown off the bullet before it gets in the barrel, check your loading techniques, not your lube. A lube needs to act like a viscous, super-strength dynamic film forming lubricant as the bullet engraves in the bore, then it needs to thin out and become a super-high-speed film a few inches later. It needs to maintain just enough viscosity at the muzzle to keep up obturation as the pressure on the bullet base drops. The characteristics of lube to meet this need, of course, vary widely with gun and load. Something a titch softer than NRA 50/50 has suited ALL my needs from 500 fps to upper 2K fps quite well.

18. Beeswax is still excellent for bullet lube.

19. A small to medium addition of micro-crystalline wax tends to reduce first-shot flyers, generally.

Lamar, Brad, any other bullet lube cooks, your turn!

 

[JWFilips]

Ian,
Fascinating Read! Great research! Thank you for posting.

 

[Ian]

It occurred to me after reading Fiver's post about the slickum coating additive this morning that only a small handful of us who sorta went through this quest thing together know what the other is talking about. That's because we know to a certain extent each other's knowledge base and individual understandings. That's not true of most people reading our posts because they probably weren't involved directly in the work as we were doing it. We don't always agree since some of our results have been contradictory, but for the most part A is A. So I started thinking about some of the basic stuff we discovered or (more often) RE-discovered and came up with some of the major "truths" off the top of my head. Hopefully our work, for whatever it's worth, will be of help to someone, somewhere.

While I'm at it, here are some of my opinions about lube. Just my personal preference.
Bullet lube should be soft enough to flow through a sizer at 60'F. It should be able to tolerate 150'F for extended intervals without drying out or weeping oil. It should offer satisfactory first-shot and sustained-fire performance from the 'teens to at least 105'f. It should be relatively non-toxic both to handle and to breath small amounts of combustion smoke. It should be non-corrosive and have a storage life of many years. It should be able to handle 10K psi to 60K psi loads and from 500 fps to 3K fps equally well. It should have a low smoke signature. It should be reasonably bore-blind and groove-blind: By which I mean it should shoot consistently well in rough or smooth bores, and also shoot consistently whether all or one groove is lubed or whether the grooves are deep or shallow, radiussed or square. It should shoot cleanly enough to not foul mechanisms like magazines, bolt recesses, or the gas systems of autoloading firearms for hundreds of rounds. It should not require frequent cleaning of the bore or anything else for extended intervals, meaning months at least.

 

[Brad]

One thing we, or at least to my knowledge, we never really investigated was cetyl esters. They should help the lube go liquid faster, a thing I think is good.

Lubes MUST leave the bullet quickly, and evenly, at the muzzle. A lube that goes liquid fast is always going to do that.

I will need to really digest what Ian posted before I comment further.

 

[Ian]

You and Jeff are the only ones who ponied up and played with the cetyl esters. Run and I played with the samples of Synester gy-HTO, basically a solid ester wax with low melt point. It is really neat stuff, but I never fine-tuned any lubes with it to see what qualities it really brought to the table. A certain rifle project was purposed for futher lube investigations, but I am a human and not a machine, and thus fallible with regard to certain "feelings". Negative energy does not encourage the grind of dedicated lube testing.

 

[Brad]

Negative energy doesn't encourage the grind of lube testing but it does encourage the creation of websites.

In the end I see the incomplete solution as being a mix of waxes, a bit of metal soap, and a small amount of some oil. I say incomplete as a single recipe hasn't been completely tested at a wide range of temps for accuracy over the long haul.

Too much oil creates major purge issues. Too much soap can leave weird fouling. A mix of waxes helps as beeswax, microwax, and paraffin all bring something different to the dance and they help balance each other out.

 

[fiver]

i'll touch on #13.
I really think 3% of either is a better balancing point.

now something you did kind of touch on but didn't directly mention....... thixotropic.
this one thing, along with the base wax, has been nagging at me for a long time.
if [big if] we could modify a lube to go from feathery tough to full flow [release of oils] without it being a full liquid with just pressure alone that would cover the needs of the quest.
we don't need a residual left behind we need the boolit to go through the barrel and out the end of it.
if all the shots were from a clean barrel they would all stay in the same group.
part of what we fight is that middle zone of rubbery grabbyness almost all waxes have at both the start and at the end [relax point]
this of course affects the jettison.

we have been thinking about boolit lube like engine oil or grease, and I really think WE need to think about it another way for it to be made to work in another way.

think about this.
if we modified a lube to just allow oil to maintain a film on the surface of the lube and it stayed on the boolit to the target.
this would eliminate one of the air pressure sine waves caused by uneven surfaces on the boolit.
the lube doesn't have to flow or go liquid or change it's state it just has to give up a micro-amount of oil molecules.
then a synthetic could be used because of the much,much lower volume used and left behind.

I can envision what is happening I just have no idea how to make it work.
but it would be similar to a cars wiper blades where they go over the window and there is that light sheen of wetness left behind that just disappears.
now we might have to modify the lube grooves to be smaller for this to work, but a system is a system and we ain't playing by the old rules here.

 

[Ian]

Well, there was TnT and we built it to do the dynamic oil film thing. The oil was a solventy ester that self-cleaned pretty well, except the Maxima K2 had too much polybutene in it and it could leave a little bit of gummy residue in the bore...not bad, but you could see it on target and around the bullet holes when repeatedly going from cold, dirty barrels previously shot with the stuff. So I modded it with half AC100 ester oil to cut the Paratac component and add a surfacant ("Ice 32"). In pistols, it worked just like you were thinking, and the VI didn't change much with ambient or barrel temp, so TnT shot very consistent and very clean in my handguns. The rub is when the pressure topped 30K psi and the oil departed the sodium stearate matrix. Someone found out that a dash of finer-grained lithium grease pretty much took care of this, but we all moved on. I made a batch of that and still have a sizer full of TnT with 15% lithium grease that gets used for several things, it still works purty good but it's soft and leaks oil a bit if I leave pressure on the sizer....a byproduct of stearate breakdown methinks.

One of the big questions I had in the beginning of this was if thixitropic properties are desirable/necessary or do they exacerbate erratic CORE at different temperatures. At this point, I'm pretty well certain that the lube had to go thin within an inch or two of the case mouth, but still has to have the viscosity necessary to prevent that lube smear past the relax point.

I'm going to make another batch of SL-68-something and if you want some, I'll send it. I've actually gone through nearly a pound of the three combined SL-68 series lubes I've made. Last time I filled the sizer I took scraps of several batches and the end cuts off of samples I sent out and mixed it all up. Works just fine. The deal is the combination of hard microwax, lots of soap, and Vaseline with a touch of heavy mineral oil and castor goes from a tough, feathery mass to a liquid and stays together in the barrel even at high pressure. Put a pea-sized lump of it on an anvil, smack it with a hammer, and all you have left is an oily spot. It leaves virtually nothing in the bore or on the muzzle, it just goes liquid and carries out the muzzle without burning.

 

[fiver]

well my train of thought has kept going with this.
what are we really trying to do here?
think about it.
we are just keeping lead from sticking to steel.
gas cutting is taken care of by plugging the bore so gas cutting doesn't occur and adding a gas check will help prevent skidding or minimize it when it happens.
much of this is dealt with by the launch, and the alloy.
the real job of lube is to provide a barrier in the barrel to make it so the lead don't stick.
who say's it has to be liquid or even an oil that does the job.

a coating in the barrel could do the same thing and never ever need to be repaired. [or maintained maybe]
a moly treated barrel and moly bullets do exactly the same thing we do with boolit lube ,and it is effective at lowering pressures/velocity enough that the loads have to be changed to maintain velocity.
you don't have to use moly of course, zinc etc. would do the same thing, the boolit alloy could contribute to the core condition if the right coating/lube combination were found.

our problem is we end up with some wax in the mix on the barrels interior and it is what [drastically] changes over time.
we got it through 10 different stages along the way and it sitting and losing it's smoothness is what is killing us in the long run.
if we eliminate the wax issue we still leave an oil in there, temperature affects it's viscosity giving us uneven pressures for the boolit to ride on.

so what's left?
eliminating as much of everything as possible leaving an inert behind an inert that works with powder residue.
my thinking is that powder residue is mostly graphite/carbon type stuff which is slippery in/on itself if kept dry.
how do we keep everything dry and gunk free and maintain the barrels inner workings.

 

[Brad]

Two words.

Powder coat

Not a viable option to me but it seems to work in some situations. No idea how fast it will let you go. To me it has some issues like thickness variations I don't want.

Other than that I don't know fiver? I think it is a good concept, it is the how that is an issue.

 

[Ian]

This stuff still keeps me up at night sometimes too. My line of thinking is that lube does more than keep lead from sticking to the barrel, in fact I don't think it can do that very well at all. I can smear lube on the outside of a barrel and mark on it with a bullet like chalk, THROUGH the lube. With good lube and light marks, it might all wipe right off, but with hard pressure and lube with lousy film strength, it sticks and doesn't come off easily, and that's just at room temperature and pressure. Also, lube makes a great non-acidic soldering paste, I use it all the time when closing the ends of jump rings and such on my wife's silver and gold jewelry. My wear tester is also hard-pressed to find a lube that doesn't allow lead to stick to steel at high speed, even at very fine grind.

We can shoot pretty impressive velocities with un-lubed bullets if we use a buffer to ensure that the obturation is immaculate, or maybe it just scrubs out the lead that rubs off on each shot. Maybe both. I know alloy, lube, powder choice, and velocity all factor in somewhere and each can change the outcome.

I can and have shot bullets only lubed with light oil or straight wheel bearing grease to good effect in the non-leading department, not always so good in the accuracy department, so I know that lubrication alone prevents leading.....but does that fluid film also provide some micro-stop-leak capability just like on piston rings? I think it does both. The higher the lube viscosity, the better it will seal. What concerns me is gas cutting occurring past the relax point of the powder/alloy combination. A dynamic film or some way to prevent leaks (like using COW or other sealing buffer) seems to be a requirement for preventing lead deposits past the relax point, at least with conventional thinking. Unless we use a paper or an other abrasion-resistant, leak-resistant jacket, we gotta use some sort of oily/waxy "lube" most of the time. Frustrating, I know.

Powder coat seems to do what most jackets do, that is provide a slippery, hard surface to glide against the steel under pressure, and it must be tough enough to not get gas-cut even if it allows tiny leaks. Paper is tender, but glides well and makes a most excellent leak-stopper.

I don't see any way to coat soft lead with a dry moly/graphite/hBN-type lube and make it hold up. Will such stuff prevent abrasion leading? Most likely. Will it prevent gas-leak leading? I doubt it, unless the bore is PERFECT or the dynamics are such that the relax point is not ever reached in the barrel. As long as we're shooting lead alloy out of steel barrels the same issues keep rearing their ugly heads.

Anyone remember the PB Blocker circus?

 

[Brad]

I do agree on the fluid gasket idea. This is why really hard lubes fail at times, they just don't flow to seal small gas leaks.

A hard coating can work, it is a case of finding one that can maintain the seal. I wonder if powder coat does OK because it is a plastic that might flow a bit under pressure? I haven't really pressure or speed tested the HT coating but it has done well in normal handgun shooting.

As for preventing leading I think it is hard to replicate what lube does in the bore outside the bore. In the bore we have extreme pressure on the lube and between the bullet and bore. There is also gas cutting and changes in bullet to bore fit going on. We look at a bullet going thru a bore as a pretty static motion other than forward and rotational velocity. What we fail to see is the small changes occurring as rifling depth and width changes,twist changes, bore diameter changes, and pressure rises and drops. What a lube does need to do is get a bullet thru those small changes as unscathed as possible.

 

[45 2.1]

The best thing you can do for yourself is to keep the viscosity low. I used to use the old NRA lube formula (equal parts by volume of Vaseline, paraffin and beeswax... good to about 2,100 fps without leading) until the equally old greasy yellow Vaseline disappeared. The new improved stuff didn't work well for accuracy like the old did.......... so I mixed it 50/50 with some of 357 Max's purple lube to cut it's viscosity down. It works fine on a bullet that has enough lube groove at the higher velocity ranges with more than adequate accuracy.

 

[Ian]

When it comes to using petroleum products in bullet lube, it sure seems that the less refined they are, the better. I've wondered why for a long time, then when I saw that boil point test that my friend did on the infamous Navy wax, I became convinced that the full-range of molecule lengths present had a lot to do with it being so well-suited for bullet lube. The narrow-fraction micro-crystalline wax (similar to 357 Max's) that I use needs a broad and dense spectrum of other things to round it out down to light oil without too many large gaps.

 

[fiver]

one other thing those types of waxes do is carry less oils.
they have smaller pores than bees-wax.
they also tend to go straight to liquid at a certain point, but many still have a sludge type stage.
I don't know if that I from impurity's or the nature of the beast.
I do notice b-wax is like lino-type and it just melts and runs.

anyway I wonder if many of those b-wax paraffin mixes are nothing more than the paraffin filling in the b-wax holes and replacing their size with a smaller one.
they do have a better flow characteristic when mixed.

a coating of sorts would be the definitive answer and
polymers would do nicely for sure, but how to get everything perfect?
the mold could be adjusted easily enough but the coating itself is the bugger in the works.

 

[Ian]

Repeatability through automation. Need a PC spray booth with nozzle for each bullet location. Electronic timer controlling burst spray. Something like that.

 

[Brad]

Yeah, I will pass. PC, in either bullets or speech doesn't interest me much at all.

Fiver, I need to send you some hi-tek coated bullets from that 9 mm HM2 mould for you to try out.

 

[Rally Hess]

Brad,
I tend to agree with your views of PC, but it gets me the "Bad Eye" in some venues.

Ian,
In your article on lubes, you mentioned a bullet can hydroplane, but didn't explain how that can happen. I've driven about 7000 miles in the last month and have given that alot of thought. I can't comprehend how that could happen to a bullet that has engraved, in contact with and supported by the rifling. Were you referring to the nose of the bullet as it entered the throat? I missed many of the majestic cornfields of the midwest pondering this. LOL

 

[Ian]

The cornfields will hopefully be awaiting your next trip, if they're not we will have bigger problems!

Have you ever observed a lube "smear" about 2/3 of the way down a barrel? It happens sometimes when powder pressure drops off below the alloy's yield point and the bullet sort of "relaxes" in the bore (we think). The bullet dumps a layer of lube there, leaving a visible coating for a few inches and can be identified as lube by careful probing with a clean patch. If your bullets do not have a "scraper" groove, I imagine the hydroplaning becomes worse, but again, that's more imagination than anything, and that's one thing I haven't put through and apples-to-apples test. I've noticed much more consistent velocity numbers and a lot less stringing when there is no lube smear, something I attribute to the bullet reacting to the change in bore condition as it encounters the congealed lube layer. Whether the bullet squeezes down and rides on top of the lube deposits, or plows them out ahead and leaves a fresh deposit behind, I don't know, but it is an interesting phenomena to observe. I tend to think that the lube deposits build for a few shots and then purge, at least that's what my targets and chronograph together with bore observations tell me. After a purge flyer, the bore usually looks cleared out, and loads that build lube and periodically "purge" can be made very consistent by pushing a dry patch through immediately after each shot, confirming that lube/powder residue is the culprit. Lube recipes containing very little to no metallic soaps aren't as prone to the smear effect, but it can still happen. If I see (or feel with a cleaning rod/patch) uneven lube deposits in a bore, I take it as a sign to re-evaluate my lube formula or powder choice.

 

[Brad]

Brad,
I tend to agree with your views of PC, but it gets me the "Bad Eye" in some venues.

Yeah, I understand that. We don't care here. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
I don't think a single solution exists. It is a matter of finding what works for you and your guns. The results speak for themselves.