The continuing quest for "Extreme" bullet lube

[Brad]

Castor wax doesn't feel that slick at all. How it behaves under pressure and heat is something I can't answer.
I did make a batch of Felix using castor wax instead of castor oil. So far it has done fine but I haven't really pushed it hard.

Interesting idea Pete. That stuff has a huge amount of ester oil in it. Wonder if it would begin to show lube purging at higher temps?
The microwax should help hold the oil but I worry how it would handle the extreme temps like we have now. Hit 100 yesterday and today and those temps are hard on a lube tryi to stay stiff and not bleed oil.

 

[Ian]

That's some frog-hair level lube tuning there, you got it nailed for that one. When I see having to cut back lube quantity to get groups or settle down the purge flyers, I still think something ain't right yet in a general sense, but no arguing that a certain combination can be outstanding. My 336 would cut five shots from 5/8" to under 1/2" at 100 just by shooting a few rounds lubed with one of the paraffin/soap/AG lubes and following it with one made with beeswax....but only for five shots, then the priming process had to be repeated. Something about CORE? Felix lube was picky in one of my rifle/bullet combinations, finally getting to the point I only lubed the space in front of the gas check. Less is more? All that led me to add the clause about lube not being sensitive to quantity applied to the bullet, or to lube groove style/shape/depth/number to the requirements of the Extreme Lube Quest. Felix lube with a tablespoon or two of Vaseline added seems much less sensitive to quantity applied than the original formula, and some of the other soap lubes which are "dry" don't seem to care, either....something which remains underlined in my mind. Magic Vaseline? It does good if its good, definitely a keeper ingredient. A few weeks ago I did some further research on industrial, non-USP petrolatums and found that even some of those products are reverse-engineered with purified fractions of microwax and paraffin oil, so no better than drugstore stuff. I maintain that we need a broad range of carbon chain lengths, not just two or three blended to an average, just as we found at the other end with the waxes.

Ester oils are very "solventy" and will even work through things like Buna-N seal material over time, so I'm not surprised that it took three days for the EVI to settle in.

VI? I took that and ran with it as far as I could go, from non-melting clay and high-VI oil lubes to Barry Darr's paraffin/Vaseline/STP formula, and much to my surprise I kept finding that waxes and plasticizing oils with LOW VI shot better (not counting the micro-additives like ester and castor) than the uber-high VI ingredients. That went hand-in-hand with thixotropic lubes, where rapid shear/work-softening and rapid heat softening both proved to be very desirable, if not essential, characteristics.

Temperature is still the biggie, it seems like we can make any number of super-accurate lubes that will work well in just about anything regardless of bore condition, bullet design, not be sensitive to bore condition or amount used, but once the temperature gets up over 90 degrees or way down near or below zero, things go south. I can fix the top end with Ivory and microwax, but the bottom end is still a bit of a mystery to me.

With this EVI formula I'm kinda having flashbacks to TnT lube, the Red Line two-cycle premix oil and Ivory soap. It was a really good lube for mild loads, and had the added benefit of being useful for pre-treating cleaned bores for elimination of first shot flyers. It left soap residue in rifle bores when the pressure and speed was pushed up, but that went away when I added some 180 microwax. Thirds wax, soap, and oil made a really good lube....but it had cold-barrel flyers like crazy, even showing up in revolvers at 25 yards. I added hBN powder to it and tried it in pistols again and it seemed to work just fine, but for some reason I gave up on it, probably because half the ingredients were there to fix problems with the other ingredients....that whole side-effect thing again.

 

[Ian]

It got hot all over the place on Friday. We bumped 100 yesterday, too, back in SW Texas. Gonna be a hot summer, good for lube testing if I can stand it

 

[Eutectic]

That stuff has a huge amount of ester oil in it.

It does that at 22%!!! I almost didn't mix it as I calculated the total POE % first..... I did have the same high percent of the very same oil in a binary mix of 22% Motul POE and 78% Beeswax early on in the 'other' Extreme thread.... My 23" T/C Hornet shot it well at 3000 fps! Accuracy was great for about 40 rounds and then tapered off..... So I thought I'd play with the 'EVI' small batch some.

I agree with Ian about cutting lube amounts to prevent purge fliers to get accuracy being a Band-Aid approach. But the two guns and loads took to it easily??? I'll play with it some more. It could hate the heat.... I'll see may get a 90°??? Even if it sits on the shelf I'll try double digit below zero when it comes! Something tells me it will eat it up..... but I've been wrong before! The G.C. .25-20 had no lube star and it had cleaned the machine marks free of CORE under magnification at the muzzle. The lean amounts with plain base in the light .32-20 grouse load had the very slightest of stars and a very slight gray line on land tops. A very light Sb wash I concluded. Sure didn't hurt anything!

Pete

 

[Ian]

Keep playing with it, Pete, you never know what it will do until you try it for a few seasons in a few different guns.

I remember when we were all playing with the POE oils and finding how they worked as bore cleaners....sometimes to a disadvantage in pitted or rough barrels that shot best when maintaining a good fouling equilibrium. I'd like a lube to clean itself out every shot, and esters are good at that, particularly EsterBee-type lubes, but but sometimes it's hard to get good results in everything.

You asked "why does Vaseline have to be mineral oil and microwax". Well, let's step back a minute and look at one of the best bullet lubes every invented: Beeswax and Vaseline. We know the oil probably doesn't do much lubrication because it isn't polar and doesn't have a very high film strength....but beeswax has a very high film strength and I think is the real lubricant in the mix. The mineral oil just softens the beeswax so it can be applied to the bullet and helps it flow. The other waxes in the Vaseline broaden the molecular structure of the beeswax, not sure how much it helps or hurts. Another good lube is beeswax softened with transmission fluid (paraffin oil), again I think the special qualities of the wax are doing the work while the ATF softens it without adding too much "slickum". So that begs a question: Why is beeswax so indispensable? Is it the esters?

 

[fiver]

well the atf- Bwax mix is so good because they are basically the same thing.
ester alcohols and carbon chains just made in different ways and kind of opposite to each other, but basically the same components.
think about the friction ATF actually has, it doesn't build up a gliding film between anything, it just kind of coats and soaks into the pores and lets things barely push over themselves.
look how it just soaks into and coats your hair and matts it all together then washes away.

compare those features to a mineral oil or modified mineral oil.

 

[Ian]

Where I was heading was friction and viscosity, two separate things. A sometimes solution to cold-bore flyers, particularly below freezing, is paraffin wax. The condensed vapor of a lube having about 10-15% paraffin in it is slippery, but about the same kind of slippery as a warm barrel with "wet" lube in it if the other ingredients are selected appropriately. If the bullet experiences the same friction regardless of temperature, then the temperature of the system or viscosity of the lube can be all over the map and the gun still put bullets in the same place.

The opposite concept, and inspiration behind TnT lube, was to create a temperature-insensitive lube by maintaining a constant lube viscosity, regardless of temperature. By eliminating the solid wax component and the solid/liquid phase problems and just using enough gelling agent to make a high VI oil stay in the lube grooves, a consistent friction could be maintained. I chose the POE oil because it has the highest VI I could find in an oil and it's basically "liquid beeswax" with an extremely low pour point, extremely high flash point, very clean burn, and very high film strength. It almost worked, except for the little problem of the oil washing out of the soap matrix at high pressure, just like the hair analogy (I have a lot of experience mopping up ATF from concrete with my hair).

I had a lot of trouble trying to incorporate both concepts into the same lube recipe.

 

[Eutectic]

Dexron III is my cold weather gun lube. I don't like my fine guns working dry in bitter cold. Dry lubes are a Band-Aid as well. When your gun is fully saturated at say -20°F below zero..... it is in a condition I have never seen out in the wild. Calling coyotes may be my coldest hunting in bitter cold. But I may move location in 20 minutes and both you and the gun/ammo get a slight break in the truck cab. Dexron III on your gun's internals has been trouble-free for me in saturated double digit below zero tests. You guys just haven't lived until the stock freezes to you cheek!

Dexron III is great in your gun parts at minus 20°..... It would probably be fine even in your hair at those temps! It might even work for keeping your cheek unstuck... But have it in your lube formula at a saturated -20° below zero and see what happens!

-20°F below zero saturated to 110°F is a L O N G ways for all our components on board in our mix to work together or even behave! Extreme is just that...... Extreme!

Pete

 

[Eutectic]

Components not only work different temperature-wise....... They can also change how either alone works for certain conditions. While I think 2 1/2% to 3% is max for POE mixed with other oils; it seems to behave better at higher % when it's the only oil! Beeswax is like a good Sergeant in our mix working hard to keep the primadonnas all in line. I'm not sure we can leave it out???

Pete

 

[fiver]

the only real components we haven't looked at is stuff that isn't a lube.
Ian tried some lube fillers at one point, and we have all chased oil amounts up and down the scale or modified them to a higher viscosity.

I keep having flashes of other ideas outside of normal lubes, but cannot for some reason follow them to a conclusion.
one is something like the ZDDP trail, it has nagged at me for a long time.
a lube that lays a dry skin down in the bore, one capable of accepting more of the lube in a wet form and holding it level with the dry lubes surface.
only it isn't the lube that lays the dry skin down in the bore at all is it.
right?
I'm thinking more of shooting zinc bullets to get the chelation then maintaining it with a zddp based lube.

it would be semi close to the moly coat I'm barely maintaining in some of my guns using the complex lube.
I know it works as a system and not that much oil is needed because the moly lube shoots dry and works but I don't think moly is the real answer.
of course I'm not shooting moly coated bullets either.

the one main conclusion we have all come to is maintaining a consistent barrel friction is critical.
lubes with a dry or non existent star seems to be working for everyone... yeah?
have we all pretty much got away from old school traditional sticky high oil and wax lubes?

but have we really really thought about putting and maintaining a coating in the barrel like the jacketed bullet guy's have.
I know we can't swing by Winchester and pick up a jar of luballoy but it might could be possible to have a barrel nitride coated and then maintain that finish.

 

[Volume One]

On the subject of first shot performamce.

Might it be possible to get good first shot performance with any good lube if one prepped for the shot.

What I mean is, could a person, after cleaning and oiling their gun, take a lump of wax (50/50 beeswax/paraffin), maybe slightly bigger than bore diameter, and just tap it down the bore prior to storage.

Might this afford just enough glide to adequately assist the first shot?

 

[fiver]

depending on your lube you could use just a patch dampened with something like ATF to prep the bore.
one other thing worth trying is lowering your first rounds speed by about 4%
that might be just about right to offset the extra initial friction.

 

[Ian]

I did the bore prepping thing a bunch and it works pretty well with some kinds of lube. Use the lube you're going to use to prep, and push most of it back out with a dry patch.

 

[AndyTheCornbread]

I use MML+Soap for everything from very fast .223 Rem between 2,500 and 3,000fps all the way down to 45 Colt at 850fps and back up to 454 Casull at 1,700fps and so on. I have used it hunting and shooting from -30F to 104F. Guns I use it in are .223 Rem, .30 Carbine, .30-30, .30 Badger, .357 Magnum, .358 Winchester, .45 Colt, .454 Casull, and .45-70. So long as I have the gun tuned properly for cast I get no leading and very good accuracy, with plain base and gas checked bullets. Alloy hardness has been anywhere from super soft nearly pure lead for 45 Colt plinkers to 25 BHN hardball type stuff for shooting gophers out at 300 yards with the .223 to air cooled 50/50 for hunting in nearly all our rifles and handguns that we hunt with.

Accuracy to me is MOA to sub MOA, and with the .223 I have it down to around 1/2 MOA. The only thing it doesn't work really well for is sub-sonic .30 Badger down around the 800fps muzzle velocity level for head shooting grouse and rabbits at 25 - 50 yards. For that I use unsized, dead soft lead, plain base bullets, tumble lubed with thinned alox and a dusting of motor mica. I make up about 50 rounds like this per year for small game season.

I tried all kinds of lubes both commercial and homemade before I came across MML+Soap and it answered 99.9% of all my shooting and hunting needs. Prior to MML+Soap the only thing that worked well for me for very high speed shooting was Carnuba Red, but at moderate velocities I would get lube purge fliers with it.

I have loads of pictures of game taken by myself, my wife and our kids plus pictures of targets etc. showing that this stuff works across the spectrum of hunting and shooting needs for cast. I can post them if you want to see, even my avatar is a picture of a deer taken with a 454 Casull shooting cast bullets lubed with MML+Soap.

During the spring, and summer we shoot anywhere from 200 - 500 rounds a week because shooting and hunting is our main hobby, so our guns see thousands of rounds a year of cast shot through them. We have 25, 50 and 100 yard ranges here at our property and we shoot a LOT so I have really put MML+Soap through the ringer and it has performed flawlessly for us.

 

[Volume One]

Soap might be a problem for me. I'm a pan luber and if I re-melt a soap lube I'd expect it to separate.

What is the MML + soap recipe?

 

[AndyTheCornbread]

MML+soap:

1/2 lb Microwax #430
1-14 oz tube cheap lithum grease
1 lb paraffin wax
3.5 oz dry OR 4.4 ounces of fresh Ivory soap
3 lbs beeswax

Melt the microwax/paraffin over direct heat until thin like water. Add grease and melt and stir until all is dissolved and the foaming stops. Now add the soap that is cut up or shaved as fine as possible very slowly, keep adding the ivory and melt/dissolve each addition until foaming stops again(do not add all at once or it makes a volcano) .....Once dissolved, Reduce heat and add the solid beeswax in until all is melted and blended together. Add dye block now if you want a pretty lube. Simmering on low for about 20 minutes after all is melted seems to help, but is not 100% required.

optimum blend temp is 425 - 450

I heat it back up to a liquid in a camping coffee percolater pitcher and pour it into my lubesizer and then let it cool when I need a refill. Nothing seperates back out.

 

[Volume One]

Thank you AndytheCornbread. I will try this very thing.

 

[Rcmaveric]

What are you pan lubing and goals for this lube you need Volume One? If you use a cake cutter you can use relatively soft lubes. Before i started following the lube quests, I used Bens Red. Worked just fine with a cake cutter. If you use a soap lube, then finger lube the bullets. Roll it into the form of crayon the fill the grooves. Then smooth with a finger and run through a lee sizer.

 

[AndyTheCornbread]

If you use a soap lube, then finger lube the bullets. Roll it into the form of crayon the fill the grooves. Then smooth with a finger and run through a lee sizer.

I have done this with MML+Soap and a nose first sizer a friend made for me. It works really well and goes much faster than pan lubing. This is good advice.

 

[Volume One]

Finger lubing is new to me. I'm reloading 357 magnum for mag velocities. I was hoping to pan lube with something firm enough to punch out but not so firm it crumbles during punch-out.

I've experimented with petro jelly and paraffin in equal parts - total failure.

I've had some limited success with 50/50 beeswax and lithium moly grease. But I kinda don't like working with the stuff indoors.

Ive seen the 6661 lube with STP oil treatment in place of ivory soap.

Was going to try that next. But this site has many interesting ideas.