Water punp grease??

[Will]

When I first started reloading (40+ yrs ago) I bought a box of bullets a fella had cast for me out of wheel weights and I believe he said he used water pump grease for the lube. I found some of these the other day in the back of my storage and the bullets were still bright and the lube was still attached and soft as when I bought them. Has anyone ever had any experience using water pump grease for lube?

[Bullshop]

Yea its in a lot of lube receipies. You can find it at the hardware store right next to the steam cylender grease. That is if you drive a time machine to get there.
BIC/BS

[felix]

Any grease with about 7-10 percent lithium and without lanolin. Make your own using lithium stearate in lieu of sodium stearate. However, there are no washing compounds (i.e., soaps, etc.) that use lithium stearate to my knowledge. Therefore, you'd have to obtain the lithium stearate up front. Use the same amount as you would sodium stearate (Ivory) for starters, and then gradually work up the percentage to the final lube consistency you prefer. ... felix

[Char-Gar]

Water Pump Grease was a waterproof grease used to lubricate the water pumps of older automobiles. It was also a common ingredient in bullet lube formulas in the days of yore. In 1967 I bought a house and found a half full one pound can of the stuff in the garage. I used it to soften beexwax to make a bullet lube that would work through the old Lyman 45 machine. I had been using Vasaline. The water pump grease worked just fine, but when it ran out I went back to Vasaline.

IIRC it was a cream or light yellow color. You can buy modern water proof greases for use in antique car waterpumps that can also be used to lube the chassis.

[Buckshot]

Yea its in a lot of lube receipies. You can find it at the hardware store right next to the steam cylender grease. That is if you drive a time machine to get there.
BIC/BS

..........Steam cylinder oil is still very much available. In fact I recall reading that siderod grease is also still available. My great grandfather was an engineer on the Southern Pacific and back in a corner of the tractor shed was 4 pails of what I found out later was siderod grease.

As a young kid naturally you have to mess with stuff. I didn't know what it was but at first it kind of struck me as a kind of odd silly putty. It was a kind of translucent sea green colored stuff that was very thick. You could stick your fingers in and pull up a bit and it wouldn't stick to you (at first). It was very fiberous or stringy, as when you pulled some up it would have many fine hairlike streamers running back to the grease in the pail.

You could just about roll some up into a ball. I think it was the warmth of your hands that did it as after some handling it very soon became tenaciously sticky. It was hard to get rid of as soap and water took a lot of scrubbing to get your hands clean.

.................Buckshot

[felix]

Lithium!!!! ... felix