Caution: lye is lethal, especially to kids. I’ve read lye-water tastes sweet before it burns. Lye fumes are also extremely dangerous.
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I live in SC and I don’t want to worry about my Felix lube melting while cartridges are in the sun at times. So, I’ve done some experimenting with sodium stearate instead of Ivory. I made some Wilgen blend with stearic acid. I added some 175F melt temperature microcrystalline wax to elevate melt temperatures. Now I am experimenting with homemade soap made from castor oil & bees wax & lye, instead of sodium stearate.
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I’ve found that a high content of sodium stearate will result in a thick grease at very high temperatures. 90 grains of sodium stearate (98% pure) turns 1 tablespoon of polymerized castor oil (isolated from mineral oil after polymerization complete) into apple sauce at 300F. 20 & 40 grains are both more useable, but the resulting grease does not mix well with the bees wax. In order to get 40 grains of sodium stearate & 1 tablespoon of polymerized castor oil to dissolve into bees wax, I had to add 3 teaspoons of stearic acid (purity unknown). I hypothesize that the stearic acid dissolved the grease into the wax because it is also a wax & an ingredient of sodium stearate (like dissolves like) - maybe I’m wrong.
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Thinking about the coagulated grease, heterogeneously mixed with the bees wax (it was actually 50% bees wax and 50% microcrystalline wax) made me wonder for a while. Then I wondered if I made my own soap out of bees wax and polymerized castor oil, if the resulting soap would allow for better mixture of the high soap content with the wax (because the soap is more similar to the ingredients I want to emulsify), and it did! Correlation is not causation...
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Soap makers have a thing called super-fatting, where more fat is used than the lye can consume. I went very high in super-fatting, hoping to be able to make just one batch (failed, but super-fatting is still my friend here, as no lye should remain in lube).
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Recipe: I polymerized castor oil in heavy mineral oil, then extracted 30 mL of the castor oil and 15 mL of the mineral oil (next time, won’t use the mineral oil after polymerization). 375 grains of bees wax. Separately, mixed 4.2 grains of lye and 20 mL of water (any less water, and there’s nothing to stir). After the 15-ish minutes, I mixed the lye, oil, and bees wax. I placed the mixture into a toaster oven and stirred intermittently while getting the wax to melt (next time, melt wax first). After about an hour, the chemical reaction was obviously underway and it was getting late, but the mixture was not homogeneous. 12 hours later, I boiled the water out (next time, salt out glycerin and air dry for a few months) briefly getting up to 300F (outside & alone, so no remaining lye fumes could harm the family). When the water was gone (hopefully, the glycerin boiled out too), the 250-300F wax would solidify while dripping from my stirring spoon - too far. So I mixed 100 grains of this extremely super-fatted soap with 320 grains of a Felix & Wilgen blend (50% FWFL & 50% FWWFL) - resulting in a lube that drips out of a square lube groove at 200F. FWWFL drips out around 145F, and my commercial benchmark (Hunter’s Supply cast .452 DIA 255 grain LSWC with lube) drips out at 180F. Now, I just gotta see what this does to my barrel before making a higher quality batch.
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Note: observing the temperature required for lube to flow out of a bullet’s lube grooves has shown me that the lube can be liquid and stay in the grooves. I think the soap helps to hold the grease together after the wax has melted, rather than actually elevate the melt temperature (maybe both occur).
