"Extreme" boolit lube, The Quest...

[Bigslug]

Grump, I doubt the moly in a lube will be deposited or layered on the bore. With a dry lube and a dry bore maybe, with grease and wax around, nope.

I tend to agree with this line of reasoning, and think that the answer is somewhere in that general zip code.

Moly is commonly employed as an ingredient of assembly lubes that are used to prevent galling/stripping of tightly fitted/threaded parts being joined under high pressure/torque. In the final analysis, this is all we are doing with a boolit - tightly assembling it to our bore. A moly suspension is going to help with the slamming-into-the-throat/forcing cone phase of the operation. It needs to be mixed into something that gives us an all-temperature gasket effect.

[geargnasher]

"dry", particulate lubricants add solid surface area to the mix, giving polar oils something else to adhere to and thus limit leakage. 5% is a number that jives with my experience, with hBN even less.

Some solids seem to shred a grease matrix and lower the overall viscosity, something to keep in mind. This is why Ca sulfonate and bentone are pretty much incompatible with any soap thickener.

I tend to agree that MoDS won't have the same layering effect when liquid lubricants are present as it does when used as a dry film coating, but the same could be said for graphite and Ca sulfonate. What we need to keep in mind is that the lubrication of polished, chrome-steel rolling or sliding elements is NOT a good analogy for soft lead, babbit-type alloy sliding against rough machined steel at high speed. Two entirely different situations from a tribological standpoint, and different rules apply. Hard, slippery solid lubricants embed in the soft lead and don't act the same way they do when forced to shear between two hard surfaces.

The trick to boolit lube is simply a game of high and durable film strength, as in heavy metal-forming pastes. The trick to accurate boolit lube duplicating shot-to-shot friction characteristics. We actually need a friction modifier and an anti-seize agent as well as a high film-strength lubricant to add a measure of repeatability to the stuttery, erratic journey of a cast boolit down a typically imperfect bore.

Gear

[bruce381]

gear sent a box of valve stem lube I was lubeing some valve with and thought maybe you would like to take a look.

[DrCaveman]

0w-30 synthetic
Lucas red 'n tacky
Ivory soap
Binder (beeswax?)

Seems like the bases are covered...also seems kinda like some other lube recipes out there...maybe it's all in the ratios

Dunno, my less-than-informed contribution... I may try it but i have realized that there are many many more factors i need to sort out in my cast boolit rifle shooting before the subtle differences in these lubes show themselves conclusively...but maybe you guys can benefit from this combo

Seems simple and easy to find ingredients. Just gotta get that soap-melting process palatable to the masses...or start selling the stuff

[geargnasher]

Bruce--Valve packing lube? I always wanted to try some of that stuff.

Brad, RLB, 30-30Guy, Eutectic, and anyone else who made and tried TnT in their rifles: I think I know why we were getting nasty brown/black deposits in the first part of the barrel with medium/high-pressure rifle loads. We know the deposits were sodium stearate, particularly burned/melted sodium stearate. So we know the oil was leaving it under pressure. I assumed the oil was simply getting squeezed out of the sodium grease matrix above a certain pressure and leaving the deposits behind to get toasted in the part of the barrel where the heat/pressure was highest. Now I think the sodium stearate deposits were due to something else: DIESELING.

I remembered back to my first brick grease tests using Mobil SHC-220 grease that I'd soaked most of the oil out of to make a nice putty about like warm NRA 50/50. I had some leading and poor accuracy in my .30-06 at 2K fps. After adding up to 25% beeswax, the accuracy came back and the leading quit. I think the wax keeps the oils from dieseling up to a point.

Lithium stearates tend to stick with the oils when melted and flow with them better than sodium. I think that's because the lithium strands are about 1/100 the size of sodium. Lithium complex has a slightly higher melt point than sodium stearate. Take these two thoughts together and it's easy to conclude that the lithium grease I tried before was probably dieseling too, but was leading instead of depositing nasty goo because the oil and thickener was simply burning up, albeit more cleanly than the sodium. The large sodium strands would also tend to absorb heat more slowly and only partially burn.

A dieseling lube could certainly help explain the erratic chronograph readings some of us were getting with TnT, and why things got better with the addition of only a small amount of conventional lithium grease and better still with a little bw and micro.

Anyone still wondering why liquid Alox leaves such a nasty, ashy, streaky mess in the bore? (hint, it's mostly calcium soap with oxidized hydrocarbons and solvents added).

Gear

[btroj]

Intersting.

Does this mean you are now a diesel mechanic? Pay raise?

Never thought of that as a potential cause of the deposits. Makes sense. I bet a low end handgun round like a 45 ACP doesn't develop enough pressure to combust the oils. I wonder if the shorter barrel also limits the stroke length of the piston in our engine?

I think the other stuff in Ivory added to the goo also. It couldn't have been nice stuff to burn in the barrel. Worse than anything Alox ever left. Way worse.

Million dollar question- how much wax do we need?

[geargnasher]

I've been trying to be something OTHER than a diesel mechanic for some time, especially now! I want to un-diesel the TnT so it will work and we can be finished with this. Maybe add some Nexium to it?

25% wax seemed to be the magic number. I'm doing the preliminary testing routine on a spruced-up version of MML, looks good so far but is bleeding oil on paper put on my dashboard at only 131F for three hours. Other than that, it's looking mighty good.

Gear

[leftiye]

Sounds like many oils would diesel in a gun's barrel. It should be almost unavoidable. Maybe why the 2 stroke oils did so well? They should avoid dieseling. IIRC 2000 psi is the ignition pressure in diesel firing chambers. It's about hot gasses more than pressure. Every gun barrel far exceeds this both pressure wise and heat wise. Kinda puts a whole new face on thangs, eh?

[btroj]

If TnT is dieseling than is that another knock against it? If so, what diesel additive do we use to prevent knocking?

Gear, in your new lube did you use any Na stearate? I still think it is a good ingredient, we just need to keep it in check so it doesn't make the lube go wonky on ignition. Maybe 10 percent or so? Just enough to keep the oils from bleeding so badly.

[geargnasher]

Brad, I tried to get Na stearate into the Mobil grease and also into Lucas grease, it absolutely wouldn't go with the Mobil because the dang oil in the grease flashed before the lithium complex melted. I had to cook the Lucas almost to the flash point to get the Na stearate to melt in finally got it all liquid and it did fine but after cooking it smelled so bad that I had to take it out of the house. Absolutely repulsive, burnt/sour smell, way worse than ATF. It might work to blend Li grease with pre-made sodium grease and just sort of blend them without actually going to the melt point of the stearates.

I like sodium because of the body it adds, it's high melt point, and its ability to keep just about any oil from bleeding. That's one of the reasons I like TnT so much. It also worked really well in that lube sample you sent me, so I still think a sodium/lithium or sodium/aluminum blend will be good, it's just a matter of figuring out what products to use and how to cook it.

Leftiye, I don't really know what's going on with the dieseling (or not), I haven't proved that it's actually happening, but it's as good an explanation for the TnT dumping burnt stearates in the first half of rifle barrels. Diesel engines run at around 375-450 psi compression pressure and 3K to over 30K diesel injection pressure. It's the heat and atomization that creates auto-ignition in the cups, but in a rifle the ignition is already happening. If the lube is atomized to the point that it can get hot enough to burn, it will. The question is can we avoid it, or does it always happen and just doesn't cause much issue with "traditional" wax/oil lubes.

Gear

[btroj]

Can lengthy cooking at a lower temp get the Na stearate to dissolve fully and let it gel properly?

Hmmmm, a test may be in order

[leftiye]

I've had second thoughts - so to speak - about the dieseling. First it could only happen behind the bullet's passage in the barrel. That's where the fire is, and where the left behind oils would be (so your lube may be burning up after it is deposited on the barrel). Second is the time issue. Unless the oils were atomized, would they be able to heat up to burning temperatures in a millisecond? It's starting to look like only some oils would burn. More important than if they burn might be whether or not they cook down and leave fertilizer on your barrel.

[truckjohn]

Remember that there's a shock wave in front of the bullet - from pushing the air out of the barrel.... and those things generate a ton of heat/pressure......

Here's a bit of a brainstorm....
Perhaps that initial shockwave pre-heats the lube deposits already in the barrel.... and softens it a bit... Then - the bullet passing by deposits another thin film.... If it's balanced right - it does what it's supposed to do and doesn't burn... If not - you would get either too hard/no soften in front of the bullet... or burn after the bullet and loose your lube deposit....

Perhaps that's why some lubes shine for high velocity and some for low - but usually few for both....

[geargnasher]

Can lengthy cooking at a lower temp get the Na stearate to dissolve fully and let it gel properly?

Hmmmm, a test may be in order

Not in my experience. You might get it to dissolve, but the metal salts have a pretty fixed melt point. Might get it to sublimate, though....

Gear

[felix]

Don't forget consistent auto-purging in any environment as the supreme attribute! That covers about all the talk about gunk/junk as left overs from firing. ... felix

[Grump]

Ummm, I'm right at the threshold of my understanding (and memory) here, but:

1. Aren't some dissimilar metal soaps incompatible, converting from lube to glue when mixed like the disaster of putting R-134A and its lubes into an R-12 system with its lower-performance lube? I remember my Dad teaching me to thoroughly, thoroughly clean out bearings before re-packing them to avoid this. His solution was to always and only use Lithium greases except for what came in application-specific kits.

2. For any "dieseling" ignition like one gets with oil in the base of a pellet in a high-power spring-air gun, there must also be oxygen present. I don't believe (until proven otherwise) that the compressing air column in front of the bullet can reach any oil's flash/ignition point. NO appreciable free air on the contact surfaces. Pretty sure no oxygen in the burning powder column--that's not fed by the air in the cartridge case.*

3. There's burning with O2 and then there's combining with other atoms or molecules at high temp. Rear-barrel deposits could be positioned thus merely because of the drastic reduction in gas temp as the bullet goes down the bore. OR it could be just because the lube is deposited heavier in the first however many inches of bullet travel.

I know that it's easier to focus on a workable fix by FIRST knowing exactly how and why the undesired effects happen, but under these circumstances it's probably best to just throw ingredient/mix variations at the problem. I am suddenly wondering if #1 above is an effect with sodium and lithium greases--even though they have the same valence electron (or whatever). Maybe it's only aluminum stearate that's incompatible, and with everything else, it being in a different column on the Periodic Table.

Using lithium stearate is beyond the Quest right now because of being unobtainium to the average lube mixologist, right?

* I just haven't had the heart, nerve, and time to test my own wonderings about what happens if a powder granule gets stuck in the lube of a loaded bullet--makes flyers, or no effect? What little I know/remember about the bullet's in-barrel journey, I'm positive that friction heating would light up any powder on the side of the bullet...

[runfiverun]

dieseling can and will happen on the front of the boolit as it goes down the barrel the air will cavitate in the oil and super heat it causing the ignition just like diesel fuel under compression.
you only need the proper air/fuel or chemical mixture to make it happen.
the boolit going down the barrel will cause enough compression/pressure/heat for the reaction to happen.
oiled bullets will do the same thing [mentioned in major Hatchers notes airc.]

oh b.t.w.
"J" lube is valve packing lube, as is the moly added into the moly complex lube.

[btroj]

Grump, we can use lithium stearate, we just need to get it in the form of lithium grease. I am sure that someone with the right contacts could get us lithium stearate but I want to stock with more commonly available ingredients.

Gear- if we get the Na stearate to dissolve into the lithium grease matrix won't that get us essentially the same effect? In Felix lube it isn't heated to the point of melting the Ivory yet the soap keeps the oils in solution pretty well. If we think of Na stearate more as a binder and less as forming a "proper grease" then it works fine. Or does it? I think it will. All we are after is an additional means of keeping oils under control.

I hope to get out tomorrow and test a new lube. This is a variation of the one I sent Gear. This will be a warm weather test as Gear as seen for to share his summer heat with us. Low in the mid 70s, high tomorrow of 95 plus. Yeah, it won't be pleasant at the range.

[geargnasher]

It was about 95 today, almost had to break out the jacket.

If you add Ivory and dissolve in the oils after polymerizing per the FWFL instructions, and then save that mixture instead of proceeding immediately with making the lube, you will indeed have a gelled grease upon cooling, so you may be right.

Gear

[felix]

To save ammo in testing, run a rod through the barrel looking for any resistance SPOT(s). Shoot only with a consistently resistant barrel throughout, and test after each shot. If a SPOT appears after a round, then auto-purging is not working within that lube formula. I know, this is going over board in over-time at the range, and will be hard to continue doing with several different lubes on trial that day. After all, we have to have fun while spending precious time at the range, so begin blasting away with ammo already tested to look for groups or busting beer bottle caps. Reason: One or more SPOTS will cause a change in the boolit's acceleration path, which then produces a change in the barrel vibe causing a "flyer". ... felix

If a SPOT or series of them "never" changes position or intensity over time and conditions, consider that barrel as a consistent one. That is what matters! ... felix