"Extreme" boolit lube, The Quest...

[Delta34]

Two established ways the WS2 powder can be used are:

1) Mixing the WS2 powder with wet lubricants (such as oil, grease & other synthetic lubricants):
The powder can be mixed 1wt% to 15wt% (as required) with grease or oil. This will enhance lubricity of the mixture and also improves High Temperature and Extreme Pressure properties of mixture. During the use, WS2 in the mixture will get coated on mating/moving parts, which in turn reduces friction and improves lubricity and load bearing ability for much longer cycles.

2) Coating the WS2 powder on a substrate requiring (dry) lubricity:
The powder can be coated by spraying (at 120 psi) the substrate with dry (& cool) pneumatic air. It does not require any binders and spraying can be done at normal room temperature. Coated film will be 0.5 micron thick. In an alternative application method, the powder can also be mixed with Isopropyl alcohol and this paste could be buffed to the substrate. The coating applications are already established in many areas such as Automotive parts, Racing Car Engine and other parts, Aerospace parts, Bearings (Linear, Ball, Roller etc), Shafts, Marine parts, Cutting Tools, Blades, Slitters, Knives, Mold release, Precision Gears, Valve components, Pistons, Chains, Machinery components and many other areas.


Seem like a win win situation to me.

[bruce381]

gear and run big box came today maybe the soaps are in if so will send out on friday a goodie package
bruce

[runfiverun]

thank you, bruce.
i appreciate it.
the aluminum stearate has been working very well so far. [i do have to wait a couple of weeks for the mixed lube to settle down though]
but i believe the lithium will take it up one more notch.
i have been on the look out for a decent stainless steel pot,and a good thermometer.
we hit 72* one day this week, so i might have some 90* weather this summer.

[runfiverun]

thank you, bruce.
the aluminum stearate has been doing really good lately.
i have had some decent weather, but it's ben really windy [as usual]
or i have had to take littlegirl out to shoot rock chucks and ground squirells [her new thing lately, sheesh, you vaporize a couple of things and.....kid's]
but i gives me a chance to try out and improve the swaged 22 stuff,and get some cast rounds out there under hunting conditions ,so i'm not complaining.
the 06,308, and mauser are accurate enough for 150 yd shots on the ground squirells, and i can't see them any further away than that through the 9 power scopes anyways.

it does give me good feed back on cold bbl and air temp bbl shots too as we shoot and move and shoot and move.
so far i have made cold bbl first shots of the day count on ground squirells at 35 and 50 yds.
at 55 and 70* temps.

that was wierd, the first post didn't go through till the second one did???
at some poin't i'll have to put this lube down the 22's bbl's at the higher velocities to see how it does there.

[popper]

WS2 sound really interesting. Very good COF and pressure ratings. Affinity for Pb and steel. Does it turn to hard crud like moly when it breaks down? Maybe could dip in powder and run thru sizer to get it to stick to CB. Or mix in with the alloy - it wicks Pb into the nanotubes. Very expensive? Just my 2 pesos. Wow, $180 for 28 oz lubriplate 400 grease.

[leftiye]

Y'all need freezers - big room size ones to shoot out of. With heaters so you can turn off the freezer unit and get the temp up over 100 degrees. Shoot the cold tests in the morning, and the hot rests in the afternoon.

[.357MAN]

Y'all need freezers - big room size ones to shoot out of. With heaters so you can turn off the freezer unit and get the temp up over 100 degrees. Shoot the cold tests in the morning, and the hot rests in the afternoon.

Better than that would be to have two small rooms, one for cold weather and the other for hot weather simulations. That way you don't have all the wasted energy and time transitioning one room.

[gundownunder]

OK, I've read this thread from start to finish, and now my head hurts

I think my needs will be met by a more ordinary mix for the foreseeable future.

On the paper fiber idea I had a thought.
Wait till the missus goes shopping , throw a bunch of wet paper into the clothes tumble drier and clean the lint filter. Turn on the drier till the missus is almost due home and then quickly remove the paper from the drier and collect the paper fiber from the lint filter.

[felix]

GDU, now that's a clever idea. It just might work OK, but is final uniformity a problem to be overcome? ... felix

[felix]

Leftiye, use one heat pump to cool one room, and heat the other room at the same time. ... felix

[felix]

Popper, that's worth a try as well. Mix into lead for small sample of boolits (only a few 22's, because of the expense). Cost benefit might not be here, though, for any other application than for sheets and grins. ... felix

[popper]

Felix - that was a thought from yesteryear when I used metal filled plastic extrusions for added strength. The nickel and copper fibers were too long to be able to pour, the size of HS2 would be about right, but cost seems to be way up there. Had a prof in school who invented adding glass fiber to steel rebar for higher tensile strength. We talk avout alloy, but maybe a mix would get us better CBs. Food for thought.
gundownunder - stick with these guys, they may come up with something really good, simple and inexpensive.
Probably enough varied temp conditions for the cast boolit crew to volunteer testing that the climate controlled range wouldn't be needed.

[Eutectic]

The two rooms at different temps is indeed a novel idea! It has me thinking on a small portable hooch now I could use on my back deck! Just big enough for me and the shooting bench! I actually need a freezer instead of an air conditioner to finish my testing of 'doctoring' a loaded round with a slight film of the tested lube's lubricating component..... This test has given 100% results of no cold start fliers by the way. Over a dozen cold starts have been tested so far; 40F the coldest. I would like to test at -5 or -10F as I am getting too old to hunt much colder than that anymore.

I wonder if the boolit would display any erratic behavior going from a 'freezer' room out into ambient with a 70 degree deferential?

As the 'cold start' is only a one shot test I suppose I could 'doctor' a round up and then load it into the chamber.... Then put the loaded gun into my chest freezer (about -7F).... Pull it out then and go to my bench already setup about 75 feet away.
Might be comparable to 'real life' .... and might not...

Eutectic

[geargnasher]

Got my order of BW-431 from Blendedwaxes dot com yesterday, I'm going to go play with it some in a little while. What to make first? Micro-Lithi-Syn, or Neon Zombie w/Nozzle dip?

Gear

[40Super]

I will just throw one thought out here. What about TWO lubes applied like a candycane in the lubegroove. A luber would need to be modified to keep the two seperate until it they get to the size die chamber. Best of both world? Probably not, but what if ....

[geargnasher]

I will just throw one thought out here. What about TWO lubes applied like a candycane in the lubegroove. A luber would need to be modified to keep the two seperate until it they get to the size die chamber. Best of both world? Probably not, but what if ....

Runfiverun has done just that on several occasions, he's mentioned it on this thread IIRC.

Gear

[runfiverun]

i have been out cleaning the garage the last couple of day's [needed it bad too]
but i found some old lube i had made waay back but never shot.[at least i don't remember shooting it]
it was/is 15-20% sodium stearate,5% cooked off jpw,and 2 stroke oil in a soy wax base.
it's still pretty soft but it has to be 6 years old.
it was with some whitelabel 2700 and some moly lube in a whitelabel lube container that was wrapped in thin tin foil. [where i got those ? i don't know either. i have only bought some red from them]

on the cold thing{
i'm pretty sure a cheap styro ice chest and some dry ice would suffice for a cold bbl.

gear:
try the micro- lith-thickened synth.
should be quite similar to my E-purple.
use 20% of everything, that should make @ 2 sticks of lube.

[geargnasher]

That soy lube sounds interesting, I'll bet if it had a touch of hard wax in it to stiffen it up more it would shoot pretty well. You have a super-thick sodium soap grease (2-stroke+SS), a soy base with reduced paraffin/carnauba for plasticizer. Unless I find Nirvana soon, I'm going to try the Hippie Lube I talked about earlier, basically soy based with sodium soap/canola grease and a touch of other soft natural or liquid waxes for consistency.

I messed with sodium/lithium grease earlier this week, can't seem to find any particular advantage to it. Seems I'm having issues making sodium soap and synthetic oils go together. Petrol oils, sodium soap and lithium complex soap do ok, but are VERY thixotropic. Could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. Magnesium stearate is supposed to fix that, but like Felix mentioned, Mg is close to Ca, and it might just be like another flavor of Alox with the barrel coating thing.

Back to the "lab"....

Gear

[geargnasher]

Learned a lot tonight. First, the BW-431 is, I believe, the answer to many problems. It's a hard, brittle, high melt-point (175F) wax that sucks up oil like crazy and melts about 30F higher than beeswax, which solves one of the points of the "Quest" right there. No more adding carnauba to beeswax to try to keep it from melting out of the grooves in the sun.

I tried all sorts of things to make the "Zombie" lube work, but it needs a plasticizer, and the only thing I can figure to add that's not a grease or grease thickener is Vaseline or Mig nozzle dip, and that affects the lube's pliability in the cold. The main point of Zombie lube was to test PAG oils, and also to test a wax/oil only lube on the Speed Green principle. So far, beeswax has been the only thing I've found that will work in a simple oil/wax concoction, but I'm not happy with the melt point. So I'm starting to lean more and more away from that and once again, back to the wax/oil/metal soap thing.

So, back to the lithi-wax stuff, and I learned some important things there, too. In a nutshell, regular, #2 grease has too much oil in it to just mix it with the microwax. What you get is either too brittle or too sticky, and in the best proportion it's both brittle AND sticky, not pliable like it needs to be. I also think that the "too much oil" thing has been the downfall of Lithi-Bee made with Mobil 1 grease in the past, where it has been reported to not work as well as non-synthetic grease and beeswax. I added some vaseline (nozzle gel petrolatum) in an attempt to make this Mobil 1/BW-431 mix more pliable, and it helped a lot, but the more I added the more it got hard and brittle in the freezer, not good once again. I divided the grease/wax batch into several parts and tried adding other things. Veggie shortening did well, but lowered the melt point way too much.

What I finally came up with is next to get tested, it's a mix of oil-reduced Mobil 1 grease that's about like refrigerated peanut butter and the BW-431, in a 50/50 proportion. It's quite firm, in fact about like Carnauba Red, and will need some heat to use in the sizer, but it is smooth, not brittle or "crystally" as I say, and not really tacky at all. When dumped out on heavy paper to cool, it hardly bled any oil at all on the paper. This is looking good, a high-temp lube that stays pliable in the freezer, and hopefully will jettison from the boolit by virtue of not being sticky rather than by simply melting under heat/pressure. This stuff isn't very thixotropic, either. I can massage it and it only gets slightly softer after a while and only because it's taking the heat from my fingers.

I hope this stuff actually shoots straight, because I think it has the "right stuff" to do whatever it does at all practical shooting temps. To make this in the future, the Lithium thickeners Bruce is sending will be key: We can finally solve the "too much oil" thing with the addition of more thickener to the grease. The additional thickener has proven to me to have the great benefit of making the high-temp wax less brittle, too! That's been the missing link I believe, making a syn lithi-bee that's pliable, high-temp, and yet not have too much super-slick ISO 220 oil in it.

One more thing, just about any of the concoctions I made with the BW-431 performed right up there at the top with my boolit wear tester, prompting me to believe the "beeswax" stuff Starmetal used in his lube isn't quite what he thought it was after all, and also that Carnauba Red has a LOT of microwax in it too. The microwaxes have been the best high-speed steel/boolit lubes I can come up with. Whooda thunk?

Must go shoot some of this soon.

Gear

[runfiverun]

remember the mineral spirits?
the micro-wax and b-wax carriers?

you didn't thicken this lube up, like i did mine with the AL stearate, but you might wanna watch it for a week or two.
you are close to my E-purple now.