"Extreme" boolit lube, The Quest...

[runfiverun]

you sent some baragel that needs the acetone [airc] it works on naptha also.
many motor cleaners have a base with napthene in them.

most case lube alcohols are rubbing alcohol.
which has a drying affect on the alcohols in beeswax, and solidifies the fats in some waxes [carnuba]
i have used the alcohol/lanolin case lubes to take the tacky out of b-wax carnuba lubes before.

the cold bbl issue is a big one we have theorized that the bbls coating is drying up,oxidizing, or thickening and the first shot or two is repairing the bores condition.

i can alleviate it somewhat by wet swabbing the bbl with the liquid i use in my lube before i shoot but controlling the amount put in the bbl without affecting the conditioning in it is kinda tricky.
we were hoping the pao oils would alleviate this to some degree [within reason, i don't expect it to last a year]

[geargnasher]

I didn't see any boron nitride, but you sent some talc too, interesting stuff.

I made a "painter's pallette" tonight and mixed a few things, and also did some more research on some of the ingredients we've been pondering.

First, the thickeners. Like I've mentioned, not all are compatible. For example, you can't mix clay with lithium complex, so there goes my bright idea for thickening Mobil 1 grease with bentone. Not sure if the fumed silica will work or not for that, and the Al stearate is a no-go with lithium complex to IIRC. Fumed silica and PAG oil makes a decent grease, but takes a lot of elbow grease, and still I think needs something to make it pliable rather than sticky, perhaps the HTO. Any of the solid thickeners tend to have some distinct advantages and disadvantages, mainly the shearing part varying the thickness so much. One thing I'm trying to accomplish is a shear-stable base, and unfortunately the silica, bentone, and aluminum soap are all very UN-shear-stable. Even the commercial aluminum soap greases fail under shear stresses, one of the reasons they've been all but phased out since better stuff has come along. I still intend to get some H1 food grade grease that's aluminum-based and add some of this powdered aluminum stearate to it to thicken it a bit and actually shoot it to see what gives. One of the plusses to the aluminum stearate and getting a synthetic grease with the same thickener is that we can make it gel more without compromising any of the chemicals in the original grease. The solid thickeners also seem to universally have one huge disadvantage: They tend to separate from the base oil when subjected to heat or inertial stress. As a grease, where they are in constant shear, they work great.

I also went through my grease inventory tonight and noticed some irksome things: Several cans of various automotive greases I have separated. Valvoline "import" wheel bearing grease was grainy and faded, and I noticed that about a third of the volume was a red liquid in the bottom of the can, visible through the cracks in the top layer of thickener. It literally poured out like engine oil. This is a straight lithium soap grease, apparently not a good one. The lithium complex greases all held up pretty well, as did the antimony thickener in the Mystik JT6 medium-duty grease. The JT6 high-temp grease is consistent and stringy as always. Some of the calcium-soap greases had dried out badly, which leads into my next rambling that goes back to the other thread: lube film cracking.

It never really occured to me until tonight that base oil evaporation could be a major fly in this ointment. I began to notice some greases are formulated with an EP additive that works dry and are deliberately made with an evaporating lubricant plus a thickener, so the concoction works like a grease and a dry lube carrier that lubes like a regular grease at first, then evaporates to leave the dry carrier. Specialized stuff, but not something I like for boolit lube. Many greases list the evaporation rate of the oil in terms of a standardized test, and I would think the lower the better, because I think a lube should leave a "wet" film in the barrel and I want it to stay there for some time. Also, I don't want the lube oil evaporating out of my stored ammo after a couple of years like it has done in some of the greases stored in my shop.

Sooo, on to lube oils. I'm on the fence with PAG and PAO. Part of me wants to try a multi-viscocity synthetic engine oil with a base of about 5 or 10 and enough coiled-polymer additives to get it to about 30 when it's hot, but I have it stuck in my head that the straight-viscocity PAGs that have a much higher VI and lower pour-point would be better for an alll-season lube. Cleaner, too, no ash or broken polymer chains to carbonize and leave residue. I haven't been able to find much on the evaporation rate of PAG oils, but I'll wager it's higher than the PAOs all else being equal. Theoretically, the gellant should have something to do with the evaporation rate of oil in the grease, or perhaps some binding agents that are added by grease manufacturers.

So what all this comes down to for me is that the more I play with this stuff, and the more I learn about greases, it's looking like the lithium complex thickener is the best, and either PAG or PAO oils would make the best lubes, and that pre-made grease is the best way to get these things, plus the greases have all sorts of anti-oxidants, binders, friction modifiers, and other additives in them that make them desireable as pre-engineered, pre-tested lube ingredients. I'm not out to copy VooDoo lube, but I think they took a very realistic approach to this, and probably went through a similar process of thinking when they developed it. Following this chain of reasoning, all we're really left with is finding the right grease and adding some compatible ingredients to make it a little less tacky and a little more firm. Perhaps carnauba wax is the answer after all, or one of the oil-based synthetic car waxes or even micro-wax.

But like I said, I'm far from through playing with the aluminum greases and even Popper's idea for peanut butter!

Gear

[runfiverun]

after looking at row after row [page after page] of greases lately.
the two i really like are the lucas red and tacky and the mobile-1 synthetic.

the mobile-1 is where i would hang my hat, a pao/zddp additive [friction modifier] and a visc modifier [thinking the htc wax] would be about right.

most greases and motor oils have a shelf life of about a year, i am guessing evaporation takes it's toll.
i have used some greases my f.i.l. has had for close to 50 years that were/are still good, maybe that's why the companies went out of business.

[popper]

M-1 also has anti-foam adds. I looked at talc for my liquidus PP idea, it's the weakest mineral known, doesn't absorb H2O, won't even stick to itself. As a plug, I think it will just blow through a hole just like a thick liquid.

[geargnasher]

That's another problem with making a viscous fluid with solid thickeners: Cohesiveness. If it won't "string" or stick to itself, how's it going to make a fluid "gasket"?

There are additives for cohesion, in fact I believe the Lubrizol GY-HTO is an example of this, but the metal soap greases have an inherent cohesive property, particularly the lithium complex.

Gear

[geargnasher]

Went to town this afternoon and got a tube of Mobil 1 220 synthetic lithium complex grease, can't seem to find the old tube of it I tried with beeswax a couple of years ago. It's virtually identical to the Lucas "red'n'tacky" grease in that it isn't stringy like melted cheese. I like it. I don't like the $18.99 price tag, but that might have to be the price of admission.

Gear

[Marlin Junky]

Gear,

Are you near a Wal-Mart? How does the Mobil 1 220 synthetic lithium complex grease compare to Wally World's "Super TECH Extreme Pressure MUTI-DUTY COMPLEX Hi-Temp Grease (Grasa Superior Roja Con Antificcionante)"

Heck, the latter was cheap enough for me to try it (and it even works pretty well mixed with beewax and Vaseline).

MJ

[geargnasher]

I don't do much shopping at Wal Mart, couldn't say. I'll bet the main difference is the synthetic PAO base oil in the Mobil stuff.

Gear

[runfiverun]

hi-temp is something that i stay away from.
hopefully i can get some pictures up [once i get little girl rounded up]
i went to the range today [man talk about getting a chance to try things in temp/weather extremes]
the 22-250 with my moly winter lube didn't fare to well at 100 yds with 33 grs of 4831sc powder.
the unburnt powder was causing flyers,i could clean them out and put two good shots down the bbl then a flyer,then clean. that's not gonna happen.

the 0-6 was quite a pleasant surprise though.
it had some bad leading in the bbl [lead star on the muzzle too] from the 7283 and 314299 fiasco last year.
it's clean now
it did take the normal 7 shots for things to settle down then a good 5 shot group.
i moved to another target and fired 11 more rounds had a couple of melted snow drip down the face flyers [2].
and i suspended shooting after 11 shots as i wasn't sure if they were going in the same hole or completely off the target.
turning the target around i can count 5 for sure shots so i am pretty sure there are 7 holes there as the group is right close to the previous 5 shot group.

anyway's back to the weather.
i left the house in a tee shirt @ 65f and had my jacket in the mustang [as usual]
finished shooting the 22-250 and had put the coat on.
walked down to the 100 yd target,and by the time i got back it was raining, then sleet, then i could see my breath instantly.
then it started snowing,and then it got cold.
i packed it in, as i wasn't sure i was gonna get the car back up the dirt road.
by the time i got home the sun was back out and the temp back up to 60f again.

[runfiveslittlegirl]

[runfiverun]

you can clearly see the first shot flyer in both pictures.
it's at least close to the group now.
sometimes i wonder if it's me, in some of my guns it's part of the group.
sometimes it's in with the let the gun move wherever on recoil group.
and sometimes it's just outside the group.
with these new lubes it's always close, sometimes high, sometimes low,but almost always a little left.

[Longwood]

most greases and motor oils have a shelf life of about a year, i am guessing evaporation takes it's toll.

Around here, it is often hot and almost always, very dry.
Right after Xmas, walmart had a pallet of cookie tins that did not sell before Xmas and I bought a few when they put them on sale..
I have started pan lubing in them, then leaving my bullets in those tins, embedded in the lube, until I am ready to cut them from the lube cake and use them.
I seal the lid with aluminum tape in hopes of preventing the lube from off-gassing and changing consistency and efficiency.

[geargnasher]

Ok, I spent the whole evening recovering from smearing 6 boxes of drywall mud on the living room walls by really getting into this stuff you sent me. In the process of fiddling with all the ingredients my wife has confirmed that I'm completly insane, a theory she's been working on for a while now. Oh, well, I told her I was a nut before she said "yes" and she went and married me anyway, thank goodness!

First attack was the Mobil 1 grease. Gotta make it thicker somehow, and less sticky. I tried mixing it with carnuba wax (too crumbly), the silica (Cabosil) stuff (too gritty), talc (?), beeswax (too sticky), and finally with the HTO polymer. I didn't try the Baragel because it's highly incompatible with the lithium complex thickeners in the grease. The HTO/grease mix looks the best, is very plastic, but unfortunately is rock hard when frozen, gooey at room temp, and turns to duck chit at about 130F. It might work fine in the barrel, but it doen't pass muster from a workability standpoint. Shelving the Mobil 1 idea for now.

Next I started making greases. This is fun, BTW, I've spent a lifetime working with all manner of greases and wondered how they were made, pretty cool to just add a little of this and a little of that and go "OH! so that's what that stuff was!" recalling some concoction I've seen or used before. I recognize much of this by feel.

With the PAG oil I made grease using the Cabosil, Al Stearate, and the Baragel. The silica just doen't feel right, probably can't shear it enough with my spoon/plate to make it work. The Al Stearate makes a super-sticky grease, even when mixed to a putty-like consistency. While cutting the white powder into the oil on a piece of glass with a razor blade, it occured to me that I'd better lock the door and don my tinfoil Stetson . The Baragel, however, makes wonderful, plastic, non-tacky putty. Definetely getting closer.

I also made grease using BG full-synthetic ATF as a base oil and the same three thickeners I used for PAG greases. Again, the Baragel looks promising, not impressed with the Cabosil, and the Al Stearate makes a super-slick, sticky grease/putty stuff.

So, since I'm so impressed with the ease of making thick "grease" with the Baragel, I focused on that for a while, mixing it with 5W-30 Mobil 1 engine oil, PAG 100 air-conditioning oil, castor oil, and soybean oil. Baragel will make just about anything work, and it seems to be an excellent "base" for lots of other things like fine powdered graphite, Metamucil, camshaft lube (if you want to add the EP zinc compounds), you name it. I did some freezer tests on a few "pills" rolled from these Baragel-thickened oils and also put a torch to them, it's definetely a stable mix able to tolerate anything the base oil can withstand.

The graphite addition to the Baragel greases was a bombshell that hit me when I got to thinking about how gunpowder residue affects what's left in the barrel. Many gunpowders, particularly rifle powders, have high concentrations of graphite in their coatings, and it seems to mix with lube residue to make a sort of paste in the barrel. Most lube stars are grey, case in point. Graphite slides against graphite quite well as long as there is some sort of "moisture" present (it's an abrasive in outer space, as NASA established many years ago), but if there's any trace of oil or moisture present it is slippery as heck. So why not match what's in the barrel with what's in the grooves? I read somewhere once (Harrison's experiments, maybe?) that just thickening ordinary grease (probably calcium-soap-based) with graphite made a good lube. Adding a lot of graphite to the bentone-thickened greases actually made them softer. I wonder if the Baragel and graphite are interacting to make an almost "dry" lube in the presence of a little base oil. This could be good for surface lube but bad for the "stop leak" quality of the lube, since it is probably making the lube more "fluid" or "squirty" for lack of better words at the moment.

Anyway, I'm impressed with the Baragel in all respects as a thickener, and it looks like it is offering the best option so far as an effective gellant for the home lube cook. At least it's providing a base that can absorb many different "modifiers" effectively, so can be quite versatile. It's also incredibly consistent across a wide temp range. How well it maintains the oil content in heat (bleed), lubrication properties of the base oil (EP performance), and what happens in the barrel have yet to be seen. It might lead like the dickens, too, and it wouldn't be the first time an experimental lube has done that! If it works, I can see the future instructions: Combine a cup of synthetic ATF with two handfulls of Tidy-Cat in a blender and puree until smooth...... ".

I lubed up a few .30 caliber boolits with "Gear's Grey Matter" lube (PAG, Barogel, Graphite) and still have the "Radioactive Zombie Lube" (BG Universal PAG w/UV tracer dye and hard, yellow beeswax) to try. Keep yer fingers crossed

Gear

[geargnasher]

Ohhh, I just noticed that Calcium Sulfonate thickener can make a grease with an actual ZERO oil bleed and does everything bentone does, plus is more water-resistant. More stuff to ponder.

Gear

[runfiverun]

kitty litter is too gritty when crushed
at least with the methods i have tried.
a gelled atf does sound intriguing though, i wonder if it could be coddeled into a solid, with some graphite.
it just doesn't want to stay in place on a metal.
try some of the aluminum stearate with the mobile-1. 5% should bring it around.
i think that some of the sticky might could be brought down with an alcohol- b-wax has alcohols in it.
or rubbing alcohol might just do it too, a low percentage could fix it then evaporate off.

i was trying a more conventional approach making a lube, then blending it with a carrier,using the proportions to get my final visc.
i just don't know if the pao oil i used was a sufficient amount to act as a bore wetter though, i am hoping the lith grease/pao combination will do the trick.
i have the grease/b-wax at 50-50 right now and it seemed pretty dang good to me, as far as running through the sizer,cleaning the bbl and shooting well.
that is the best this rifle has ever shot, even with this same boolit load combo.[and i tried many]
same for the 8mm with the mixed synthetic there.
so there has to be something to this.
i am really impressed with the way it cleaned up the 0/6's bbl.
then again maybe it was just the hornady gas checks...

[geargnasher]

I thought long and hard about the Al stearate to thicken the Mobil grease, but I had stuff all over me and didn't want to get it all over my "googler" at the time, but I did make some notes on things to research when I get time. Calcium sulfonate/bentone compatability is another note I made.

The gelled ATF isn't nearly as sticky as some of the other greases, but that's what I like about it (muzzle jettison). It's plenty sticky enough to stay in the grooves, but wouldn't survive if the boolits were piled together loosely. I'm hoping that it will squeeze out just enough oil under pressure to "wet" the bore and that the bentone can handle the high shear stress of the leading edge of the lands against the engraves, but the graphite should help and I can always add zinc blahblahblah or HTO to it as an EP booster. Heck, even moly would work.

I'm glad your grease/beeswax experiment went well, like I've said before I'm not sure the beeswax is our limiting factor, and it would be nice if it weren't because it's so dang easy to work with and makes a durable lube. There may be some hope for my Radioacive Zombie lube yet.

CBRick tried the Mobil 1 and beeswax once in some very proven guns, he said he had high hopes for it but it just fell on its face accuracy-wise compared to Felix lube and LBT. I tried it once, too, and had the same impression. I think the difficulty is in the carrier, not the synthetic lube oil. Speed Green is pretty good stuff, and it has a synthetic lube oil and beeswax carrier too, and lithium complex grease and beeswax makes a decent lube if the lube is a conventional mineral oil, so it's tough to figure exactly what the issue is. Maybe just the wrong combination of stuff.

Junior's 4-1-1 is another example of a pretty decent beeswax/lithium grease/conventional oil lube, but it has the same temperature limitations that all of the conventional oil or natural oil lubes seem to: Modifiers like lanolin, carnauba, and sodium stearate need to be employed at the temperature extremes to give the best results.

Gear

[runfiverun]

i like the lithium greases also [a lot, and atf]
i think the wax and the aluminum stearate took place of the binders [goin with what i know to start]
but did so in a cleaner way, to bind the lube ingredients, and not bind the lube to the carrier.

to do the mobile-1 as a lube "without a carrier" would be the way to go.
it would be similar to the j-lube, only with a different base.
the waxes/fats really affects the synthetics drastically, as you seen when i mixed the b-wax and carnuba red into the j-lube,
and had to mix more synthetic into it over and over to get it useable.
something like 2-3% carnuba or 10% beeswax will really,really, firm it up.

i shot 100 rounds of the yellow lube today over an 8 hour period through the 0-6.
the bbl looks like it has had carnuba in it, with a little powder fouling.

there was a couple of other guy's there that had a ton of questions about "cleaning lead out of the bbl".
especially when they seen i was shooting the 22-250 at "what sounded like normal loads".
[thier words]
when i got done laughing, i showed them all three of my rifles bbl's and then told them about how many rounds had been down them without being cleaned.
i showed two guy's the 0-6 bbl after the hundred round test,one of them was there for the full 100 rounds.
he really thought i would have a sewer pipe
his eyes were a bit wide when he seen the target and the bbl.
i did let him shoot the mauser with 30.5 grs of 4895, and the 190 gr boolit lubed with j-lube, at the 300 yd plates.
he went through 20 rounds and was most impressed.
especially when he hit the 6" plate 10 times in a row without the bbl getting smoking hot.
and that, in the wind we were having, he only had to hold off about 4"s.

so far so good,i really like this yellow lube i think i am gonna make some more, but leave out the micro-wax this time.

[geargnasher]

Is this "Yellow lube" the stuff from post #150 with the additional beeswax added?

I'm heading to my range (50-yard) first thing in the morning to try out my "Grey Matter" lube, if it works at all I'm going to load some more and head to town to see how it does at 100. I still have the "Zombie" lube to try, and have high hopes for it, but I think it will need something "else" in it, like a better gellant. I really wish the HTO was more temp-stable, it made a wicked-good feeling lube out of the Mobil 1 at room temperature. I like the concept of gelling with a long-string polymer, but I don't know if the HTO has the "right stuff".

Gear

[runfiverun]

yeah, i have taken to calling it "engineer yellow".
i gotta call it something as i have two black lubes [flat and satin], the o.d. green one,a red-brown one,and a pink one.
plus the yellow/brown tumble,and the j-lube.
it's green when i make, it but yellow on the boolits??
i don't think the microwax is necessary in it, and is what was causing the initial little bit of crumbly feeling when i mixed in the b-wax.
i put the first shot on paper at 50 yds at the start of the shooting, and it was dead in the orange.
the rest went to 100 yds and started just a bit to the right.
the 100 shots slowly worked thier way across the paper to the left as the sun went across the sky today.
not unusual, but it went away from the sun.
i am sure the wind was the actual influence.
it picked up substantially in the late afternoon and i was reading gusts of 15 mph.
i have seen open sighted rifles follow the sun across the sky from the little glint on the front sight.

[Longwood]

I had very good success with Lubri-plate as an ingredient for lube back when I did not know where to buy very many different bullet lubes.
I was told many times that it was the best grease money could buy and the price reflected it.
I still have about 1/2 of a pint can but I use it for so many things, I hate to use it up for bullet lube. I have not seen it for sale for years.
I am experimenting with much slower bullets now and lube cookies for the first time, maybe I will try a little Lubri-plate in a couple of experiments.