Barrel Seasoning

[Geezer in NH]

Steel does NOT season. Good Luck many here will lead away from that but the fact remains.

[rfd]

aside from the fallacy of "seasoning" steel, lotsa different takes on cleaning a traditional muzzleloader.

my take is simple - get at that BP residue ASAP no matter what.

this means as soon as the last shot is taken for the session/hunt/whatever, get something down the tube to keep the residue soft. i use straight ballistol or wd40 or patch lube on a few patches to clear out the larger amount of fouling, then wet the last patch well and leave it and the rod down the bbl.

back at the ranch, begin the real cleaning of tube and lock ASAP. i use tepid plain water and patches. when the patches come out reasonably clean, run down a dry patch or two, then a sloppy wet oily patch and again leave the patch and rod down the tube. locks are taken off and left soaking in water while the tube is getting flushed out, then it's scrubbed with a stiff nylon brush, rinsed, patted dry with paper towels, spritzed with ballistol or wd40, excess patted off, stuck back on the gun and done. my trad ML bbls and breech plugs are clean and shiny like new. if a gun isn't used within a week or two, the rod gets pulled, patch and bore examined, new oily patch sent down to kiss the breech plug face.

find whatever cleaning process that works best for you and yer guns, but the bottom line is always gonna be attacking the BP residue ASAP.

[SeaMonkey]

A number of Vegetable and Animal Fats have been used for Black Powder shooting lubricants,
and now even some Synthetics have been tried.

Has Castor Oil ever been used by any in Black Powder shooting?

It has some interesting properties including high film strength and great friction reduction.

[Maven]

SeaMonkey, Stumpy's Moose Snot, a patch lube, uses it in the original recipe. However, the lube works just as well with olive, peanut, or vegetable oil.

[rfd]

personally, i see no reason to complicate cleaning all manner of trad ML or cartridge guns that are fed real black powder. all it takes is discipline, plain tap water, and literally any kinda "gun oil" for the final lube. to me, anything else is not only unnecessary, but a waste of time and perhaps money spent on marketing stuff that's not needed.

as to patch lubes, natural tallows and oils (love me that bear oil, edward!), and "waxes" are all that's needed - i avoid all the commercial chemical crap that can do more harm than good.

[indian joe]

A number of Vegetable and Animal Fats have been used for Black Powder shooting lubricants,
and now even some Synthetics have been tried.

Has Castor Oil ever been used by any in Black Powder shooting?

It has some interesting properties including high film strength and great friction reduction.

I'm thinking price might be the biggest deterrent to using castor oil ? - on the range anyhow - moose milk (cutting oil and water) is about as good as it gets for competition PB shooting and is cheap.

For cleaning -- the corrosive elements of BP fouling are SOLUBLE salts leftover from the combustion process - best and most easily neutralised and removed with Di-Hydrogen Oxide - H2O - WATER !! -- dry the barrel with a couple or three flannellette patches - run down an oily patch - I use WD40 for that despite being told by mobs of people that it is a waste of time, will leave a residue in the barrel, and wont work - 30years so far and we doin ok - I use the stuff around the farm and there is always some in easy reach - maybe better stuff - this works at my place. I dont intend any of my guns to be in longterm storage - shoot everything on the rack at least a couple times a year.

I have a memory like a sieve and am easily distracted so my BP guns ALWAYS get cleaned before they go back in the rack. meant to do it is a bad plan for me !!!!!

[megasupermagnum]

I don't want to sound like I'm walking back on my previous post, but I'd like to point out that you can most certainly season steel, at least some steels. I cook every day in my cast iron pan, but my outdoor plate is a seasoned steel bowl/plate. I've had it for a while, but I believe it is this one. https://www.bensbackwoods.com/padern...-baking-pan-9/

It is steel, and it builds up a seasoning just like cast iron. The thing is though, the conditions required to season a pan are not at all what happen in muzzle loading. If one were to honestly season a barrel, you would need to clean it bare, then give it a thin coat of oil. Bake in an oven at 400ish degrees for an hour, and let slowly cool. Repeat 4-5 times any you would have a half decent seasoning... until you shoot it. Just loading and shooting would wear the seasoning of the bore right out.

So no, you are not seasoning a barrel by wiping some oil on it now and then. Even if you did, the act of shooting it would remove it. Consider that bluing, a much stronger finish than a seasoning, cannot remain in a barrel due to shooting.

[Lead pot]

Personally I don't want oil in a barrel or water based cutting oils when I start cleaning it. Once you get oil on the barrel it tends to trap the water under it and you have to make darned sure when the bore is clean that you get it dry before oiling it to hang it on the wall.
I shoot cap and flint shooters. The cap shooter I will run a couple wet patches down the bore to get most of the fouling out. Then I pull the nipple and I made a small barb with threads and screw it in place of the nipple and I have a surgical tube attached to the barb and I stick it in a gallon bucket filled with water and the butt stock on the ground the tube on the barb in the water jug. I put a shotgun cotton swab on a Delrin rod and dip the swab in water and push it down the bore to the breach plug. Then I slowly pull the rod up and the suction it creates will pull the water in the bore with it and then just up and down in the bore. This will even clean one of those chambered plugs. That is how I do my rifles with the wood pinned to the barrel that I cant put in a water bucket.
The flint shooter I do the same way but I use one of those clamped on adapters over the flash hole that Track of the Wolf sells.
When the bore is clean and the patch comes out as white as it went in I run several dry patches to make sure the bore is dry then I shoot some WD-40 down and a few dry patches again to remove the WD -45 then I oil the bore. The WD displaces water very well and cleans out well.
One cant be lazy cleaning the rifle. I can shine a light down the barrel and the face of the breach plug still reflects a shine.

[tomme boy]

Hot water will actually speed up the forming of rust It forms what some call fash rust. Don't believe me? Clean your barrel with boiling water and let it sit without anything else done to it for 4 hours. Then take a oiled patch and swab it and wipe down the barrel. Rust will be all over the patch.

And as Waksupi said, modern steel can not be done. Think of the old barrels like a cast iron pan and how you seal up the porous metal with carbon to not let anything stick. Modern steel is not porous like cast is.

[waksupi]

A number of Vegetable and Animal Fats have been used for Black Powder shooting lubricants,
and now even some Synthetics have been tried.

Has Castor Oil ever been used by any in Black Powder shooting?

It has some interesting properties including high film strength and great friction reduction.

I tried castor oil years ago when I did a full summer of testing various concoctions. The castor oil would be okay to hunt with most likely, but for range shooting, it will foul heavily in a short number of shots.

[Lead pot]

You might want to try straight Vaseline for patchiest lube. I can soot a whole 30 shot over the log shoot with out having to swab the bore to seat the ball.

[dogrunner]

Well, guess I'm gonna be a real hard head on the 'seasoning' issue..........cleaning too!

Built a buncha ML's........at least one from scratch. All turned out well and accurate too. I drank the 'seasoning' cool aid crap and found that it failed the course relative to reasonable term storage less the rust bugaboo.............wound up with a significant beginning pit in the bore of my .54 Hawken copy....wound up lapping it and restoring most of the shine back, I still get tight jaws when I think of it tho.....I'd been using only the hot water pump out with good success.............heat drying the bbl and then using a good light oil to finish....never a problem.....till the seasoning issue was tried....nevernomoreagain. I soap (soft hand soap does well pumped directly into the muzzle)...place the breach into a plastic coffee can and pump it till it runs clear............I then flush with water so hot I can't hold the bbl bare handed, it heat dries and is immediately followed with that light oil.

I have NEVER had a issue with corrosion using this approach.........I cannot fathom why some claim that hot water somehow screws up the cleaning. But I know for sure and certain that so called "seasoning" will ultimately cost you a barrel...

Be your own judge, try both methods and then make up your own mind. I damn sure did!

[waksupi]

Well, guess I'm gonna be a real hard head on the 'seasoning' issue..........cleaning too!

Built a buncha ML's........at least one from scratch. All turned out well and accurate too. I drank the 'seasoning' cool aid crap and found that it failed the course relative to reasonable term storage less the rust bugaboo.............wound up with a significant beginning pit in the bore of my .54 Hawken copy....wound up lapping it and restoring most of the shine back, I still get tight jaws when I think of it tho.....I'd been using only the hot water pump out with good success.............heat drying the bbl and then using a good light oil to finish....never a problem.....till the seasoning issue was tried....nevernomoreagain. I soap (soft hand soap does well pumped directly into the muzzle)...place the breach into a plastic coffee can and pump it till it runs clear............I then flush with water so hot I can't hold the bbl bare handed, it heat dries and is immediately followed with that light oil.

I have NEVER had a issue with corrosion using this approach.........I cannot fathom why some claim that hot water somehow screws up the cleaning. But I know for sure and certain that so called "seasoning" will ultimately cost you a barrel...

Be your own judge, try both methods and then make up your own mind. I damn sure did!

My point on hot water was it seems to set the fouling harder, than if you use lukewarm water.

[Castaway]

Two issues going on here. Black powder fouling forms polar compounds, mostly salts. Water is a polar solvent, oil isn’t. Water dissolves salts, it doesn’t neutralize salts. Oil covers up the salts but doesn’t remove them. They must be removed. Hot water dissolves salts better than cold water, but cold water works with a little more effort and water. On the other hand, heat, in most cases speeds chemical reactions, in this case, flash rusting. Do what works for you, (here we go) but I trust the science. The obvious still applies, steel doesn’t season, and oil in a dry barrel stops the rust. The trick is cleaning first

[indian joe]

Two issues going on here. Black powder fouling forms polar compounds, mostly salts. Water is a polar solvent, oil isn’t. Water dissolves salts, it doesn’t neutralize salts. Oil covers up the salts but doesn’t remove them. They must be removed. Hot water dissolves salts better than cold water, but cold water works with a little more effort and water. On the other hand, heat, in most cases speeds chemical reactions, in this case, flash rusting. Do what works for you, (here we go) but I trust the science. The obvious still applies, steel doesn’t season, and oil in a dry barrel stops the rust. The trick is cleaning first

ok ----got me on a technicality (I was one of the neutralisers) neutralise as in render inneffective ------so water dissolves and flushes out salts we end up at the same place despite the technicality difference ....... "Hot water dissolves salts better than cold" = another technicality with many ifs and buts attached. Cold water will do the job quite well.

The overall message is, before you return it to the rack, clean your Blackpowder gun with plenty of water, dry the barrel, oil it, put it away ...........the idea you can somehow season a barrel so it wont rust if left uncleaned is baloney in anything other than the short term (length of said short term determined by atmospheric conditions around the dirty gun at the time) and if you push this barrow far enough you will end up with a rusted, wrecked, pitted barrel. Not a matter of if just when (how long it will take to happen)

[rfd]

... The overall message is, before you return it to the rack, clean your Blackpowder gun with plenty of water, dry the barrel, oil it, put it away ....

Yes, all that, but started as soon as the last shot of the day is taken by at the very least keeping that crud soft 'n' wet before the real gun cleaning takes place. I've seen folks at the range or woods take that last shot and immediately case the gun, then wonder why cleanup is so hard after the hour's drive home - or get lazy and do a not-so-good cleaning that leads to worse issues as time goes by. Do diligence with bp guns is important.

[megasupermagnum]

Yes, all that, but started as soon as the last shot of the day is taken by at the very least keeping that crud soft 'n' wet before the real gun cleaning takes place. I've seen folks at the range or woods take that last shot and immediately case the gun, then wonder why cleanup is so hard after the hour's drive home - or get lazy and do a not-so-good cleaning that leads to worse issues as time goes by. Do diligence with bp guns is important.

I case my gun immediately afterwards. Sometimes it sits overnight like that. I don't find it to be difficult. All I do is fill the barrel, and let is soak for a couple minutes, and it is as easy as if I did it 30 seconds after the last shot.

[mack1]

SeaMonkey, Stumpy's Moose Snot, a patch lube, uses it in the original recipe. However, the lube works just as well with olive, peanut, or vegetable oil.

I like the castor myself it stays put very well but I don't think it shoots any better.

[Edward]

Yes, all that, but started as soon as the last shot of the day is taken by at the very least keeping that crud soft 'n' wet before the real gun cleaning takes place. I've seen folks at the range or woods take that last shot and immediately case the gun, then wonder why cleanup is so hard after the hour's drive home - or get lazy and do a not-so-good cleaning that leads to worse issues as time goes by. Do diligence with bp guns is important.

What Rob said is the safe/correct way !!!! What you use for propellent is (CORROSIVE) and the longer it sets after shooting the likelihood of damage is increased and for no reason . And if you forget ,you have a nice wall hanger ./Ed

[indian joe]

I case my gun immediately afterwards. Sometimes it sits overnight like that. I don't find it to be difficult. All I do is fill the barrel, and let is soak for a couple minutes, and it is as easy as if I did it 30 seconds after the last shot.

overnight works ok most times - but I wont use a case - only have the ordinary soft vinyl gun cases - and they WILL rust a gun overnight - bad news those things - I have a couple of suede leather bags for my good guns ........................