Felix Lube - the Short Version

[geargnasher]

Or like the the man who figured this out in the first place might say, "heat for 30 minutes at 300 degrees while stirring and call me in the morning."

Gear

[nanuk]

how badly does it smell up your kitchen to cook this stuff in the house on the SWMBO's stovetop?

[stubshaft]

If you use baby oil then it smells like a nursery.

[geargnasher]

If you use fresh Ivory it will release all the perfume in the soap, plus whatever perfume esters are left in the Johnson's at that point, and it invariably gives me a sinus headache for the rest of the day. I use stearic acid instead these days, no headache.

Gear

[1longshot]

can we not just remove the mineral oil that has separated out, and leave the polymerized Caster oil?


I have been wondering this myself? Is this the better way?

[Jailer]

Tried a batch a couple days ago. Final product has the consistency of modeling clay with the tackiness of flypaper.

I don't have a lubesizer and pan lubing is definitely out without a cookie cutter, so I just mashed some into the lube groove of 25 boolits and test fired them tonight in the 45. For the first time I had ZERO leading.

Nice job on the lube Felix, thanks for sharing.

[rnelson11]

I made my first cast boolits last weekend and went searching for a lub. I grabbed the first receipe I could find which was really easy to make and boy did I get leading. Come to find out it was for black powder.

I re-found this site, joined 3 years ago but didn't start casting because of several factors, and went searching for ingredients for the Felix lub. I already had a bar of beeswax so all I needed was the lanolin. I did some research and found that Walmart carries medical grade lanolin in a 4 oz tube for about $ 9.00. Its the stuf preagnant women use to keep their nipples from cracking when they brest feed.

I made the lub on Friday morning and it came out great. I got very little smoke since I reduced the heat every time it would start to smoke. It kind of looked like vapor coming out of the pot.

I don't have a lub-sizer so I planned to pan lub. I poured the lub directly into the pan with my waiting boolits already sitting in the pan. The lub hardened in about an hour and all I needed was a way to get them out.

Not wanting to wait for a cookie cutter I made one. I found that a 7mm Remmington Magnum case was the perfect size so I cut the neck off with a tubing cutter, drilled a small hole in the end of a boolit, stuck a small allen wrench through the primer pocket hole (had to drill it out a bit) and drove it into the boolit.

Saturday morning I cut out the boolits, loaded up 15 and was off to the woods. They were extreamly accurate. I was shooting in a standing position at about 20 yards and got 3" groupings from my Springfield TRP. And the best was yet to come.

When I got back to the house I pulled the barrel from my gun and had no leading at all. A few brush strokes with Hoppes and a couple of patches with Hoppes then oil and it was cleaner that its been in a while.

Sorry for the long post but I am very pleased and can only say that this is some really good stuf.

PS: After posting this I realized I should have started a new tread.

Rick

[HDS]

Could this perhaps be a good source for sodium stearate?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sodium-Stear...item35ac0dca21

We don't have ivory soap over here.

[wiljen]

HDS that is extremely pricy for that amount. Check with places locally that have candle or soap making supplies as they should have it considerably cheaper than that.

[Hip's Ax]

I got my sodium stearate at Soap Goods online. Here's the link. This place had a lot of hard to find ingredients including Cetyl Alcohol (and others) in reasonable quantities.

http://www.soapgoods.com/Sodium-Stearate-p-689.html

[BulletFactory]

^ how much do you use, instead of the soap?

[HDS]

This might seem a silly question/idea, but what about fountain pen ink for dying lube rather than crayons and whatnot? Not sure if there are any undesirable parts in fountain pen ink or not, they are water based so I guess that would have to be cooked out.

[HDS]

I was a bit lost in the beginning with those measures. I noticed that using actual teaspoons and tablespoons is not very accurate; some teaspoons are relatively small compared to ones from old days etc. I figured out that one tablespoon is three teaspoons, so there's easy relation. I found out (from old cooking book) that teaspoon is 5 milliliters and tablespoon 15 milliliters. Then I figured out how much 3½x3½x1" block of beeswax is by volume, it's 12.25 cubic inches and converted it to more familiar form which happened to be very close to 2 deciliters. Now I use cheap plastic household metering cups marked "1t=5ml" and "1T=15ml" and stainless 1 deciliter metering cup for adding beeswax, which is melted in separate kettle during the oil cooking. Maybe original measures will make too hard lube or too soft lube, but at least it's easy to make changes and keep things in control. You'll find that US teaspoons and tablespoons are very close to 5 and 15 milliliters (also 1:3 hehe), but of course You use US based system. You can convert beeswax measure also to more handier unit for You. This calculator helps alot:

http://www.onlineconversion.com/volume.htm

BTW for anyone else desiring a metric recipe. I found a swedish article on felix lube that converted the beeswax into a weight unit, which I find is superior to volume.

Same recipe as in the first post, but beeswax was listed as 200-225 grams, going towards the lower end if you aim to use it in a lubesizer and higher if you want to pan lube.

So the recipe would be:
2 Tablespoons mineral oil
1 Tablespoon castor oil
1 Tablespoon Ivory, or homemade soap (grated)
1 Tablespoon Lanolin
Beeswax - 200-225g

[realfudd]

I got the bright Idea to toss some pine rosin in the mix, since there was some dripping off the white pine tree in the yard. Boolits stuck in the bore of the old Mauser, however the rosin put in the melted wheelweight alloy worked well, and made the tin and grey scum re-absorb.

[nanuk]

pine rosin makes good glue

[stubshaft]

I got the bright Idea to toss some pine rosin in the mix, since there was some dripping off the white pine tree in the yard. Boolits stuck in the bore of the old Mauser, however the rosin put in the melted wheelweight alloy worked well, and made the tin and grey scum re-absorb.

We call that flux!

[doctorggg]

Made my first batch of FWFL. Cooked 16 ozs mineral oil and 8 ounces castor oil for about 1 hour stirring constantly. Than made a single batch of lube. Seemed like it turned out well. Will see how it works through my Lyman sizer in 40 cal.
Greg

[HDS]

Made my first test batch of Felix lube last night. I reheated it again today (I read it likes that) and also used a heat gun to clean off the sides of the container that got lube stuck on it.

The red ATF I got in place of mineral oil was Valvoline Max Life, said Dexron III on the bottle so I went with that, I thought it smoked really, really easily though and at low temps so I dunno yet if I screwed this up.

I weighed out the beeswax as well, 200 grams. Sadly I only had a kitchen spoon I could use for this kind of cooking so the rest of the measurements where not as careful.







I thought maybe it's on the hard side when cooled down, compared to say 50/50 NRA formula or my 50/50 MOS/beeswax lube. I'm hoping this will be my lube of choice from now on for my incoming Star.

[JJC]

A little dark, but looks about right. Could be the atf though. I just made two batches 35oz each and have it down now. I did the same thing, made it let it sit overnight and reheated.

[HDS]

It gets a lot darker when its liquid, it's a very pale beige when set. Which I think is the correct color. I want it to be really red though. Gonna see what works best for that.