Bullet lube putting holes in targets

[Hastings]

I'm shooting Lyman #356637 boolits as cast, water-quenched from WW alloy in my CZ Shadow. My lube is about 50-50 mix of beeswax and moly extreme pressure black grease. I pan lubed them. The temperature outside was about 45 degrees F (7 C). I've always LLA tumble lubed boolits so I'm not sure what to expect with this, but there are actually soft bits of lube that sometimes get embedded at close range targets (10 yards). This isn't a hard lube, and although I don't seem to get getting leading yet, I wonder if the lube is doing its job if it's being blown out with the boolit like that.

Is this common?

[Jailer]

Yup. I make quite a mess of the IDPA targets on practice nights.


ETA: mine make a mess but no holes.

[Old Caster]

Sometimes when shooting a timed fire sequence at 25 yards I will get some lube on the target but I don't think I ever remember making a hole. It might have at the distance you fired though. I wonder more if lube in a groove is doing its job if it stays in the groove. Centrifugal force has to be pretty severe when you figure how fast the bullets are spinning.

[243winxb]

Had 50/50 spot the target at 25 yds, when lube had dried out in old cast bullets . No holes.

[williamwaco]

I have seen it many times at 10/15 yards. I have never seen it at 25 yards.

Note this is conventional bullets only - with the lube grooves full. I have never seen it with tumble lubed bullets at any range.


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[geargnasher]

If it shoots well don't worry about it.

Nobody really understands how lube works, but I think that the statement about lube being left on the boolit after muzzle exit "not doing it's job" isn't true. If you subscribe to the theory that lube should stay in the boolit's grooves while in the barrel and make a "floating fluid gasket" like a rubber o-ring seal or a piston ring, then lube very much needs to stay in the grooves while in the barrel. I know that things which cause lube to be blown off the boolit before it gets fully engraved (as in sloppy revolver cylinder throat/boolit fit, excessivly worn/overized rifle throats, etc) will cause not only leading, but excessive lube purging at the muzzle while the boolit has to squeegee the thick lube coat of the bore ahead of itself. If the amount of lube that a typical boolit can carry is all deposited in the barrel with every shot, as is the implication that if there's any left on the boolit when it leaves the muzzle then the lube didn't do it's job, it would create some pretty interesting hydraulic issues.

One thing most of us agree on is that, like someone here once put it, "it all either needs to stay or go" once the boolit clears the muzzle, because if it comes off in chunks all the way from the muzzle to the target the boolit will be experiencing changes in balance like dryed mud slinging off of a tire, and that hurts accuracy. At short ranges and fast shooting you'll probably never be able to tell any difference in accuracy, but if you find lube on your 100-yard rifle targets (I have!) the groups can almost always be improved simply by lubing one less groove or softening the lube mix some so it blasts off of the boolit all at once when it decompresses at the muzzle.

Gear

[sqlbullet]

What gear said.

Also, that magic "star" we all aspire to have on the muzzle of our guns is made by lube left in the groove when the bullet breaks from the muzzle. This goes to Gear's last paragraph. You want the lube there to do it's job all the way down the bore, then you want it gone as soon as it is free from the bore.

[geargnasher]

Yes. You said it much better than I did.

One thing to add: When I think of building a lube for a given application, I think of it in terms of matching the lubricity and the viscocity for the pressure and (to a lesser extent) the velocity. Then I think of the ambient temperature and barrel temperatures that it will likely encounter, and also how much the first shot from a clean, cold barrel matters, then compromise accordingly, because like most things in life, there is no free lunch and most everything's a trade-off when it comes to dealing with mechanical things.

Gear

[Hastings]

Thanks for the info guys. I feel a bit better now. But it does have me wondering if perhaps I should formulate a winter lube that's even softer? It's only going to get colder here as we get into winter, and I'm crazy enough to shoot at temperatures well below zero.

I guess the other thing I should do is just monitor my barrel for leading.

[geargnasher]

That's what I do, I have a super-stiff version of Felix lube that I use in the summer, and in the winter I've used both MML and a much softer version of Felix lube.

Gear

[btroj]

Gear is dead on. I just hate having winter and summer lubes. Worse yet, having summer ammo I have to shoot int he winter.
Why can't it just always be the same temp? 95 in summer and 20 in winter sorta sucks. Give me 65 all year!