Ricochet
01-27-2016, 12:23 PM
I'm revisiting a very, very old subject, one that I experimented with when I first started casting and had problems with, that being the use of grease as a boolit lube. It's been done for over a century, there are pros and cons, some have reported good success and others dismal failures. There are many threads in the archives discussing it, in some of which you can read messages that I posted telling how oil can creep out of the grease and interfere with powder ignition resulting in erratic low velocities, unburned powder messes and boolits stuck in the bore. I don't want to revisit all that right now, but I am experimenting with a new (to me) grease that I think has promise. And as much as folks like to experiment with oddball things as lubes, I'm sure some of you will come up with similar soft gooey things to try. The biggest problem with use of greases is that they don't work well in lubrisizers, alternate methods like tumble lubing, dip or pan lubing don't work well unless they're combined with something like beeswax, and boolits lubed with soft grease are extremely messy to handle and store. Most people using grease have applied it directly with their fingers or with some tool like a stick or brush.
Anyway, here's my tip: I got an oral medication syringe intended to be used for dosing liquid medicines to infants and children. It's a 6 ml syringe that looks just like the ones used for giving shots, but it has a smooth tapered tip with no provision for locking a needle on it. The opening is of comparable width to boolit lube grooves. I first filled it by pulling the plunger out and pushing the whole syringe down into the can of grease, then scraped off the excess and wiped it clean, reinserting the plunger to push it out. I'm using an NLGI Grade 2 consistency grease, and found it very easy to push out of the syringe, also finding that it's possible to fill it through the tip by pulling back on the plunger with patience and persistence as the vacuum is easily broken. I hold the boolit by the nose in the fingers of one hand and rotate it as I extrude the grease from the syringe with the other, like icing a cake. The string of grease drops right into the groove. For now I'm finding that better than trying to hold the tip against the boolit and make the grease fill the groove with a flat surface, I overfill the groove and let the grease stand proud. If I'm careful I don't get it all over my fingers and the boolit nose so it's too slippery to hold, and it's dead easy to avoid getting it on the base. I'm not wasting big globs of excess stuff. When I seat the boolits the case wipes off the excess, leaving the groove perfectly filled. The excess does get into the seating die and on the outside of the loaded round, but it doesn't build up in the nose plug causing progressively deeper boolit seating as Alox and wax lubes do. Being a viscous fluid it just squishes out. It makes a rather sexual sound on lowering the ram withdrawing the round from the seating die, and it will require some wiping. I learned long ago to seat the boolits and crimp them in separate steps to avoid shaving lead with the case mouth. Running them through a second time gets most of the grease back out of the die. I've spent a lot longer telling how to do this than it takes to do it. It's not the best method for large production, tumble lubing is, but if you do this a bit and get the hang of it it's no more trouble than using a lubrisizer. :grin:
Whether this grease works or not remains to be seen, I'm recovering from a broken right wrist and won't be able to shoot them for a bit. I have some .45 ACPs I loaded in October with the BD 45 greased, and these .38s will sit for a while. I had previously tested several greases on paper and found this bled the least. The stuff that killed my powder years ago bled very quickly and badly, and some ancient military graphite grease bled like I'd just spooned thick oil on the paper. But now we know how to apply soft greasy goo to boolits easily. :wink:
Anyway, here's my tip: I got an oral medication syringe intended to be used for dosing liquid medicines to infants and children. It's a 6 ml syringe that looks just like the ones used for giving shots, but it has a smooth tapered tip with no provision for locking a needle on it. The opening is of comparable width to boolit lube grooves. I first filled it by pulling the plunger out and pushing the whole syringe down into the can of grease, then scraped off the excess and wiped it clean, reinserting the plunger to push it out. I'm using an NLGI Grade 2 consistency grease, and found it very easy to push out of the syringe, also finding that it's possible to fill it through the tip by pulling back on the plunger with patience and persistence as the vacuum is easily broken. I hold the boolit by the nose in the fingers of one hand and rotate it as I extrude the grease from the syringe with the other, like icing a cake. The string of grease drops right into the groove. For now I'm finding that better than trying to hold the tip against the boolit and make the grease fill the groove with a flat surface, I overfill the groove and let the grease stand proud. If I'm careful I don't get it all over my fingers and the boolit nose so it's too slippery to hold, and it's dead easy to avoid getting it on the base. I'm not wasting big globs of excess stuff. When I seat the boolits the case wipes off the excess, leaving the groove perfectly filled. The excess does get into the seating die and on the outside of the loaded round, but it doesn't build up in the nose plug causing progressively deeper boolit seating as Alox and wax lubes do. Being a viscous fluid it just squishes out. It makes a rather sexual sound on lowering the ram withdrawing the round from the seating die, and it will require some wiping. I learned long ago to seat the boolits and crimp them in separate steps to avoid shaving lead with the case mouth. Running them through a second time gets most of the grease back out of the die. I've spent a lot longer telling how to do this than it takes to do it. It's not the best method for large production, tumble lubing is, but if you do this a bit and get the hang of it it's no more trouble than using a lubrisizer. :grin:
Whether this grease works or not remains to be seen, I'm recovering from a broken right wrist and won't be able to shoot them for a bit. I have some .45 ACPs I loaded in October with the BD 45 greased, and these .38s will sit for a while. I had previously tested several greases on paper and found this bled the least. The stuff that killed my powder years ago bled very quickly and badly, and some ancient military graphite grease bled like I'd just spooned thick oil on the paper. But now we know how to apply soft greasy goo to boolits easily. :wink: