pistol lube cookie

[rancher1913]

so this lube cookie thing is new to me but I have been seeing it reference in several posts of late and that and learning to do the paper/ ball loads for a black powder pistol has got me thinking about making some.

I have a gentleman's recipe for his lube cookies but I already have a batch of "bens red" made up, would this work as a lube for black powder or is it only good in smokeless.

[Omnivore]

I don't know about Ben's Red, but generally speaking a black powder lube is for black powder, and you don't use a lube designed to reduce leading in smokeless powder loads in your muzzleloader. That's a different lube designed for an entirely different purpose, operating at far higher pressures for the most part. There are a few lubes that are said to be OK for both, but that's more the exception.

SPG, a commercial black powder lube, has been very popular for a very long time. Check out what the black powder metal cartridge loaders do with lube, and you'll be pretty much right in the ball park for percussion revolvers. For a single shot muzzleloading pistol, check out what the long gun muzzleloaders are doing.

With a revolver you're typically firing a LOT more shots than you would from a true muzzleloader, and so the right amount of lube, in the right place, to prevent any and all build-up of powder fouling, will make your day of shooting a lot more pleasant. The common assertion that you can't get off more than two to three six-shot cylinders before taking the gun down and cleaning and re-lubricating it is completely false. If your gun fouls up, you're not using lube correctly, or in the right amount, in your loads.

Gatofeo #1 (I call it GF1 for short) is a good black powder lube, period correct for the 1860s I believe, and is easily made from bee's wax, mutton tallow and paraffin wax. I've been using it for a few years now, in percussion revolvers as a cookie, and I get great results.

For making cookies I toss a predetermined weight of GF1 into a predetermined size baking dish half full of water, and heat it in the oven at around 150 until it's all melted. The floating over water gives you a perfectly even thickness, you see, because it self-levels that way. Let it cool, pull out the now solid sheet of lube, place it on a plastic cutting board and push out lube pills using a punch made for card wads for the 43 Spanish cartridge. The smaller size punch works better in my tapered case paper cartridges. A 45 caliber pistol case (45 ACP or 45 Colt, et al) drilled out so as you can push the lube pills out of it, makes an adequate punch also. I believe I've used a cut off 308 Win case also. Whatever gives you the size you want.

Do a quick search or three on line and you'll learn all about making GF1. It's been posted about over and over on the BP forums for years.

I'd save the Ben's Red for my smokeless loads, I think, unless it is specifically indicated for BP.

[Texantothecore]

Mutton tallow is the best. I use it with felt and it seems to work really well.

[rancher1913]

thats what I was afraid of, now I got to make and keep another item, thanks.

using the saturated wool was what I was thinking, a card then the wool then the boolit, just hoping that something I already had would work for once, one of these days I am going to be saving money at this hobby.

[Maven]

rancher1913, You can save yourself the time, effort, and tedium of cutting, lubing, drying those wads by purchasing pre-cut and pre-lubed ones. Here's one source: http://www.rmcoxyoke.com/wads Btw, I've been using these for years in my BP revolvers and have been very pleased with them.

[rancher1913]

thanks maven, I have some of those but am trying to get as self sufficient as I can just in case.

[Omnivore]

The commercial, greased felt wads are good for direct loading and shooting right away. Being made oversized so as to fit tight into a chamber, they are too big to fit easily into paper cartridges however, so you'll end up with a bulge, and the soft lube will definitely degrade the powder during storage. Also they don't come from the factory with quite enough lube to prevent fouling build-up in the bore or fouling lock-up of the cylinder. The dry wads are too big for cartridge making also, and won't do anything to mitigate fouling. Some of the 36 cal felt wads I've gotten were actually undersized, so I suppose it depends on the maker and what day they were punching them.

A solid lube pill contains more lube for the chamber volume it takes up.

If you want felt wads in your paper cartridges for some reason, you'll probably want to punch your own to a size that works better during cartridge assembly, and lube them yourself with a harder lube such as GF1 or SPG. Some people have reported good results from soaking the felt in melted lube.

So we're talking about two lines of study here. One is the pursuit of the knowledge of just how much of what kind of lube is required for the powder you're using, so as to eliminate fouling build-up. Not reduce, nor ease, not make cleaning a little bit easier, but eliminate all build-up. The other line of study is selecting or making all the components, including cards, lube pills or felt or whatever else you want to stuff into a load, in such a way as to be easy to assemble into a cartridge that is in turn easy to load into the gun.

Keep in mind that it is perfectly acceptable to shoot with no lube whatsoever, so unless you've been making cartridges for some time already, you might want to start out making "dry" cartridges and work with that for a while, so as you're not tackling several things at once. You can always shove some lube in over the top of the bullet in the chambers after you've loaded your cartridges too.

[rancher1913]

I have been shooting "dry" for years but just started to learn about and understand the lube cookie. I like the idea of having ready to go rounds for the black powder pistols and being able to keep them on target if you can't clean every few rounds.

[Dan Cash]

Get a mould for a grease groove bullet which fits your revolver. Lube it with a bees wax/oil lube and shoot. Grease cookie or wad is not needed. Adjust the charge for the bullet so that the bullet compresses the powder as it is seated. The bullet, a slip fit into the chamber, swells from the pressure of compressing powder and makes a tight, flash proof fit in the chambers.

[Omnivore]

Get a mould for a grease groove bullet which fits your revolver. Lube it with a bees wax/oil lube and shoot. Grease cookie or wad is not needed.

That is a true statement, but then again it depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the lube. Technically, no lube is "needed" at all, and so we must ask; why are we using lube? Some use it because they think it will prevent crossfires. Whether that actually works is highly debatable, especially given the rarity of crossfires (I've never had one). Look up John Fuhring's article on "Clean Loading" for an example of what I mean. He claims to be able to cause or prevent a crossfire at will, depending on loading practice, regardless of the presence or absence of lube.

I use "lube" to prevent accumulation of powder fouling in the bore, which at the same time prevents lock-up of the cylinder due to fouling of the arbor. I don't know if a grease groove bullet can actually do that. I have my doubts. The test that I have come up with, for determining whether you're getting accumulation of fouling, is to fire 100 shots. The barrel fouling should be exactly the same after 100 shots as it was after the first shot, and furthermore the barrel should look essentially clean after one pass, one direction, with a tight-fitting dry cotton patch.

You may be able to accomplish that result with a gigantic lube groove bullet (which is going to be very long for its weight), but you can accomplish it easily using a GF1 or SPG lube cookie. Fuhring's writings addresses this to some extent also, pointing out that the lube behind the bullet is vastly more likely to mix with the powder fouling than lube in front of, or captured within, the bullet.

I should point out that I've gotten horrible fouling build-up, to the point of essentially erasing the rifling, causing terrible accuracy, and having a hell of a time scrubbing the packed fouling out of the bore, by using a small amount of lube, such as in a typical lube groove bullet or with a lube pill that's too thin. It could be that shooting dry would actually be less problematic than that, but I haven't tested for that, specifically.

Of course if you only fire off a few shots, anything you try will work just fine, but that's not the point as I see it. I informed Fuhring of my 100+ round tests, and his response was that it didn't matter because he never fired that many shots in one session from one gun. He missed the point there, I think. It's not that you're trying to produce a system that can regularly be used to fire 100 or more shots at a session, but that you've created a system that exhibits zero fouling accumulation (and thus maintains its accuracy and point of impact), which also does not lock up the cylinder with fouling, and is always a cinch to clean no matter how many shots you fire.

Others use lube as though they're shooting higher pressure smokeless loads; to "protect" the base of the bullet, but that purpose is irrelevant to percussion revolver shooting. It simply isn't needed. OK, well it isn't needed in standard Army guns. I haven't used a Walker with 60 grains. Maybe there you could begin to run into bullet erosion and barrel leading due to the higher pressures, but I have yet to hear of it. If you’re getting barrel leading in the regular Army pistols, then it means your barrel is fouling and the fouling is causing the problem. In any of the above instances, the lube cookie (made of a proper black powder lube) (card, pill, card) will solve the problem anyway.

And so it is that, regardless of all the above, one way or the other, or what the physics are doing or why, if you have a generous lube cookie in your paper cartridges, you aren't carrying a flask, you aren't carrying a bag of wads and another bag of bullets, a tub of grease or anything like that, or any loading tools beyond what's on the gun already. You don't need a "buffet table" covered with accessories and tools and a loading stand, because all of that's been dealt with in your cartridge-making at home. You can show up with what's on your person, you're light and you're mobile, you can shoot to your heart's content, from sun-up to sun-down if you like, and never be concerned about any of that.

Some people enjoy having a science lab set up at the range, with equipment and accessories laid out on a big table, maybe with a couple of "nurses" along to help out the "surgeon" ("Scalpel"..."Lube spatula..."..."sponge"...and so on) and that's fine. That's how you experiment to find out what loads work best with your gun. This is a different way of looking at it, is all.

[rancher1913]

And so it is that, regardless of all the above, one way or the other, or what the physics are doing or why, if you have a generous lube cookie in your paper cartridges, you aren't carrying a flask, you aren't carrying a bag of wads and another bag of bullets, a tub of grease or anything like that, or any loading tools beyond what's on the gun already. You don't need a "buffet table" covered with accessories and tools and a loading stand, because all of that's been dealt with in your cartridge-making at home. You can show up with what's on your person, you're light and you're mobile, you can shoot to your heart's content, from sun-up to sun-down if you like, and never be concerned about any of that.

***this is what I am trying to accomplish, just hoped that something I already had would work, should have known better**

[Omnivore]

You can order the mutton tallow from several sources, or buy a sheep and butcher it, or you can use SPG, or substitute with some other tallow in the GF1 recipe. A lot of different lubes will work. Some report good results using only two components; bee's wax and (whatever kind of) tallow. Just don't make it too soft, and don't add things that are liquid at normal temperatures. My tubes of Bore Butter for example are separating and dripping liquid out of them on hot days. You can pour the stuff out of the tube. In winter the stuff is hard like wax, so different summer and winter lubes might make sense, but then there's the issue of storing cartridges long term, which I like to do.

For a while I used whatever venison tallow I had, and it seemed to work. I was impressed by Gatofeo's write-up describing his trials, someone then gave me two tubs of mutton tallow, and so that is what I've been using. I haven't arrived at using GF1 through any scientific process, but I can say that it does the job. I made up a big batch of it, and that's lasted a couple years and counting. No doubt other lubes will do the job also.

When I get around to it I'm going to order some SPG. You have to buy bee's wax and paraffin wax, and I don't generally kill any sheep around here, and so I'm ordering all the components for GF1 anyway (unless some kind relative gives me some). May as well seek to make it that much simpler and order SGP ready to go.

Simplify, incorporate, simplify some more. Life is good.

[dromia]

I just use my normal felt wads in my paper cartridges, I cut them myself and soak them in a beeswax tallow mix. They are the same diameter as the round ball, still over size for the chambers but no bulging. I have never had the lube seep but I have never stored them for very long perhaps a week at the most. I have a handful beside my as I type and it is hot today, well hot for here in the low 70s, and no sign of seeping no discolouration of the paper.

With a good lube 1/4" felt wad I can shoot all day with out the guns jamming. I am using Swiss which is very fouling light, if I go for the cheap nutty slack then it is a different story and a dab of water pump grease is helpful over the mouth of the chamber.