Cosmoline

[noylj]

Has anyone tried Cosmoline as a bullet lube or as a replacement for petrolatum?
Also, has anyone tried one of Lee's tumble lube bullets with a "standard" bullet lube?
The normal grease groove seems like over-kill with 99.999% of the bullet lube on a bullet never doing anything. It just seems that the smaller and more frequent grooves would "pump" lube against the barrel more efficiently.

[arkypete]

A lot of years ago there was a formula using cosmoline, parafin and I don't remember if it was lanoline, petrolatum, or bees wax in equal amounts.

Jim

[fryboy]

cosmoline has been incorporated into various lube recipes in the past , there's a few listed in the recipe thread , they also say that lee's liquid was originally designed as a cosmoline of sorts, in fact that was what the original alox was ( sorta )
as for the regular grooved boolits , yes and it works , mr. lee designed the tumble lube boolits to better take effect with his lube , i've dipped a few boolits and built up a groove full of the LLA but couldnt tell any difference between it and just being coated ( ie; works either way ) i've found recluse's recipe to work much better for my needs however
as for the overkill with the lube grooves , alot of guys just fill one or two grooves on multi grooved regular boolits as sometimes too much lube isnt good either , some boolits will show a bit better accuracy when doe as such , of course that does leave out the single grooved boolits but we cant have everything lolz

[noylj]

The search for "perfection" means that I look at fired cast bullets and the grooves are generally still full of lube. When there is lube missing, it appears to have left in chunks and not having been used as lubricant. Thus, almost all the lube I put on the bullets never did any thing to help lube the bore.
I look at the Lee TL bullets and I see lots of small grooves and I am just thinking that the lube in those grooves has a better chance of actually getting to act as lubricant, but it is possible that there is less hydraulic pressure on these grooves to actually push the lube against the bore.
Also, several years ago I decided to try tumble lubing and I found that just a tumble lube os LLA was all I needed for 9mm and .45. This seemed to be a big step up as tumble lubing was easy and I wasn't "wasting" almost all the lubricant I was putting on the bullet.
Wondering if any one with a lubrisizer has tried lubricating a TL bullet and if they are getting any more leading then from a normal-design bullet.

[turbo1889]

. . . Wondering if any one with a lubrisizer has tried lubricating a TL bullet and if they are getting any more leading then from a normal-design bullet.

It has been done and it does work but the standard Lee design tumble lube grooves are not well suited to this mainly because the bands of lube are so small that the lube doesn't want to stay on the boolit until it gets loaded into the cartridge but is easily rubbed or flaked off just by handling the boolits with your fingers. This is especially true with the harder more brittle lubes but also applies to the soft sticky lubes as well.

The ranch dog bullet molds address this issue by using a modified tumble lube design that is basically the Lee tumble lube profile at 150% size making the tumble lube grooves 50% wider and 50% deeper which minimizes this issue and allows the ranch dog bullets to be lubed in a conventional lubra-sizer and the lube stays on the boolits until they get loaded in the case but it is still a tumble lube style design as well so you can still tumble lube them too.

Those ranch dog molds do have a very good reputation for both accuracy and minimal leading and people lube them both ways.

[runfiverun]

lube isn't just a lubricant.
it is also a plug to stop gas blow-bye.
a liquidous sealant if you will

[JIMinPHX]

I've used standard lubes in TL design boolits before. As long as you don't size the boolit down too far, it works well. Once you take more than about .002" or .003" off the boolit diameter with a sizer, there isn't enough lube groove left to hold enough lube. I've tried that trick up to around 1,800fps with good results. I haven't tried it faster than that.

[bhn22]

http://yarchive.net/gun/long_term_storage.html

You may need to cut & paste, but it's worth reading

A post by Ed Harris to help you understand liquid alox a little better. At work, I once had to return an machine part to our supplier. As part of the return conditions, It had to be fully covered with spray on cosmolene. I used a bottle of LLA, since I have no other use for it. It worked perfectly, and looked great, the part looked factory new, which it was. LLA even smells like cosmo.