""if i can bring myself to try talking bruce out of some more aluminum stearate,and HTO wax""
I will send more monday IF I rmember, please email me again here with address
Bruce
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""if i can bring myself to try talking bruce out of some more aluminum stearate,and HTO wax""
I will send more monday IF I rmember, please email me again here with address
Bruce
quiver canola oil has < 2% erucic by law in the US. It is LEAR rapeseed oil.
Gear- is Case HTO oil additive similar to the HTO you are using?
I was talking about the original breed of rapeseed. Given the difficulty of finding the non edible oil that would leave musterd oil for a substitute.
Did some bullet sizing last night. Running bullets unlubed thru a Lee push thru to size them down before running thru my Star. I do this for bullets being sized down more than .002 to save wear and tear on the Star.
I rub a tiny bit of lube on a bullet every so often to reduce the effort required to size the bullets. Using Hornady Unique case lube was a dismal failure. It reduced the effort a bit but not very well. What amazed me was how much better the Red-n-tacky thickened with Na stearate worked. It dramatically reduced the effort and required fewer bullets be treated.
Not sure how this relates to bullet lubes but it sure shows me how well the red-n-tacky/Na stearate works as a lubricant. It also seems to leave a good film.
Thks Bruce - the lubrizol site sure is hard to use, I don't find half of what you guys are talking about. quiver the LEAR works fine.
brad try 2 parts lanolin to one part castor oil.
melt the lanolin and stir in the castor oil.
it will quickly become your sizing/swaging/needs some slickery stays in place lube.
makes good lip balm too.
and pretty decent boolit lube mixed with b-wax.
Works good with 1/4-part Lubrizol Syn-Ester HTO too, I ran out of case forming lube and the old alcohol and isopropyl mix wasn't quite cutting it, so I made my own "drawing lube" using lanolin, castor, HTO, and adjusted the viscosity with Redline two-stroke racing oil. It's GOOOOOD stuff!
Gear
I have been away for a bit, so where are you guys in your quest now?
Has anyone tried adding any ceytl esters nf yet?
How about your choices of stearates? sodium, lead, zinc, magnesium ??
One thing I have learned is that the melting order is critical, I always melt the caranuba first, then the ceytl esters, then the beeswax, and finally one of the stearates such as sodium as it is usually in flake form. This will give you a good amount of liquid base to add your base lubricant to. I finish up with the second stearate provided it is either powder or liquid from another pot. Then I stir like mad and crank up the heat to achieve the 250 to 300 degrees F.
You will know you have it right when it looks like thin pudding. Let it cool while still stirring until around 150 degrees F or a little less, helps with getting it out of the mold tubes.
If you take some of the ceytl esters and melt it and mix in a bit of HTO you will have a dandy case lube similar to sizing wax.
Jeff, I'm working on Esterbee still. I think I've found about the correct visosity of ester oil to use and have been playing with different stearate thickeners. Straight Ivory soap does pretty well. I might try the cetyl ester stuff, but right now I'm trying to increase the melt point a bit.
Gear
Finally finished this thread. Back at the May posts, I was actually expecting more certainty by this month...
Anyway, it sounds like everyone is considering thixotropic (sp?) as a bad thing.
WHY?
Seems to me that the right degree of this property would allow enough hardness to be MUCH more "handle-able" at even the broad range of garage/shop temps year-round than the NRA mix I grew up with. Plus the softening on shear stress could address all those cold-weather rocksolid concerns, while still allowing a nice and hot melt point.
LMK...
Shear-thinning is one thing, thixotropic is another. Any lube that cools from melted to become very hard, yet turns to goose poop when squeezed through a sizer and never regains it's orginal firmness can be difficult to handle.
Gear
gaining hardness back is really a big help.
the lube has to make the jump across the throat gap, it going soft after that is what we want.
going to liquid is not really what we want either.
there's a fine line here.
still working the lith grease angle.
going for something simple this next go round.
http://www.matweb.com/search/datashe...8c7181e&ckck=1
somehow :lol: i ended up with a 5 gallon bucket of this on my doorstep.
i'm gonna try to keep it pretty short on the ingredients.
b-wax,grease,stearate,hto wax [and possibly a poe]
Thixotropic isn't all bad. Many thixotropic materials soften under sheer stress but return to a harder state on rest. Think ketchup. We shake it to make it more liquid, it then thickens back up. Many drugs that come as a suspension have things added to make them more thixotropic, it reduces the tendency for the particles in the suspension to settle put and form a hard cake in the bottom.
What is needed is a formula that softens SOME with a sheer force. Lot goes to, justs softens a bit. It then needs to return to its normal hardness upon rest. This would make sizing and storage work well. It would mean that the lube would make the jump to the rifling well enough but the sheer forces caused by the rifling would allow the lube to flow a bit allowing it to perform as required.
Now, does anyone know of an additive that can give that? Besides a lithium stearate grease?
Well, THAT is a deal-breaker.
But btroj says some such materials do stiffen back up.
Now, runfiverun, you say liquid is not what we need, but I thought some experiments with oil-only lube were successful. It's just not a practical lube for application, transport and such.
Years ago, I had thought that a single grease or slightly harder than lipstick substance could be devised, purely from the lube technology side, with an engineered soft enough from 0°F to 180°F range and virtually no thicker or softer through that range. Don't we have a few plastics that have the same flex through that range? Like, dudes, just make a liquidy plastic with lube qualities, or plasticize a lube to that level of sorta fluidity.
Oh, that second approach is what Gear is working on.
Seems to me that none of the waxes, bees' included is really the way to go. Too much fiddling needed to make it do what I think a bullet lube should do, especially in the cold.
that's kind of where were stuck at...
we know it's a visc thing, the trick is the manipulation.
how do we get a lube to start out semi-solid and break it down to a near semi liquid by the time it gets to the muzzle?
pressure? shear? friction?
the muzzle could be 3"s away or 30"s away.
so i doubt friction is the answer.
i have no issues using a polymer/silicone of some type as a tumble lube or a groove filler.
I've made and tested a lot of wax-free lubes, they just don't work that well in my experience. There needs to be SOME sort of melting ingredient, at least it seems so when using greases only. I've used sodium and lithium greases thick enough to stay on the boolit my themselves and they never shot as well or as cleanly as the same stuff with as little as 20% wax added.
The more I play with lubes the more I believe Mike is right about using a grease and a wax. Beeswax seems to work better than anything for a melting component, I'm liking the ester oils a lot so far, but it needs a little help with flow control, hence my thoughts on using a metal soap to help things out.
Gear