As part of the work being done and reported on the "Extreme Lube" thread, we need to re-establish a general "bar" for what a lube must do. The point being to engineer a lube to perform in all situations, we must know what ARE those situations. I'm going to start with a list of my own based partly on much that has already been discussed, and will edit to add to it the suggestions you make as we go.
1. Must be temperature insensitive. The lube must be able to stand long strings of shooting in the heat without deteriorating groups, and must have minimal "cold barrel" characteristics, keeping POI constant to 1 MOA through starts and stops. Ambients of 105F to ZeroF seems reasonable to me.
2. Must be velocity insensitive. To me, this means SOFT, I want the lube to work in .45 Colt revolvers at Cowboy Action velocities as well as extremely high velocities in rifles with fast twists where high pressure and high land force is the norm. I'm going to say 700 fps from .30-45 caliber is a good bench mark for the low end, and the high end will be whatever your loading skills can be. Many cast shooters don't care to get above 16-1800 fps with accuracy in .30 caliber (for example), but some will, and those who shoot at very high velocity need this lube to NOT be the limiting factor. For those shooting at milder velocities, "Extreme Lube" would still offer all the other advantages outlined here, which is more than 95% of the formulas I've tried will do.
3. Must be insensitive to barrel surface finish. Some guns have rough bores, some pitted bores, some highly polished. This affects lube performance greatly, but some recent work has proven that a lube can be formulated for both.
4. Must work with conventional lube-sizing equipment. I do not consider compatibility with the pan-lube technique a requirement for the lube, but some may. My gut tells me a truly "Extreme" lube won't melt easily below the smoke point of most waxes. Some of the high melt-point lubes can be poured into stick moulds when they are made, since they aren't easily remelted and poured into sizers.
5. Must work with a variety of lube groove designs from Loverin to Lee to Keith to Silhouette styles. This is all about viscosity, lubricity, being cohesive, and having the right tack. The biggest issue to achieving this is being able to do it across a wide temperature range. Edit to add that we want the lube to be minimally sensitive to number of grooves lubed on a multi-groove boolit, although a Loverin boolit with seven grooves lubed is likely to shoot differently than it would with only the space just above the gas check lubed no matter the formula, just to give an extreme example. If you lube them all the same for the same gun, it doesn't matter.
6. Must be storage and handling friendly. Must not corrode brass or equipment, must stay in the grooves during handling, and must not leak into the powder when subjected to 160F (direct summer sunlight in some climates).
7. Must be able to tolerate being blown out of the groove and run over by the boolit in the bore. This is often what happens with fast pressure curves and sloppy boolit fit. Some lubes excel at this, others only work in "benchrest" situations where fit tolerance is less than half a thousandth. Difficult to establish a test standard for this one since it's so subjective, but a group of people testing one formula in a variety of guns can come to a consensus.
8. Must leave consistent bore fouling, i.e. satisfy Eutectic's Consistency Of Residuals Encountered (CORE) concept. This is key to hunting accuracy and multi-temp performance. My personal standard for this is two, ten-shot groups fired in succession starting from a clean barrel compared to two more, ten-shot successive groups fired from one day to a week later with NO BARREL CLEANING. A second requirement is to be able to maintain accuracy for at least 500 rounds between major cleanings. Some lube ingredients, in my experience, cannot do this. Alox 350 is one, we think due to calcium buildup in the bore. Lubes with too much Molybdenum disulphide can have the same disadvantage. It goes without saying that the lube formula, as a single factor, must not promote lead fouling of the bore.
9. Must not affect accuracy by "clinging" to the boolit after it exits the gun. I call it "lube jettison", and use point-blank tests where I shoot through cardboard to observe the spatter pattern, condition, and quantity. I want all the lube gone from the boolit within two full boolit revolutions post-muzzle.
10. Must be relatively non-toxic. No Teflon or chlorine/flourine produced in decomposition, or similar hazards.
11. Must be able to make the lube from readily obtainable ingredients, which excludes such things as must normally be purchased by the boxcar load or drum, or by special permit.
12. As an added bonus, it would be nice if the lube were compatible with black powder as well as smokeless, even though moisture content requirements are typically contradictory.
An important note: No lube can overcome poor fit, unsuitable boolit design, or poor loading techniques. Much of what accounts for "good" or "bad" lube formulations involves the guns and ammunition themselves, not so much the lube formula. Some lubes DO tolerate less-than-ideal conditions than others, but lube alone won't make your rifle shoot.
**What a good lube WILL do is be transparant, in that is doesn't DETRACT from the accuracy potential that the handloader builds into a given gun/ammo system.**
Let's hear what everyone else has established for lube testing standards, keeping in mind what you'd want if someone designed a lube to work just for you, and I'll update this list with suggestions.
Gear
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Originally Posted by Gear
Or is Google Earth getting that good?
Several 100-yard "patterns" with flecks of lube on the target showed me that some time ago. IIRC the groups were off by 1-2" from the norm. A little less sticky and more slicky and the problem went away and groups returned. This was the very first thing I learned about shooting Felix lube in the wintertime without tweaking it some for my purposes.
