Bore Butter?

[SPQR70AD]

I have used the piss from a bird called the yellow beaked red headed triple clawed mongolian sapsucker and never had problems

 

[Black Powder Guy]

bud in pa, how do you make beef suet lube?

 

[Mad L]

If I tried to get my hands on any of that stuff here in UK the zoo-keepers would nail me to the gatepost.

I recall a restaurant in Germany, Frankfurt if I recall correctly, called the Blue Swan, they served All Kinds of exotic game and the menu is said to constantly change...they were located just across town from the Zoo.
You might check with them...

 

[TFoley]

Do NOT use Bore Butter to season your new skillet.

 

[Henry Miles]

Should be called Crud Builder instead of Bore Butter...
I used it for years until I did a thorough cleaning and found out how much easier loading could be without all the built-up brown crud. Bore polishing is the trick, even on new barrels.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Any fat, melted, will mix with warm or hot melted beeswax, and then when the wax cools, the concoction will congeal. The more fat that you use, the softer the stuff when cooled.

Depending on the mixture, the stuff works as a bullet lube, an anti-chapping compound for skin, a dressing made for treating leather and making it water resistant, and even as a candle if one adds a wick and lights the wick.

So with Beef Suet, you can buy raw beef suet from a good butcher shop. It's the fat from around the kidneys, and you might need to find a butcher that caters to folks making their own venison bologna or making their own salami. The hard white fat in salami is usually beef suet. It has a pretty high melting point, and I think it's better used to make a proper British boiled pudding.

(♫♪♫ oh bring us some Figgie Pudding, oh bring us some Figgie Pudding ♪♫♪).

To render it, you merely cook it on the stove. Some folks then pour it into a pot of boiling water or just boil it from the start. The boiling helps to remove traces of protein often from tiny amounts of blood in the fat. Then the stuff is allowed to cool and harden, and you remove the hard "cookie" of now rendered suet from the surface of the water. Lay it on a paper towel to dry, and some folks scrape the underside of the fat cookie to remove the thin layer of softer fat that usually is found there. After all of that, it's time to remelt the remaining cookie of hard fat and add melted beeswax. The ratio of fat to beeswax determines the hardness.

So folks merely save trimmed fat from steaks and such over time, and then cook that up in a fry pan, and pour the fat from that into the water to complete the rendering. It's technically not really beef "suet" but a lot of folks refer to it as such. It's likely the same "suet" that you find mixed with birdseed to be used in a suet-feeder for birds in Winter. This type of "beef suet" is softer, and I've found that it's better for a lube than the harder to find and harder to melt true beef suet from the cow's kidney area.

IF you do the same thing with pork fat, it's lard, and it works well too. So does veg shortening and beeswax. So does the cheapest olive oil on the shelf, and beeswax. So does combinations of olive oil, animal fat, and beeswax. Just don't use fat from meat that was salted, like bacon fat, and poultry fat appears to be too soft, so I can't recommend chicken, goose, duck, nor turkey fat.

LD

 

[Sudsy]

How about Avacodo oil, which has the highest smoking point of the natural oils at 570 degrees, mixed with beeswax ?
Anyone try it ??

 

[SPQR70AD]

I always used crisco and never had a problem. shot 60 minie balls out of my zouave musket filling the hollow part on the rear of the bullet. cleaned up in a few minutes with hot water and dish soap. used it in C&B guns firing 50-60 times . no problems with patched RB's either

 

[Whitworth]

How about Avacodo oil, which has the highest smoking point of the natural oils at 570 degrees, mixed with beeswax ?
Anyone try it ??

I been using a bottle of cannabis oil, the non THC containing kind of course. The Mrs. got me bottle thinking it might help my aches and pains bless her. Well it did nothing for me so I used to lube patches and a put a drop over the balls in my c&b revolvers. Seems Crisco and other greases get blown out of the cylinder with the first shot so packing them full seems futile since only shot # 1 sends the full load of grease down the barrel. YMMV.

 

[Sidney Smith]

IMHO, Bore Butter works okay for lubing conicals but is lousy for lubing patches. Some love it and some hate it and I fall somewhere in-between, but a bit closer to the latter. Having gone through relationships with more lubes than I can count, this is what I've experienced. BB gummed up the rifle bore, was hard to clean and demanded a swab between loads. It's was also a poor rust preventative. Crisco/lard was a bit better though still not very good; TOW mink oil is excellent, however. Spit patch, Hoppes BP Lube, Black Solve, etc, works great. Wet patch lubes of various kinds are much superior.

You've got to melt the bore butter first before lubing patches with it. I cut strips of bulk patching, toss them into a zip lock bag, then add about a tablespoon sized gob of bore butter. Then the bag goes into the microwave for maybe 15 or so seconds. Just long enough to melt the bore butter. Then just do the shake and bake to the bag and voila, lubed patches. Simple.

 

[mooman76]

It works for me. Not great but gets the job don't and I do have to swab occasionally or accuracy goes south after a few shots.

 

[ohio ramrod]

I got a tube when it first came out and used it solely as a patch lube and it worked ok. But I was still using sperm whale oil which was much better. Now I use either a beeswax/lard mixture or Dixie's Jobola oil (fake sperm whale oil).As to seasoning a barrel with i,I have bought several rifles that were seasoned with it, given up on and sold cheap. I would clean it out, lap the barrels and resell the rifles at a profit.

 

[Oldbear63]

Would a beeswax mixture work better, producing good lubrication with less fouling?

 

[Oldbear63]

Has anyone used Howards FeednWax? It is a mixture of bees wax and orange oil.

 

[Sudsy]

Interesting day
Forgot my prelubed strips when I went to the range. Had to use a dry strip and a tube of CVA Patch grease that I've kept as a backup in the truck just in case.
Shot the tightest groups I've ever shot with this new"ish" .36 cal flint (which is still a work in progress)

 

[Okie Hog]

When i was fixing, rejuvenating and cleaning hunters neglected muzzleloaders i received a couple guns every year where the bore had rusted under the bore butter. Yep, they smeared bore butter on an inadequately cleaned/uncleaned bore.

When melted, 1/3 bore butter and 2/3 beeswax makes good conical lube.

 

[tenngun]

Would a beeswax mixture work better, producing good lubrication with less fouling?

Any petroleum product mixes with powder residue to make a hard sludge. Animal fats and plant oils don’t make a hard sludge.
Half of the stuff after powder burns by weight is a slick sludge
Saliva makes a good lube as it cleans the barrel as you run down your ball.
Fouling depends on humidity. And a drier atmosphere let’s you shoot more with less fouling
A humid atmosphere gunks pretty quick.
Even in hot moist environment most lubes on most fits will let you shoot at least five shots with out needing to wipe.
A bees wax olive oil mix, or a moose milk works good to wipe the bore for you as you load.
However nothing is magic.
Shooting paper cartridge in my .62 with a .570 ball I start getting tight at ten shots. Even a .600 bare ball starts getting tight.
Wipe often, Even every shot won’t add any significant time to your reloads. Ml is not a race, or even a marathon, it’s a stroll in the woods.
Wax/olive oil,plain olive oil, lard, mink oil, bear oil, crisco, ect will make your gun easier to clean when the shooting is done over any petroleum

 

[TFoley]

Barrels are not cast iron and cannot be seasoned, that was the best advertisising ploy ever!

OTOH, I can confirm that lead does not stick to a well-seasoned fry-pan, as I discovered a few years ago when making lead patties in an omelette pan.

See, I thought it was old and unused - a sure sign of my lack of visitations to the food-preparation room - turns out it was MEANT to look old and unused, and had, as a result, cost a fortune. Replacing it took a fairly large lump out of my set-aside for shootmentations.

 

[Josephg]

I like the concept of Bore Butter and I have generally had good luck using it as a patch lube. Today, after a shoot I found my later cleaning patches coming out dirty grey-brown. Not rust, but lots of residual stuff and I went through about 20-30 patches, all coming up suspicious. Even alcohol patches continued to come up dirty until I finally got down to steel. This time I finished with pure mineral oil before putting it away.

I realize I am opening a can of annelids (worms) but what are opinions on Bore Butter?

You like the concept? What is the concept? Putting it in a tube/container? What is different or special about it?

 

[jambuster]

I posted this before in thread "bore Butter"

Old post on I have seen over the years.

I obviously borrowed it.

You have no idea how much humor has come out of Ox-Yoke's claims on the
1000 Shot Plus lube. To the point where some of us now call them
Ox-Joke. With any of my three BP rifles "an historic feat" is getting the
4th ball down the bore without resorting to a bigger hammer.
I'll run you through the full story since the snow has started to fall.
Lets go back to the early 1980's.

A shooter/buckskinner by the name of Young, living in California, went
to the range one day and forgot his patch lube. In utter desperation he
whips out a tube of Chap-Stick and smears it on a few patches. Lo &
Behold it worked better than the lube he had been using. Several of his
buddies tried his idea and reported it worked well. So Young then
tracked down the source of Chap- Stick which is a common lip balm
formulation that has been floating around since the late 19th century.
Chap-Stick is petrolatum (petroleum jelly) with 5% cetyl alcohol and
water. The cetyl alcohol acting as the emulsifyer. With the cetyl
alcohol the water forms minute beads within the petrolatum. Without the
cetyl alcohol you can't get the water to mix in any way with the
petrolatum. Huge quantities of cetyl alcohol are used in the production
of PVC emulsion resins used in kitchen flooring. (My old job was as an
R&D
Tech. on these resins.) The petrolatum is the moisture barrier and
carrier for a topical agent used to soothe chapped lips. The water
emulsified into the petrolatum reduces the drag of the "stick" when you
apply it to your lips and acts as the moisturizing agent. Young then
finds a place to buy Chap-Stick in bulk and packages it as Young Country
Arms 103 Lube. That his lube and Chap->Stick are identical in every
respect, right down to the color, suggested he simply bought from the
makers of Chap-Stick in bulk quantities. Now Ted Bottomly had started
Ox-Yoke and made pre-cut patches and packs of patch cloth. He wanted a
patch lube to round out his line. He bought the first Ox-Yoke lube from
Young. When I first saw them I was at the late C.P. Wood's house in West
Virginia. Woody was looking at a 4 ounce container
of Young Country 103 and a 3 ounce container of Ox-Yoke's patch lube.
Both were identical in every respect, including color. You paid the same
price for 3 ounces of Ox-Yoke's lube as you paid for 4 ounces of Young's
lube. The logical conclusion would be that Ox-Yoke was buying from Young
and the missing ounce was Ox-Yoke's profit on the deal.

Both were advertising their respective lubes in the magazines. Young
advertised that you could fire a hundred rounds without wiping the bore
with his lube. Three months later, Ox-Yoke would advertise that when you
used their lube you could fire 200 rounds without wiping the bore. The 3
month lag time in the mags being the lag time in getting adds scheduled.
This went on, each one upping the ante, so to speak.
Those of us connected with the Buckskin Report discussed this in letters
and thought it a great joke.

The others in the field at that time were Hodgdon with their "Spit-Patch"
which was nothing more than beeswax emulsified in water with a soap.
Then there was T/C Maxi-Lube which was nothing more than the same
petroleum grease they used to grease the bearings in their machines.
Blue and Grey products was selling an automotive wheel bearing grease
that had been pigmented, not dyed, blue. I receieved several letters from
Doc Carlson. He was seeing BP muzzleloaders come into his shop with
balls or slugs stuck in the bore just ahead of the powder charge. You
could not pull these projectiles by any normal method.
He would have to remove the breech plugs, pull the charge and beat them
out of the bore, toward the muzzle with a heavy rod and a hammer. He
described the presence of a black tar-like film in the bore where the
projectiles had been frozen in place. The common thread in this being
that the shooter had used one of the "petroleum-based" lubes. I had to
explain to Doc that the petroleum greases were nothing more than
petroleum lubricating oils that had been "bodied" by the addition of
metallic soaps such as calcium or cadmium stearate. With a petroleum
lubricating oil, or grease, anytime you heat them to a high temperature
in the presence of sulfur you get asphalt. The way asphalts were
produced was to take crude oil and sulfur in an autoclave. Heat the
mixture to 600 degrees for about 8 hours
and you had road tar. Which is about what was happening in the gun.
Since the repackaged Chap-Stick was a petroleum wax it did not form
asphalt with sulfur and high temperatures. I then wrote an article for
the Backwoodsman magazine and compared the behavior of the two Chap-Stick
lubes to the behavior of sperm whale oil when it had been used in black
powder guns.

Well, Old Ted Bottomly jumped right onto that one. three months later
he starts advertising that his lube is "all-natural, non-petroleum" and
authentic, using what our ancesters had used. At that point I figured
his parents were to Christian to call him ******* so they settled for
Bottomly. By about 1984, Bottomly and Young had a falling out over
pricing. The one ounce shy thing with Ox-Yoke pushed most of the
customers to Young's lube. Same thing, same price but more of it with
Young Country 103. And by this time we were up to 800 rounds between
swabbings. Technology marches on. Bottomy came out with his first Wonder
Lube. Years of research went into this lube, or so he claimed. Now at
this time Ox-Yoke was located in West Suffield, CT. A short time later I
was searching the drugstore shelves looking for petrolatum-based skin
care products or salves that I coulde repackage and become a millionaire
. I spotted this tube of something
called "Mineral Ice". Menthol in petrolatum. Made by a Dermatone
Laboratories located in Suffield, CT. Out comes the map. just by a
mere coincidence both companies were located just across the river from
each other. This of course raised doubts as to the "years of research"
comments out of Bottomly. The new Wonder Lube went into the lab. Proved
to be mineral oil, paraffin wax, a yellow dye and oil of wintergreen. A
book at work on fats, waxes and oils nailed this one down to a common
chest rub preparation for those with head colds who could not tolerate
camphorated oil. Again it was billed as "all-natural and non-petroleum".
Never mind that paraffin wax comes from paraffinic crude oils and mineral
oil comes from napthenic crude oils, the yellow dye and the oil of
wintergreen should convince anybody that it is all-natural and
non-petroleum. Given the wax and oil, I simply refer to this type of lube
as a remanufactured vaseline. With the yellow dye the rubes will swear
it is beeswax.

One thing about con artists is that they are never content to leave a
con artest for any length of time. In 1990, Bottomly comes out with a
new version called 1000 Shot Plus lube. High-technology now made
possible a lube that eliminated fouling, eliminated the need to clean and
would totally stop bore corrosion. Bottomly searched the world for this
modern technology and found it in Germany after years of searching. This
advance in this lube was made possible by this
secret micronizing agent. It gave the lube a micron particle size that
made all of this advancement possible. At that point his chest thumping
ego trip gave away the formula. This secret micronizing agent is no real
secret and has been around for over 100 years. It is nothing more than a
fossil wax mined in Germany. The same time of wax used to be mined in
Utah as Utah Wax but the mine closed for lack of business.
Paraffin wax is a hard brittle wax that forms huge crystals. When you
look at a block of paraffin wax sold for food canning you see lines on
the surface of the blocks of wax. Those are the lines denoting crystal
size. It had been found that if you added this fossil wax to paraffin
wax it would reduce the size of these crystals, though nowhere near a
micron in size. Paraffin wax was limited in which skin care and salve
formulations it could be used in because of the macro-crystallinty of it.
This made it unsuited to preparations where hardness and brittleness
were objectionable. By using the fossiol wax addition the paraffin wax
could replace more expensive waxes in these products. But when you lay
this type of Techno-Nonsense on a bunch of ignorant rube BP shooters they
will beat a path to your door, wallet in hand.

Now, to get back to an historic feat of 3 shots without swabbing the
bore. The problem with this type of lube is that as long as the surface
temperature of the bore is above the melting point of the wax, about 40
to 45 C, the fouling deposited by the combustion of the powder will slide
off the metal when pressure is applied to it. When the surface
temperature of the bore is below the melting point of the wax it will act
as an adhesive and hold the fouling to the surface. The unburned
charcaol in the powder fouling will adsorb most of the mineral oil
present in the lube. This turns it into an oily sludge that simply
builds up in the breech with repeated loading of the gun. After a few
rounds are fired in a flinter you have the oily sludge being blown out of
the vent which then coats the flint and frizzen. Lubricated flints
strike no sparks.
Now for the real punch line. With the addition of the micronizing agent
they doubled the amount of dye used so the new lube was more orange in
color, compared to the lemon yellow of the previous version, and they
doubled the amount of oil of wintergreen. Convince the rubes that it is
now even more natural. During the past few years there has been much
bitching about the quality of Ox-Joke's pre-lubed patches. I have seen
packs in the store where the lube had turned hard and brown. The mineral
oil migrates out of the paraffin wax into the low density polyethlene
used in the bags. This makes the lube hard and brittle. It goes back to
paraffin wax properties. With these an historic feat is getting the
second ball down the barrel without wiping. Ox-Joke supplies T/C with
Bore Butter which is only a slight modification
of Ox-Joke's standard formula.

Remember the dbate about blowing down the barrel on the message boards.
My off line joke was that as long as you use the repackaged Chap-Stick as
a patch lube you would not get chapped lips from blowing down a cold
barrel.

Then their was Uncle Mike's Apple Green patch lube. Another paraffin
wax/mineral oil lube with methylsalicin in it. Nothing more than a
repackaged arthritis salve. I can tell you that is was very effective on
a knee suffereing degenerative joint disease. So if you are going to go
out in those North Woods in winter weather to hunt the elusive whitetail
you ought to take all three lubes along. Prevent chapped lips, take care
of chest colds and arthritic joints from all of the hoofing through the
snow. No reason for you to return home in anything less than the best of
health in spite ot the weather. Might be a good idea to take along one of
the ascorbic acid-based powders since that is vitamin C. Then Goex's
sugar-based powder might make an emergency trail food.

I joke with Dixon that it is bad enough we have to deal with the ATF,
what next with these products, the Food and Drug Administration too???
Well, time to go sit out on the deck for a smoke and listen to the snow
flakes fall.

Based on what nhmoose says "Bore Butter" and it's competitors are made of Paraffin and Mineral oil which as far as I can tell are petroleum based products and should be a no-no for black powder applications due to sludge formation upon ignition.