patch lube

[Mr Hawken]

can someone give me a recipe of a homemade patch lube.i usually use bb but at $10.00 a tube its almost getting to expensive. thanks

 

[jtmattison]

If you're used to Bore Butter you can make a good substitute with beeswax and olive oil. Melt them together at about 60:40 oil to wax in a double boiler. You can tweak the consistency bad adding more or less wax.
Also see our members resource section for Stumpkillers lube recipes. They work great but require more ingredients.

HD

 

[Bob Gular]

Crisco works just fine.

 

[prowler]

I'll second Huntin Dawg's method. :bow: I use the BW/EVOO for everything. 50/50 for OP wads, and various mixtures based on temperature for patches.

 

[cowpoke1955]

I use Ballistol. 1 part oil to 4 parts water. Here is their link:[url] http://www.ballistol.com/index.htm[/url] . A little will go a long ways. One order will make enough lube to last you for years.

 

[BrownBear]

Deer tallow and olive oil here. Still sperimenting, but 2:1 deerlive gives something about the consistency of vaseline or BB in a tube at room temp, but great for cold weather. Melts almost instantly when you smear some on your finger. 3:1 deerlive gives a consistency about like the tubs of BB. Stiffer in cold weather but dandy in warm.

I rendered pretty close to a gallon of tallow from one deer last year, and planned to do it again this year. But even after giving half of it away to my hunting pard, I had too much left over to bother again this year. Seems to keep really well, both as pure tallow and blended for lube. Plain tallow is definitely too hard to use by itself for lube at our normal temps, but if I lived in hot country, it might be okay.

 

[bingo1952]

I like a greasey/waxy lube. I use a mix of 50% beeswax, 25% lard, and 25% olive oil (old and no good for cooking) that I have been using for patch lube and it also works well for Minie bullets.

 

[boar]

Deer Tallow. Groundhog oil mixed 50-50 with beeswax. I perfer the deer as it don't run in hot weather. Bear is good but cost more. I have used Crisco. But you could use about any tallow, just mix beeswax to get the thickness you want. Dilly

 

[Jarikeen]

I just lightly lube my patches with olive oil, but then I also swab between shots.

 

[Brik847]

I like moose juice prelubed patches and make it yourself follow the recipe on this site.

 

[longcruise]

Just plain old pure lard from the grocery store works fine if you don't hapen to have a dead animal laying around to render the fat.

 

[smo]

SPIT! :thumbsup:

 

[Stumpkiller]

Here's a link to the homemade lubes & solvent I came up with after much work & experimentation.
[url] http://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/fusionbb/showtopic.php?tid/203261[/url]/

 

[romeoh]

I use Ballistol. 1 part oil to 4 parts water. Here is their link:[url] http://www.ballistol.com/index.htm[/url] . A little will go a long ways. One order will make enough lube to last you for years.

My secret too.
Got a little bottle with ballistol/water mix in my "rangebox".
Plus a tobacco box, one like these:
- Ah, :cursing: can´t post pics from where I am right now. The link would be:[url] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bb/Copenhagen_LongCut.gif[/url]
I grabed me any empty one from an addicted and cuted a sponge to fit inside the tobacco box.
A little ballistol/water mix on the sponge and you can start lubing - well, postoffice-style :grin:

 

[evan9201]

you could always order some mink tallow from track of the wolf, a tin lasts me a while or any other animal fat boiled down will do. the veg based bore butter will live up to its name in cold weather.

 

[Frank/Pa]

How many shots can you shoot with the mink tallow before you have to swab the bore?

 

[evan9201]

after about 3 or 4 shots it starts to get a little sticky but its no harder to remove than any other lube and you can also waterproof your frizzen with the stuff too.

 

[BrownBear]

One thing that hasn't come up in this useful discussion (thanks to all for that) is life expectancy of lubes, especially on prelube patches.

I've got sealed packs of patches prelubed with wonderlube and maybe bore butter that seem to last forever, at least till you open the pack and expose them to new air. Then you've got about a year to use them if they're newer, or a few months to use them if they've been sitting around a long time before you get around to opening them. No problem to refresh them at that point with a little new lube and go on shooting, but if you don't you'll start to have some patch failures.

Same goes for patched balls in loading blocks, and they seem to go even faster. I just smear a little extra bore butter on the patch showing at the bottom and they're fine, but let them sit in the block for a couple of months without doing that and they're likely to fail.

My homemade deer tallow/olive oil patch lube seems to hold up lots better. I've got a can of prelubes I've left sitting for about a year now as kind of a test, and they seem as good as the day I made them. Same for the cans of lube- none of the crust on top you see forming in tubs of bore butter.

Makes me wonder about the role and life expectancy of the animal fat compared to vegetable oils. We all prefer to shoot more and use the stuff up faster, but there always seems to be some that gets forgotten or ignored for months or years back in the corner of a cabinet. The homemade stuff I've tinkered with sure seems to stick around better.

I haven't managed to leave any of your lubes sitting around that long Stumpie, so maybe that's a good sign of how well they work. Have you kept any around long enough to get a feel for how it holds up compared to bore butter and such?

 

[Stumpkiller]

I haven't managed to leave any of your lubes sitting around that long
Stumpie, so maybe that's a good sign of how well they work. Have you kept
any around long enough to get a feel for how it holds up compared to bore
butter and such?

As a test I left a load in my .50 New Englander for 11 months and four
patched balls in the block for the same period. These were in an unheated
closet in my attached garage that runs 45º to 80º depending on the season.
The load fired but struck about 4" high of the normal zero (Upper left in
the image). The group is offhand and all hit high. I loaded the patched
balls and after the second I wiped (normally I can get seven shots without
wiping). A couple of the recovered patches showed some tearing, but I think
that was the ones I was huffing down the fouled bore and was not from
deterioration from the lube attacking the cotton.

The group was not so hot (this is 50 yards) but it was in the interest of
seeing what might happen. The bore was fine, cleaned up well, and I detect
no problems from having left the charge in. I would say accuracy suffers,
loading ease suffers and it isn't a good practice. I load my blocks up
before leaving the house and usually cycle through them within a month. I'll
pop them out and wipe a bit of fresh lube on the patch if they hang around
longer than that.

I have some pre-lubed strips in a baggie that are three years old and they
work fine.

 

[BrownBear]

Thanks for responding, Stumpie. Excellent test. I'd need to make up a lot bigger batches if I was going to have any hanging around for a year though! :hatsoff: