Whatever I have around. Sometimes I buy olive oil and don't like the flavor, so it becomes lube. I did use the extra light Bertolli olive oil once and really liked it. It is ultra refined/processed. But, any decent olive oil seems to work. No need for the top shelf stuff, but I wouldn't use the fake dollar store stuff.
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Perhaps an odd cleaning question.
- Thread starter Daryl Crawford
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Whatever I have around. Sometimes I buy olive oil and don't like the flavor, so it becomes lube. I did use the extra light Bertolli olive oil once and really liked it. It is ultra refined/processed. But, any decent olive oil seems to work. No need for the top shelf stuff, but I wouldn't use the fake dollar store stuff.
Segway to a good story ?
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Any product based on oil out of the ground can not will not absorb salts.
Only animal fats or vegetable fats can absorb salts. Including salts produced from the combustion of MUZZLELOADING fuels.
I find it amazing that folk can not disengage their thinking from current convention when it comes to cleaning and caring for traditional muzzleloaders.
In fact it amazes me how many have all the garb such as dress and tradition tools but some how can not reboot their minds that they are not cleaning a modern breech loading firearm using nitro based fuels, I mean come on guys, what is the mental block here?
A minor clarification to your post--animal fats and vegetative oils have only a minor ability to remove fouling salts that is barely better than petroleum-derived oils, and that is due to a mild saponification reaction upon encountering the caustic basic pH of the fouling. Although mild, this soap-forming reaction was nonetheless important in the 18th and earlier centuries when few other cleaning aids were available. The fouling salts are primarily removed by their solubility in water and alcohol. Deedub
I wish I knew what was in the Original Lehigh Valley lube. Once I found it at Dixon's years ago it was all that I used. I never had a problem with rust. Due to some infirmities I left it uncleaned for almost a month after using it, and still no rust. A friend and I made up some paper cartridges for his 20 ga. NW trade gun. They were lubed with Lehigh Valley just around the ball. He got 15 shots before any resistance was felt. He felt that he could have kept shooting if he had wanted to. Too bad it isn't available again.
Brokennock
Cannon
Not really, pretty boring. I was young and making the switch from compound bow to recurves and long bows. I had one short recurve that liked a thinner, thus smaller nocked arrow, and I didn't know the string and serving needed to be thinner (did not know it was an option) and nicks were mysteriously exploding on the string at the shot.
I was also new to the internet, had been avoiding it and email. Was setting up my 1st email account and every user name I tried got rejected. Out of frustration I combined my aggravation of the day with the arrow nocks with my frustration with finding a user name, and, became, Brokennock.
Lame.
No clarification needed at all. I don't use the animal fats to clean my gun! If you had read my comments on this subject you will see I only use boiling water to clean my guns.
You would then discerned how I exploit the animal fats wonderful ability to not only prevent O2 getting to the iron but also absorb any lingering salts. Something that petroleum based oils don't do!
Also I think you will find that when settlers from Europe and else where started crossing the great continent of North America in the 1700's they most definitely were not carrying wd40 or worse still....Rem oil!
I bet they new how to boil water and render fat though!!
Does that clarify things?
Dang whipper snappers and PH mumbo jumbo blah blah blah, dang college graduates jibba jabba....
Lanolin?
IMO, using any olive oil other than the "Refined Olive Oil" or "Pure Olive Oil" which are the lowest levels of olive oil available is a waste of money.
The various higher grades like Extra Virgin, Fine Virgin and Virgin all have much better taste but for making cleaners or patch lubes, taste doesn't matter. A barrel or roundball patch will never know the difference.
Tall oil.
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Sorry to offend your prejudices. Deedub
More on my bore picture; After leaving my rifle, well cleaned by the way, out of action for 6 months after swabbing the bore with a patch soaked in Rem Oil after the last cleaning, I ran a patch down the bore to remove the rem oil prior to loading. The patch came out rusty, I brushed and swabbed and kept getting rusty patches.
I finally got a halfway clean patch and decided to shoot the rifle to see what damage had been done. Now, this is a Rice barrel that had a penchant for cutting patches and shooting fliers even before it rusted inside. Shooting the gun after it rusted caused blown patches and poor grouping.
I decided to fix the barrel or ruin it. I realized the sharp crown was cutting patches when I loaded it so I smoothed it out. Next I cut a small square of a green scotch bright pad soaked it with soft scrub from the kitchen and went to work on the bore. I thought "how many strokes", "let's start with 50", then 75, then 100. After about 100 strokes I could actually see metal on my scotch bright pad. Of course I thought I had ruined the barrel, my borescope (picture above) showed that I had actually rounded the edges of the lands slightly.
Of to the range to see how bad my barrel was after I tortured it with the abrasive scrub. I tried several different loads and didn't get blown patches but the accuracy wasn't there. I decided to try 90 gr of 3F, a .530 ball, and a .015 ticking patch having loaded my way up over the testing period. I took a shot at 50 yards, bullseye, another one, ragged hole, 3 more and I still had the ragged hole.
I shot at 100 yards, if it wasn't a fluke I had slightly less than a 2" group. Then I looked at my powder measure, I thought I had it set on 90 gr but it was actually set on 80 gr. Looking back must have skipped 80 gr on my 5 gr ramp up on load testing.
It appears the only pitting is near the breach as shown in the picture, a couple of years down the road and this minor pitting hasn't caused any cleaning problems. I have used a variety of things to protect the bore during down time, barricade, ballistol and mobil 1, no problems so far.
I finally got a halfway clean patch and decided to shoot the rifle to see what damage had been done. Now, this is a Rice barrel that had a penchant for cutting patches and shooting fliers even before it rusted inside. Shooting the gun after it rusted caused blown patches and poor grouping.
I decided to fix the barrel or ruin it. I realized the sharp crown was cutting patches when I loaded it so I smoothed it out. Next I cut a small square of a green scotch bright pad soaked it with soft scrub from the kitchen and went to work on the bore. I thought "how many strokes", "let's start with 50", then 75, then 100. After about 100 strokes I could actually see metal on my scotch bright pad. Of course I thought I had ruined the barrel, my borescope (picture above) showed that I had actually rounded the edges of the lands slightly.
Of to the range to see how bad my barrel was after I tortured it with the abrasive scrub. I tried several different loads and didn't get blown patches but the accuracy wasn't there. I decided to try 90 gr of 3F, a .530 ball, and a .015 ticking patch having loaded my way up over the testing period. I took a shot at 50 yards, bullseye, another one, ragged hole, 3 more and I still had the ragged hole.
I shot at 100 yards, if it wasn't a fluke I had slightly less than a 2" group. Then I looked at my powder measure, I thought I had it set on 90 gr but it was actually set on 80 gr. Looking back must have skipped 80 gr on my 5 gr ramp up on load testing.
It appears the only pitting is near the breach as shown in the picture, a couple of years down the road and this minor pitting hasn't caused any cleaning problems. I have used a variety of things to protect the bore during down time, barricade, ballistol and mobil 1, no problems so far.
It's all right. No harm done
well here is my opinion. I do not have a smoothbore "yet" but on my rifles I never put water on them. I use to use warm water and I had the same problem. after I finished and oiled, I would wipe the oil out with alcohol to load and shoot the next time. I would always have funk come out. I figured the oil was breaking dried stuff out of the breach. I started using WD40 it works very good! the other day I was talking to an old man and showing him a couple of my rifles. we got to talking about cleaning, his knowledge of flintlocks goes back a long way. he told me to use K1 kerosene. it has low sulfur content. well I like trying new thing some time. so I bought a gallon. after shooting I cleaned my rifle with the kerosene and I got twice as much crude out than I ever had before when cleaning, with warm water or the WD40, I took it out to my loading room today and wiped it with oil a week after cleaning, nothing but a white rag came out. the kerosene cleans it like a charm! if you use it get the K1 it is about the same as jet fuel with low sulfur content. and oil the bore when you are done,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
