What makes you think nothing but the latest space age chemical compounds will work to protect metal from rust? And nothing else can possibly work...... Most antique muzzle loaders are rust buckets. The bores are rusted out. The outsides are normally pitted to the extreme. Sperm oil, lanolin, and possibly bear oil aside, they did not have much that was effective for the working man's gun. Thus their guns rusted away quickly. Petroleum changed that. Not "space age" anything, good old grease and effective oils that the average guy could afford.
This is a muzzle loading forum that deals with traditional guns. It is not a forum about historical reenacting. Maybe that is were I am getting confused. IF we are pretending that we are living in a log cabin and the year is 1800, I am thinking the computer is out of place.
Use whatever you want, particularly for modern guns. For my valuable antiques and guns I make I would never use anything that is not proven to work. I do not check my guns periodically, I use highly quality preservatives instead. Would a collector of expensive historic guns use olive oil or animal fat. Of curse not, it puts his investments at risk.
There is a segment of the ML community that I do not understand. Those who deliberately avoid cleaning their guns. I see it in the civil war community. To me that is bizarre. Maybe the insistence on ineffective historic and ineffective, preservatives is part of that mindset?? Not sure.......News flash, it is 2023, it is not 1800. Going out of the way to get HC ineffective products does not make sense to me.
I get what you are saying but I disagree.
Petroleum did not change much at all.
The argument could be made that most BP guns are rust buckets today.
It has little to do with oils and mostly to do with care.
Besides petroleum products existed in 1800. Camphor, mineral oil, asphaltom....on and on.
As far as the severe pitting we see on some originals, that happened when the guns were neglected like stored in damp basements, attics, barns under the beds for extended periods of time.
Heck you’ll see this with 10 year old guns left behind/under the seat in vehicles today or put away damp in cases and carelessly stored.
As mentioned fulminate of mercury is highly corrosive to both metal and wood so percussion guns will commonly see erosion on both wood and metal around the lock/drum/barrel/hammer...
With that said some well kept percussions do not suffer near as bad from this.
My point is it’s more about actual care than the products used.
Also in their period of use, the old guns were well kept most of the time.
There is some irony.
Let’s take whale oil. It’s one of the best oils known to man. So much so it was a main ingredient in transmission fluid through the 1960s.
Some transmissions like GM’s 4 speed Hydromatic will run ok but not near as well as they did off the “whale oil fluid”.
