Mad Monk said:
Mad Professor,
If you can. Get a quantity on the amount of oil of wintergreen in the lube. When Ox-Yoke was still producing it I tried to look at that. I had found that if the container was not tightly sealed the lube would harden. So I smeared some on a piece of foil and weighed it. Left it sit exposed to the air for a week. Volatile loss was 5.5%. Only the oil of wintergreen is the volatile in the lube.
This ignores federal law on packaging. Any thing with more than 5% oil of wintergreen must be in childproof packaging. No matter the amount or end use. They claimed all food grade ingredients. You do not use oil of wintergreen in any foods. Normally it would be a tincture of oil of wintergreen going into foods as a flavoring.
In 1985 I identified mineral oil in the lube through the research group lab I was working with. They identified the mineral oil on their IR machine. They would not do the work on the base waxy material. Too much time for their niormal work load.
Using different solvents it looked to me like a low melt point crystalline wax base.
I tried turpentine and that ruled out beeswax.
They use an orange oil-soluble dye to give the appearance of beeswax. That came out with the mineral oil in an acetone extraction of the lube. The dye wanted nothing to do with the waxy base.
Ox-Yoke got into the lube business back in the early 1980's. Young, in California, came out with his Young Country 103 lube which was nothing more than repackaged Chap-Stick. Soon after that we see Ox-Yoke selling a lube. I bought a container of each at the Morgan's Rifles Shoot at Winchester in 1984. Compared the two to Chap-Stick in the lab. No question. You paid the same for 4 ounces of Young's lube as you did for 3 ounces of the Ox-Yoke lube.
Then in 1984, Ox-Yoke and Young had a parting of the ways and Ox-Yoke came out with the first version of what evolved into the 1000 shot plus lube.
Funny thing about this. Ox-Yoke was located in Suffield, CN while a large skin care product company was located just across the river in West Suffield. That skin care product company produced products based on paraffin wax or petrolatum. The oil of wintergreen was used in chest rubs for those with colds.
Then around 1989 or 1990 we see the 1000 shot plus lube come on the market. All kinds of nonsense said for it by the manufacturer. One that caught my eye was the thing about micronizing the lube. That Ox-Yoke had to go to Germany to obtain this technology.
The oils, fats and waxes book in the research library went into how the Germans had used cheap paraffin wax in skin care products by micronizing the normally macro-crystal paraffin wax. The simple addition of a tiny amount of a certain fossil wax would cause the paraffin wax to form micro crystals.
If they had been using a waxy material obtained from rendering animal fats there would be no need to micronize because they are amorphous in form.
It was Ox-Yoke who started this whole nonsense about "all-natural" and "non-petroleum". The man who ran Ox-Yoke had dealt with me a few times. I had explained black powder fouling to him.
I had written a magazine article explaining how some petroleum lubes formed asphalt films in the bore of a black powder gun and why some would not.
We had, at that time, lubes on the market that were petroleum lubricating greases. The T/C Maxi Lube at that time was the same grease they used in the shop to lube the milling machines, etc. The other was the industrial lube grease that was sold by Butler Products.
The petroleum greases that are made from lubricating oils with a metallic soap as a viscosity builder would react with the sulfur from black powder to form asphalt films in the bore. The commercial way of producing asphalt was to heave a napthenic petroleum oil into an autoclave and add sulfur. Heat it up and in a certain period of time you have road tar.
The petroleum waxes will not do that.
Even Ox-Yoke's lube would form a film in the bore eventually. If you want to look at how a lube performs in the bore you put some in a shallow metal pan and burn it down with a propane torch flame. It either produces a tar-like deposit or it does not.
Hi Mad Monk,
I'll try to address some of your questions.
Oil of wintergreen (methylsalicylate) is not all that volitile b.p. is 224 oC or 435 oF. Yes over a week some will evaporate but I wouldn't attribute the loss of 5.5 % only to this without knowledge of the other (volitile?) components.
A tincture is an alcoholic solution of a compound used for medicinal purposes, as methylsalicyalte is miscible (soluble in all proportions) with ethanol maybe some volitile loss is ethanol (b.p. 78 oC)? I'm not framilar with the laws but from what you said if a tincture was used it could account for significant evaporative loss depending on its concentration.
I'm not sure how you could identify mineral oil by infrared spectroscopy (IR) in a mixture of various hydrocarbons. IR is primarily used to identify functional groups present in a molecule. There is a portion of the IR spectrum called the "fingerprint reigion" which is UNIQUE for a particular compound, it can be used to identify compounds if a pure sample (e.g. only one component) is present. This is not applicable to mixtures. In fact we use mineral oil to examine certain solids a a dispersion (Nujol mull). The information where mineral oil absorbs is essentially useless as it cannot be attibuted to the compound being examined or the mineral oil. In fact mineral oil is itself a mixture of hydrocarbons.
"Microcrystaline"? When hydrocarbons and waxes get large enough (lower homologus series are liquids) they will crystalize if they are in a pure state. Otherwise how much or big of crystals you get will depend on the mixture. This is similar to plastics where they use a "plastizer" to keep the plastic bendable without breaking (FYI these are in drinking bottle plastics and may endocrine disrupters). In the context of polymers there is also the "glass state" , this is where things get hard but are not crystalline/brittle.
Sulfur has long been used for "Vulcanizing" rubber. That is as a cross-linking component of raw rubber to give a more stable and durable rubber. It works primarily on the unsaturated hydrocarbon chains that exists in natural rubbers. The same things may be happening in a gun barrel but with other unsaturated hydrocarbons introduced as a lube. In general for a given hydrocarbon stucture (number of carbon atoms) the more unsaturation the lower the melting point, think of Criso vs olive oil. Maybe avoid the "good fat" (for EATING, unsaturated, polyunsaturated) for ML lubes (sarurated is better?)? P.S. Short saturated fats are still liquids when long unsaturated fats solidfy, what temperature are you working with?
Mad Monk, I'm sure you know much more than I about ML shooting , I want to learn. I can help you with chemistry, maybe WE can figure out what makes the "asphalt" deposits? Maybe come up with a winner :winking: Just writing/thinking about this thread has given me a number of new ideas.......
Please PM me if you want to discuss this, I've taught qualitative organic analysis for many years.
Anyway, I don't have an axe to grind about this at all.
The way I use NL is to lubricate PRBs/conical bullets and the bore before I shoot them. When I'm done shooting I swab the bore with boiling hot soapy water, apply a bronze brush, swab again then rinse with clean hot water. I rinse the bore with dry gas (100% isopropanol), sometimes some more NL comes out (yellow patch), have not seen any leading with conicals, and then a dry patch. I then heat the barrel near my woodstove, when its hot to touch its dry and I then coat the bore with NL. No rust using this system so far unless I omit the dry gas treatment when I get a slight amount of flash rust.
I'm just learning but the key seems to be to use something "greasey " that does not induce/create fowling upon shooting then will coat the (clean) bore and not let moisture to get at it. Temperature plays a roles as some lubes get too runny when hot and others too hard when cold. Hence the use of different ratios and/or additives (mostly differnet fats/oils!).
The search for the perfect lube/protectant goes on............ :grin:
