doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Barrel Grease - What Kind?

Ah yes, the heartbreak of coprolalia...

I temporarily contracted the coprolalic syndrome last week when I slammed my finger in a car door. Fortunately, no one was around to witness the symptoms of the disorder!

For percussion revolver with 3F, I punched overpowder wads out of 1/8" thick felt, mixed up a combo of beeswax, neatsfoot oil (the substitute for lard or tallow) and parafine (our jelly jar sealant, not the Brit gasoline) in a double boiler which can be a coffee can or Mason jar in a pot of water), dipped the wads one at a time with big tweezers, and placed on wax paper. I have these in Ruger Old Army ".44 cal." (which is actually .457") and .36 cal (which is of course closer to .38" while modern .38 cal. is closer to .36" GO FIGURE??) They seal the powder against cross-firing between cylinders and both remove and soften fouling. They take up some useful space in a bp revolver cylinder but I don't think that's much of an issue in a shotshell even with relatively voluminous bp. Anyway, as Pete says, you need a lube of organic origin around bp; I'm not even sure the parafine qualifies as such unless you think all those palm trees, ferns, and ancient asparagus that were compressed and baked into crude oil allow that interpretation.

jack

My wife is always telling me I need to seek professional help. WTF is up with that crap?

Did your loads have a crappie smell ?

A lot of confusion exists in the naming of calibers, but this one is really no more so than a lot of others. The calibers of ML'ing rifles, pistol, & cap-n-ball revolvers were all named according to their bore sizes. .36 cal revolvers thus had bores in their bbls of .36". The barrels were rifled with groove dias of about .375" so the chambers were bored for this size ball, the .36 cal cap-n-ball actually firing a .375/.376" ball. The first cartridge guns were actually conversions of these & a heel bullet was laoded with both case & ball having a diameter of about .375 but for some cause they elected to name it according to bullet dia & simply rounded to two places & called it a .38 cal. Eventually the bullet size as well as the bores were dropped to use a .357" bullet which would put the grease grooves inside the case, but the .38 designation was not changed until introduction of the .357 Magnum. all makes "Perfect" sense.

gjw, yea use a grease gun. First measure the correct thread diameter for your left ear so the zert will fit properly. Just use enough grease to fill any voids which will be indicated when your shorts start to get slick. Let us know how much your velocity increases.

Lighten up, this was a joke thread!!!!

What? You didn't think my response was funny? Where is your sense of humor?

Circle Fly has lots of components to experiment with...

When I used to use a lubed wad in shotshells, I got away from lubing the bottom wad. I found that a 12g lubed felt wad between a pair of 3/8" fiber wads worked best. A buddy of made me a felt wad cutter out of a length of steel pipe that I could just punch out of some thick wool. (got it at Track of the Wolf many years ago)

I also "discovered" that I could make a cup out of paper plates and fold it around to act like a modern wad-cup. Groups were significantly improved, but, the time and patience required for this offset the fun factor in owning an old SxS.

The only lube recipe I found that worked across a wide range of applications was from the BPCR mailing list.

- 1 ring bol-wax
- 1 cup murphy's oil-soap
- 1 "block" of canning wax
- 1 stick of Crisco (the kind that come in the 3 pack)

I pan lube bullets for my 56-50 Spencer and 45-90 Winchester/1886 with this as well.