This article written by Steve Hurst of Tucker, GA, was published in #155 Sept/Oct 2001 issue of the Fouling Shot.
I have a love/hate relationship with Lee Liquid Alox (LLA). When I first tried LLA, I dearly loved the convenience of pouring the brown liquid over a batch of bullets, letting them dry and loading them. This convenience and the great saving in work it represents, lead to the purchase of bullet molds for this specific purpose. LLA has also saved the day several times when cheap gun show cast bullets proved to have poor lubricant. Overcoating with LLA prevented leading and permitted accurate shooting. I purchase LLA in bulk, and use it wherever possible.
The hate comes from a long series of gripes starting with the smell, which I detest. The strong odor and sol-vent base were not user friendly when I was living in an apartment. Second, LLA quickly gunks up the seating die, and the build-up can seat the bullets deeper. Every hundred rounds or so the die must be removed, disassembled and cleaned. Third, the nose of loaded rounds is covered with a sticky film that picks up dirt, or rubs off on other rounds. Unless removed, (at the cost of extra work), LLA gets into cartridge boxes and everywhere you don’t want it. Fourth, firing LLA lubed loads produces copious quantities of foul smelling smoke, in an indoor range this can make you most unpopular. Finally, in revolvers, LLA coats the gun with ugly black residue that must be scrubbed off. In automatics the breach and action become mired in black muck.
Finding a replacement for LLA has turned into a long crusade. You see, despite all the drawbacks, the stuff works amazingly well. It prevents leading and delivers decent accuracy over a range of loads in pistols, revolvers and rifles. It is not good for high accuracy requirements like benchrest, and it is sometimes not the best for high-pressure loads. But for plinking and casual shooting where 99% of ammunition is consumed, it delivers the goods. A replacement is going to have to deliver equivalent accuracy in the same loads to be acceptable. Accuracy must be constant, as I have no desire to clean a plinking pistol or rifle every 20 rounds; 200 rounds is more reasonable. I want to shoot all day and clean at home.
I decided to start with pistol loads, where most of my LLA has gone up in smoke. The pistol used in these tests is a S&W 686 “Custom Hunter” .357 magnum with a 6 1/2-inch barrel. Reworked by S&W to get everything in tune, it averages 2-inch 50-yard groups with match grade cast bullet ammunition or good jacketed loads. Control loads were fired at each range session to follow gun performance as well as to check Ransom Rest set-up.
The standard load I chose for these tests is the one I use the most in .38/.357 pistols. It is an H&G #50 148 grain BBWC over 3.5 grains of Bullseye in .38 cases. It averages 3.55-inch groups at 50 yards with a standard deviation (SD) of 0.63” when lubed with LLA. The bullets, of 6% antimony, 2% tin alloy, come from the mold 0.358”, are closely checked visually and not sized. For these tests, I used single lots of Remington and Federal cases and CCI 500 primers. The alloy is hard for the pressure and firing in a .357 chamber causes an extreme amount of gas blow-by. This demands excellent leading control; lubricants that work well with this load in guns chambered for .38 Special can lead severely when fired in the .357 chamber.
Testing starts with a clean barrel, an initial 12-shot warm up, followed by two 12-shot groups. This short test served to eliminate poor lubes before more serious testing. The real test is 132 rounds, 12 fouling shots followed by 10, 12-shot groups, fired as fast as possible. The gun gets very warm to duplicate shooting in an extended plinking session or pistol match.
Readers familiar with my article on lube theory (TCB 122-12) will not be surprised the first choice was castor wax (CW). By heating the bullets to just over the melting point of CW, I was able to apply a nice even coat to the .38 wadcutters. This provided a quick lesson in mechanics. The CW is hard so it bulged the cases and often prevented chambering. I tried softening the CW by mixing with oils. However the CW separated out on cooling, which gave flaky non-homogenous mixtures which did not adhere to the bullets. It was apparent the mechanical properties of the lubes were just as important as the shooting qualities, and would have to be considered first.
Out of dozens of possible components in CBA member Ralph Schneider’s compendium of cast bullet lubricants, the following ingredients were singled out for a close look: beeswax, castor wax, carnauba wax, lanolin, modulan, jojoba oil (a replacement for sperm oil), Dextron III automatic transmission fluid (ATF, also formulated to replace sperm oil), and soaps. Criteria were performance, stability, availability, and cost.I decided to first test soap based lubes as they have shown promise as lubricants. LLA is Alox 606-55 which is a calcium soap of oxidized hydrocarbons. It has greater heat stability than Alox 2138F used in the NRA formula lube.
I decided to work with sodium soaps, as calcium soaps are not water soluble. Sodium soaps have figured prominently in other lubricant formulas, so I was hopeful. Ivory bar soap is primarily sodium stearate, but contains considerable water to make it soft. I milled it into small pieces and dried it before use to get an accurate weight. All percentages in this article are by weight. The components were varied to yield a soft film on the bullets. Enough soap was used to make a permanent emulsion of the oil components. Water was added to each formula to achieve a cream-like consistency for bullet coating. The bullets were coated with about 0.6 grain of dried lube per bullet, about the same as a thin coat of LLA
Initial accuracy was impressive, 90% soap, 10% mod-ulan, shot 1.75” groups and 80% soap 20% Jojoba oil put them into 2.5”. The 10% modulan, 10% Jojoba 80%soap, and 11% ATF 89% soap were not far behind. The short tests were very promising, so 132 round tests were loaded. However, in the long tests, leading build-up was continuous with all the formulas. Accuracy degraded with groups enlarging to over 5” with severe leading.
What happened? Sodium grease was once a popular pistol lube. Sodium grease is a gel of oil and sodium soap. Perhaps the problem was that the percentage of soap was so much higher in these lubes than in the greases. I have not given up on soap based lubes, as many advantages were apparent. They can be water soluble, which makes application very pleasant and clean-up of the bullet noses consisted of a quick wipe with a wet rag. Initial groups were tantalizingly tiny, the smoke was neutral smelling, and most formulas adhered well to the bullets, but were not sticky. Potassium and lithium soaps would also be water soluble, and I intend to test them. Synthetic detergents are also under consideration.
I decided to test lubes using hot coating, which is almost as easy to use as a water based lube. I started with Lyman’s Orange Magic. The bullets were warmed to just above the melting point of the lube, placed in a plastic bag and the lube added (120 grains of lube to 200 bullets). Turning the bag over and over in gloved hands dis-tributed the lube and the bullets were turned out onto a wire screen to cool. Orange Magic hot coated bullets produced very consistent groups: Avg. 3.60” SD 0.22”. This lube is hard enough that the bullets are not overly sticky. If you don’t mind paying 3 dollars a stick, this would not be a bad choice. Any commercial lube that can be melt-ed without decomposition can be hot coated.
I wanted to see if it was possible to do better, so for-mulations of the ingredients were adjusted to give the correct physical properties of hardness and tack. Bullets were hot coated as above, the formulas performing best in the initial series were loaded for the following 132 round tests:
Beeswax 50% Lanolin 50%-Avg. 5.08” SD 1.09
Beeswax 50% Modulan 50%-Avg. 4.08” SD 1.57
Beeswax 80% Jojoba oil 20%-Avg. 3.10” SD 0.91
Beeswax 80% ATF 20%-Avg. 2.58” SD 0.57
The modulan lube threw regular fliers. Is it possible that this is an example of lube purging that Tom Gray has documented in rifles?
All these formulas gave slight leading in the barrel throat, which did not build up. The fouling shots from a clean bore had the same point of impact and group size, but were not included in the averages. With the number of groups fired, it is not possible to predict statistically which of the last two formulas is superior. However, considering the price difference between ATF and jojoba oil, the choice is obvious. These lubes have the correct consistency for use in lube-sizers.
This revolver, and several others I have tested, delivers their best grouping when a slight wash of leading is visible in the throat. Increasing the amount of lube can eliminate the leading, but this always gives slightly larger groups. The effect of group enlargement with heavy lube coatings can be demonstrated with LLA and many other lubes.
Please note I am not claiming that these lubes are any good for magnum pistol loads, I plan to test this next. Likewise, no claim is made for use in rifles. I have tested 90% beeswax/10% jojoba in rifles with good results, but this was without shooting side by side with control loads. I have not tested these lubes yet in any other guns, so I can not make any claims as general mid-range velocity pistol lubes. The % composition is not “magic” and may be adjusted to meet temperature and use requirements. The beeswax/ATF lube has a slight odor, while the beeswax/jojoba lube is almost odorless. The smoke from the beeswax/ATF lube has the familiar “hot transmission” odor, the smoke from beeswax/jojoba lube has a slight but neutral odor. Both are sticky, but not as sticky as LLA.
I did not get what I wanted, which was a water solu-ble replacement for LLA. It is sometimes hard to see where a series of experiments will lead, but I decided it was time to write this up and test some other ideas.
I want to thank Mustafa Curtis, Bill McGraw, Tom Gray, Peter Brown and all the other CBA members that contributed their thoughts by call and letter. Special thanks go to Ralph Schneider for his work compiling the bullet lubricant tests from eight journals and magazines.
(Editor’s Note: Ralph Schneider’s 28-page cast bullet lubricant list can be obtained by sending $4 to him at S 15200 County Road FF, Eleva, WI 54738.)
Addendum: Cleaning Beeswax
When making bullet lubes that contain beeswax, one is brought face to face with the fact that beeswax is a natural product. Harvested in the field, sometimes melted out of the combs in an old pot, crude beeswax frequently contains an assortment of bee parts, dust, pollen and just plain dirt. I have always cleaned up beeswax by melting it in a pot in a warm oven, turning the oven off and letting it cool slowly overnight. This allowed the dirt to settle to the bottom. By cooling the pot in the refrigerator, the wax shrank, and easily dropped out. By trimming off the bottom 1/16 inch, the heavy grit and trash was removed with little loss. However, it has always been apparent that this did not remove everything, some things were to slow to settle out.
Last week I set out to filter some beeswax in an attempt to get a cleaner product. A heated filter is a must, you can’t get the beeswax hot enough to make it work with a cold filter.
Invest in a large metal or glass funnel at the hardware store. Setting up in a 200° F oven worked well, and did not degrade the beeswax. After trying to melt the wax in the funnel, which was very slow, I melted the wax separately in a double boiler. Be sure not to get any water on the filter, it will prevent it from working.
Laboratory filter paper was painfully slow, so I tried coffee filters, which were much faster. Two coffee filters used together worked excellently, giving a pristine product. I could filter about a pint of melted wax before the fil-ters started to slow down to half of their original speed.
I was surprised when I filtered some of my previ-ously cleaned beeswax at the amount of trash on the filter. This was obviously a much better cleaning method. Even some “clean” beeswax sold for candle making con-tained dirt that I would not want to put down an expensive barrel.
Mama’s muffin tins made good moulds. After the wax cooled overnight a few minutes in the refrigerator made them release easily. Store your wax ingots in a plastic bag, as the sticky wax easily picks up dirt from anything it touches.
I have a love/hate relationship with Lee Liquid Alox (LLA). When I first tried LLA, I dearly loved the convenience of pouring the brown liquid over a batch of bullets, letting them dry and loading them. This convenience and the great saving in work it represents, lead to the purchase of bullet molds for this specific purpose. LLA has also saved the day several times when cheap gun show cast bullets proved to have poor lubricant. Overcoating with LLA prevented leading and permitted accurate shooting. I purchase LLA in bulk, and use it wherever possible.
The hate comes from a long series of gripes starting with the smell, which I detest. The strong odor and sol-vent base were not user friendly when I was living in an apartment. Second, LLA quickly gunks up the seating die, and the build-up can seat the bullets deeper. Every hundred rounds or so the die must be removed, disassembled and cleaned. Third, the nose of loaded rounds is covered with a sticky film that picks up dirt, or rubs off on other rounds. Unless removed, (at the cost of extra work), LLA gets into cartridge boxes and everywhere you don’t want it. Fourth, firing LLA lubed loads produces copious quantities of foul smelling smoke, in an indoor range this can make you most unpopular. Finally, in revolvers, LLA coats the gun with ugly black residue that must be scrubbed off. In automatics the breach and action become mired in black muck.
Finding a replacement for LLA has turned into a long crusade. You see, despite all the drawbacks, the stuff works amazingly well. It prevents leading and delivers decent accuracy over a range of loads in pistols, revolvers and rifles. It is not good for high accuracy requirements like benchrest, and it is sometimes not the best for high-pressure loads. But for plinking and casual shooting where 99% of ammunition is consumed, it delivers the goods. A replacement is going to have to deliver equivalent accuracy in the same loads to be acceptable. Accuracy must be constant, as I have no desire to clean a plinking pistol or rifle every 20 rounds; 200 rounds is more reasonable. I want to shoot all day and clean at home.
I decided to start with pistol loads, where most of my LLA has gone up in smoke. The pistol used in these tests is a S&W 686 “Custom Hunter” .357 magnum with a 6 1/2-inch barrel. Reworked by S&W to get everything in tune, it averages 2-inch 50-yard groups with match grade cast bullet ammunition or good jacketed loads. Control loads were fired at each range session to follow gun performance as well as to check Ransom Rest set-up.
The standard load I chose for these tests is the one I use the most in .38/.357 pistols. It is an H&G #50 148 grain BBWC over 3.5 grains of Bullseye in .38 cases. It averages 3.55-inch groups at 50 yards with a standard deviation (SD) of 0.63” when lubed with LLA. The bullets, of 6% antimony, 2% tin alloy, come from the mold 0.358”, are closely checked visually and not sized. For these tests, I used single lots of Remington and Federal cases and CCI 500 primers. The alloy is hard for the pressure and firing in a .357 chamber causes an extreme amount of gas blow-by. This demands excellent leading control; lubricants that work well with this load in guns chambered for .38 Special can lead severely when fired in the .357 chamber.
Testing starts with a clean barrel, an initial 12-shot warm up, followed by two 12-shot groups. This short test served to eliminate poor lubes before more serious testing. The real test is 132 rounds, 12 fouling shots followed by 10, 12-shot groups, fired as fast as possible. The gun gets very warm to duplicate shooting in an extended plinking session or pistol match.
Readers familiar with my article on lube theory (TCB 122-12) will not be surprised the first choice was castor wax (CW). By heating the bullets to just over the melting point of CW, I was able to apply a nice even coat to the .38 wadcutters. This provided a quick lesson in mechanics. The CW is hard so it bulged the cases and often prevented chambering. I tried softening the CW by mixing with oils. However the CW separated out on cooling, which gave flaky non-homogenous mixtures which did not adhere to the bullets. It was apparent the mechanical properties of the lubes were just as important as the shooting qualities, and would have to be considered first.
Out of dozens of possible components in CBA member Ralph Schneider’s compendium of cast bullet lubricants, the following ingredients were singled out for a close look: beeswax, castor wax, carnauba wax, lanolin, modulan, jojoba oil (a replacement for sperm oil), Dextron III automatic transmission fluid (ATF, also formulated to replace sperm oil), and soaps. Criteria were performance, stability, availability, and cost.I decided to first test soap based lubes as they have shown promise as lubricants. LLA is Alox 606-55 which is a calcium soap of oxidized hydrocarbons. It has greater heat stability than Alox 2138F used in the NRA formula lube.
I decided to work with sodium soaps, as calcium soaps are not water soluble. Sodium soaps have figured prominently in other lubricant formulas, so I was hopeful. Ivory bar soap is primarily sodium stearate, but contains considerable water to make it soft. I milled it into small pieces and dried it before use to get an accurate weight. All percentages in this article are by weight. The components were varied to yield a soft film on the bullets. Enough soap was used to make a permanent emulsion of the oil components. Water was added to each formula to achieve a cream-like consistency for bullet coating. The bullets were coated with about 0.6 grain of dried lube per bullet, about the same as a thin coat of LLA
Initial accuracy was impressive, 90% soap, 10% mod-ulan, shot 1.75” groups and 80% soap 20% Jojoba oil put them into 2.5”. The 10% modulan, 10% Jojoba 80%soap, and 11% ATF 89% soap were not far behind. The short tests were very promising, so 132 round tests were loaded. However, in the long tests, leading build-up was continuous with all the formulas. Accuracy degraded with groups enlarging to over 5” with severe leading.
What happened? Sodium grease was once a popular pistol lube. Sodium grease is a gel of oil and sodium soap. Perhaps the problem was that the percentage of soap was so much higher in these lubes than in the greases. I have not given up on soap based lubes, as many advantages were apparent. They can be water soluble, which makes application very pleasant and clean-up of the bullet noses consisted of a quick wipe with a wet rag. Initial groups were tantalizingly tiny, the smoke was neutral smelling, and most formulas adhered well to the bullets, but were not sticky. Potassium and lithium soaps would also be water soluble, and I intend to test them. Synthetic detergents are also under consideration.
I decided to test lubes using hot coating, which is almost as easy to use as a water based lube. I started with Lyman’s Orange Magic. The bullets were warmed to just above the melting point of the lube, placed in a plastic bag and the lube added (120 grains of lube to 200 bullets). Turning the bag over and over in gloved hands dis-tributed the lube and the bullets were turned out onto a wire screen to cool. Orange Magic hot coated bullets produced very consistent groups: Avg. 3.60” SD 0.22”. This lube is hard enough that the bullets are not overly sticky. If you don’t mind paying 3 dollars a stick, this would not be a bad choice. Any commercial lube that can be melt-ed without decomposition can be hot coated.
I wanted to see if it was possible to do better, so for-mulations of the ingredients were adjusted to give the correct physical properties of hardness and tack. Bullets were hot coated as above, the formulas performing best in the initial series were loaded for the following 132 round tests:
Beeswax 50% Lanolin 50%-Avg. 5.08” SD 1.09
Beeswax 50% Modulan 50%-Avg. 4.08” SD 1.57
Beeswax 80% Jojoba oil 20%-Avg. 3.10” SD 0.91
Beeswax 80% ATF 20%-Avg. 2.58” SD 0.57
The modulan lube threw regular fliers. Is it possible that this is an example of lube purging that Tom Gray has documented in rifles?
All these formulas gave slight leading in the barrel throat, which did not build up. The fouling shots from a clean bore had the same point of impact and group size, but were not included in the averages. With the number of groups fired, it is not possible to predict statistically which of the last two formulas is superior. However, considering the price difference between ATF and jojoba oil, the choice is obvious. These lubes have the correct consistency for use in lube-sizers.
This revolver, and several others I have tested, delivers their best grouping when a slight wash of leading is visible in the throat. Increasing the amount of lube can eliminate the leading, but this always gives slightly larger groups. The effect of group enlargement with heavy lube coatings can be demonstrated with LLA and many other lubes.
Please note I am not claiming that these lubes are any good for magnum pistol loads, I plan to test this next. Likewise, no claim is made for use in rifles. I have tested 90% beeswax/10% jojoba in rifles with good results, but this was without shooting side by side with control loads. I have not tested these lubes yet in any other guns, so I can not make any claims as general mid-range velocity pistol lubes. The % composition is not “magic” and may be adjusted to meet temperature and use requirements. The beeswax/ATF lube has a slight odor, while the beeswax/jojoba lube is almost odorless. The smoke from the beeswax/ATF lube has the familiar “hot transmission” odor, the smoke from beeswax/jojoba lube has a slight but neutral odor. Both are sticky, but not as sticky as LLA.
I did not get what I wanted, which was a water solu-ble replacement for LLA. It is sometimes hard to see where a series of experiments will lead, but I decided it was time to write this up and test some other ideas.
I want to thank Mustafa Curtis, Bill McGraw, Tom Gray, Peter Brown and all the other CBA members that contributed their thoughts by call and letter. Special thanks go to Ralph Schneider for his work compiling the bullet lubricant tests from eight journals and magazines.
(Editor’s Note: Ralph Schneider’s 28-page cast bullet lubricant list can be obtained by sending $4 to him at S 15200 County Road FF, Eleva, WI 54738.)
Addendum: Cleaning Beeswax
When making bullet lubes that contain beeswax, one is brought face to face with the fact that beeswax is a natural product. Harvested in the field, sometimes melted out of the combs in an old pot, crude beeswax frequently contains an assortment of bee parts, dust, pollen and just plain dirt. I have always cleaned up beeswax by melting it in a pot in a warm oven, turning the oven off and letting it cool slowly overnight. This allowed the dirt to settle to the bottom. By cooling the pot in the refrigerator, the wax shrank, and easily dropped out. By trimming off the bottom 1/16 inch, the heavy grit and trash was removed with little loss. However, it has always been apparent that this did not remove everything, some things were to slow to settle out.
Last week I set out to filter some beeswax in an attempt to get a cleaner product. A heated filter is a must, you can’t get the beeswax hot enough to make it work with a cold filter.
Invest in a large metal or glass funnel at the hardware store. Setting up in a 200° F oven worked well, and did not degrade the beeswax. After trying to melt the wax in the funnel, which was very slow, I melted the wax separately in a double boiler. Be sure not to get any water on the filter, it will prevent it from working.
Laboratory filter paper was painfully slow, so I tried coffee filters, which were much faster. Two coffee filters used together worked excellently, giving a pristine product. I could filter about a pint of melted wax before the fil-ters started to slow down to half of their original speed.
I was surprised when I filtered some of my previ-ously cleaned beeswax at the amount of trash on the filter. This was obviously a much better cleaning method. Even some “clean” beeswax sold for candle making con-tained dirt that I would not want to put down an expensive barrel.
Mama’s muffin tins made good moulds. After the wax cooled overnight a few minutes in the refrigerator made them release easily. Store your wax ingots in a plastic bag, as the sticky wax easily picks up dirt from anything it touches.