• This community needs YOUR help today. We rely 100% on Supporting Memberships to fund our efforts. With the ever increasing fees of everything, we need help. We need more Supporting Members, today. Please invest back into this community. I will ship a few decals too in addition to all the account perks you get.



    Sign up here: https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/account/upgrades

bore butter

Muzzleloading Forum

Help Support Muzzleloading Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

cotcrab

32 Cal.
Joined
Feb 21, 2018
Messages
45
Reaction score
1
Hi I've been having problems with my Vincent rifle. I clean in between shots ( a damp patch and the nipple cleared). After 15 shots their is a blockage between the breach and the barrel. We normally add a little 4f powder inside the drum to clear the blockage. When I get home I clean the gun with hot soapy water and use boar butter to coat the inside and outside of the barrel. I'm being advised to not use boar butter as a final rust preventative. To use Ballistol or Hoppes for black powder. Any suggestions. thanks
 
I've used it in the past, and I have two tubes of it, but I would not use it as a rust preventative when you have better choices as those mentioned.
Bore Butter is effected by the cold and heat as well.
You seem to have a fouling problem where the fouling is being pushed down into the breech area and blocking the flash port.
It's possible the Bore Butter could be part of the problem.
On another thread someone suggested that after your first shot, pour you next load down the bore, and then run your damp patch down the bore to swab it of fouling. Thus the fouling settles on top of the powder charge and not into the breech and flash port.
Then run you patched ball down onto the powder.
I've been going to try this, but haven't yet.
Sounds like it would work though.
 
I've never had a single day's problem with bore butter in over 40 years. However, I use Slip2000 extreme weapons lube on all my MLs and centerfire pistols as a rust preventative. I usually use bore butter after I've completely cleaned my ML barrels with hot water along with a little Murphy's Oil Soap, I then run several patches to make sure I get any hidden crud out of barrels. I then run clean patches after the bore butter sits a day, and then use the Slip2000.
 
I use it in the barrel (liberally). I'm being told that's the cause of the blockage. The bees wax is hardening and building up by the breach.
 
cotcrab said:
I use it in the barrel (liberally). I'm being told that's the cause of the blockage. The bees wax is hardening and building up by the breach.

I would think after the first boom the wax is immediately melted and launched forward. I believe you may be pushing crud into the breach as you swab between shots myself? I would not change the routine at all EXCEPT to swab after the powder is poured down for the next shot (as suggested above). If that fixes yer issue you know its not bore butter.

I dont suggest Bore butter for a rust preventative myself. WD-40 and/or Barricade will do that. But if its been working and yer happy that's fine too. Its so dry here I think I could get away with nothing after a good dried barrel :haha: Last I saw humidity was 8%. :shocked2:
 
Jimbo47 said:
I've used it in the past, and I have two tubes of it, but I would not use it as a rust preventative when you have better choices as those mentioned.
Bore Butter is effected by the cold and heat as well.
You seem to have a fouling problem where the fouling is being pushed down into the breech area and blocking the flash port.
It's possible the Bore Butter could be part of the problem.
On another thread someone suggested that after your first shot, pour you next load down the bore, and then run your damp patch down the bore to swab it of fouling. Thus the fouling settles on top of the powder charge and not into the breech and flash port.
Then run you patched ball down onto the powder.
I've been going to try this, but haven't yet.
Sounds like it would work though.
Cant you have a accidental fire from hot embers if you pour powder down without swabing?
 
cotcrab said:
Cant you have a accidental fire from hot embers if you pour powder down without swabing?

Is it technically possible. YES
Is it likely? Not unless you are speed loading, which you cant do when swabbing anyhow. I've done things with various methods over the years, at first I never swabbed while shooting. I never had a charge go off from a hot ember. My latest method, before a recent change, was to swab as suggested AFTER the powder charge is dropped. It works.
Just give the bore a minute or so to settle after a shot (Only a minute or two, it doesn't take 5 minutes) Then drop your next charge
 
Cant you have a accidental fire from hot embers if you pour powder down without swabing?

That is a subject of much cussin' and discussin' here and around the camp fire.
Answer is probably "yes". But possibilities are very small. Nontheless, that is why we practice good safety techniques. Like keeping our face away from the muzzle and not pointing at anything but the sky between taking shots on the line.
 
I blow down the barrel after shots, many think it’s an unsafe practice. So... when you swap do so with the cock on half cock. Make sure you hear air whooshing out the nippleand just as important when you draw the rod up listen to air sucking in.
 
When you swab your cleaning patch should go down the bore fairly loose so it doesn't push the fowling into the breech. Then when you pull the jag with swab back out, it bunches up and pulls the fouling out. I have a still use BB on occasion. While I believe it's not the best lube, it's not the worse either and does work. You should not be using it liberally, lightly is good and don't depend on it to prevent rust. You could get away with it short term or in a very dry environment like here maybe.
 
cotcrab said:
I use it in the barrel (liberally). I'm being told that's the cause of the blockage. The bees wax is hardening and building up by the breach.

I'm pretty sure bore butter no longer uses beeswax, (if it ever did)it is paraffin based.

The question I have is, do you also use bore butter on your shooting patches? this alone could contribute to your problem.

There are far better products out there than bore butter.

A simple solution to the fouling problem in the breech it to squirt some alcohol down the barrel followed by a cleaning patch. (Every X number of shots)
The alcohol will loosen and dissolve the fouling so it can be pushed out the vent clearing the channel. then it evaporates leaving the barrel bone dry for the next reload.....Just don't use alcohol with much if any water in it.
 
cotcrab said:
Hi I've been having problems with my Vincent rifle. I clean in between shots ( a damp patch and the nipple cleared). After 15 shots their is a blockage between the breach and the barrel.

Dollars to donuts you're using a tight fitting patch/jag combo to swab between shots. All that's doing is pushing the fouling back down the barrel to create the blockage.

Switch to a thinner cleaning patch or slightly smaller jag. It should be pretty loose going down the barrel. Once it bottoms out, give the rod a little twist as you start it to bind the cleaning patch a little, requiring some effort to draw it back out of the bore. Poof! All that nasty fouling comes back up out the bore rather than packing into the bottom.
 
Old post on I have seen over the years.

I obviously borrowed it.

You have no idea how much humor has come out of Ox-Yoke's claims on the
1000 Shot Plus lube. To the point where some of us now call them
Ox-Joke. With any of my three BP rifles "an historic feat" is getting the
4th ball down the bore without resorting to a bigger hammer.
I'll run you through the full story since the snow has started to fall.
Lets go back to the early 1980's.

A shooter/buckskinner by the name of Young, living in California, went
to the range one day and forgot his patch lube. In utter desperation he
whips out a tube of Chap-Stick and smears it on a few patches. Lo &
Behold it worked better than the lube he had been using. Several of his
buddies tried his idea and reported it worked well. So Young then
tracked down the source of Chap- Stick which is a common lip balm
formulation that has been floating around since the late 19th century.
Chap-Stick is petrolatum (petroleum jelly) with 5% cetyl alcohol and
water. The cetyl alcohol acting as the emulsifyer. With the cetyl
alcohol the water forms minute beads within the petrolatum. Without the
cetyl alcohol you can't get the water to mix in any way with the
petrolatum. Huge quantities of cetyl alcohol are used in the production
of PVC emulsion resins used in kitchen flooring. (My old job was as an
R&D
Tech. on these resins.) The petrolatum is the moisture barrier and
carrier for a topical agent used to soothe chapped lips. The water
emulsified into the petrolatum reduces the drag of the "stick" when you
apply it to your lips and acts as the moisturizing agent. Young then
finds a place to buy Chap-Stick in bulk and packages it as Young Country
Arms 103 Lube. That his lube and Chap->Stick are identical in every
respect, right down to the color, suggested he simply bought from the
makers of Chap-Stick in bulk quantities. Now Ted Bottomly had started
Ox-Yoke and made pre-cut patches and packs of patch cloth. He wanted a
patch lube to round out his line. He bought the first Ox-Yoke lube from
Young. When I first saw them I was at the late C.P. Wood's house in West
Virginia. Woody was looking at a 4 ounce container
of Young Country 103 and a 3 ounce container of Ox-Yoke's patch lube.
Both were identical in every respect, including color. You paid the same
price for 3 ounces of Ox-Yoke's lube as you paid for 4 ounces of Young's
lube. The logical conclusion would be that Ox-Yoke was buying from Young
and the missing ounce was Ox-Yoke's profit on the deal.

Both were advertising their respective lubes in the magazines. Young
advertised that you could fire a hundred rounds without wiping the bore
with his lube. Three months later, Ox-Yoke would advertise that when you
used their lube you could fire 200 rounds without wiping the bore. The 3
month lag time in the mags being the lag time in getting adds scheduled.
This went on, each one upping the ante, so to speak.
Those of us connected with the Buckskin Report discussed this in letters
and thought it a great joke.

The others in the field at that time were Hodgdon with their "Spit-Patch"
which was nothing more than beeswax emulsified in water with a soap.
Then there was T/C Maxi-Lube which was nothing more than the same
petroleum grease they used to grease the bearings in their machines.
Blue and Grey products was selling an automotive wheel bearing grease
that had been pigmented, not dyed, blue. I receieved several letters from
Doc Carlson. He was seeing BP muzzleloaders come into his shop with
balls or slugs stuck in the bore just ahead of the powder charge. You
could not pull these projectiles by any normal method.
He would have to remove the breech plugs, pull the charge and beat them
out of the bore, toward the muzzle with a heavy rod and a hammer. He
described the presence of a black tar-like film in the bore where the
projectiles had been frozen in place. The common thread in this being
that the shooter had used one of the "petroleum-based" lubes. I had to
explain to Doc that the petroleum greases were nothing more than
petroleum lubricating oils that had been "bodied" by the addition of
metallic soaps such as calcium or cadmium stearate. With a petroleum
lubricating oil, or grease, anytime you heat them to a high temperature
in the presence of sulfur you get asphalt. The way asphalts were
produced was to take crude oil and sulfur in an autoclave. Heat the
mixture to 600 degrees for about 8 hours
and you had road tar. Which is about what was happening in the gun.
Since the repackaged Chap-Stick was a petroleum wax it did not form
asphalt with sulfur and high temperatures. I then wrote an article for
the Backwoodsman magazine and compared the behavior of the two Chap-Stick
lubes to the behavior of sperm whale oil when it had been used in black
powder guns.

Well, Old Ted Bottomly jumped right onto that one. three months later
he starts advertising that his lube is "all-natural, non-petroleum" and
authentic, using what our ancesters had used. At that point I figured
his parents were to Christian to call him ******* so they settled for
Bottomly. By about 1984, Bottomly and Young had a falling out over
pricing. The one ounce shy thing with Ox-Yoke pushed most of the
customers to Young's lube. Same thing, same price but more of it with
Young Country 103. And by this time we were up to 800 rounds between
swabbings. Technology marches on. Bottomy came out with his first Wonder
Lube. Years of research went into this lube, or so he claimed. Now at
this time Ox-Yoke was located in West Suffield, CT. A short time later I
was searching the drugstore shelves looking for petrolatum-based skin
care products or salves that I coulde repackage and become a millionaire
. I spotted this tube of something
called "Mineral Ice". Menthol in petrolatum. Made by a Dermatone
Laboratories located in Suffield, CT. Out comes the map. just by a
mere coincidence both companies were located just across the river from
each other. This of course raised doubts as to the "years of research"
comments out of Bottomly. The new Wonder Lube went into the lab. Proved
to be mineral oil, paraffin wax, a yellow dye and oil of wintergreen. A
book at work on fats, waxes and oils nailed this one down to a common
chest rub preparation for those with head colds who could not tolerate
camphorated oil. Again it was billed as "all-natural and non-petroleum".
Never mind that paraffin wax comes from paraffinic crude oils and mineral
oil comes from napthenic crude oils, the yellow dye and the oil of
wintergreen should convince anybody that it is all-natural and
non-petroleum. Given the wax and oil, I simply refer to this type of lube
as a remanufactured vaseline. With the yellow dye the rubes will swear
it is beeswax.

One thing about con artists is that they are never content to leave a
con artest for any length of time. In 1990, Bottomly comes out with a
new version called 1000 Shot Plus lube. High-technology now made
possible a lube that eliminated fouling, eliminated the need to clean and
would totally stop bore corrosion. Bottomly searched the world for this
modern technology and found it in Germany after years of searching. This
advance in this lube was made possible by this
secret micronizing agent. It gave the lube a micron particle size that
made all of this advancement possible. At that point his chest thumping
ego trip gave away the formula. This secret micronizing agent is no real
secret and has been around for over 100 years. It is nothing more than a
fossil wax mined in Germany. The same time of wax used to be mined in
Utah as Utah Wax but the mine closed for lack of business.
Paraffin wax is a hard brittle wax that forms huge crystals. When you
look at a block of paraffin wax sold for food canning you see lines on
the surface of the blocks of wax. Those are the lines denoting crystal
size. It had been found that if you added this fossil wax to paraffin
wax it would reduce the size of these crystals, though nowhere near a
micron in size. Paraffin wax was limited in which skin care and salve
formulations it could be used in because of the macro-crystallinty of it.
This made it unsuited to preparations where hardness and brittleness
were objectionable. By using the fossiol wax addition the paraffin wax
could replace more expensive waxes in these products. But when you lay
this type of Techno-Nonsense on a bunch of ignorant rube BP shooters they
will beat a path to your door, wallet in hand.

Now, to get back to an historic feat of 3 shots without swabbing the
bore. The problem with this type of lube is that as long as the surface
temperature of the bore is above the melting point of the wax, about 40
to 45 C, the fouling deposited by the combustion of the powder will slide
off the metal when pressure is applied to it. When the surface
temperature of the bore is below the melting point of the wax it will act
as an adhesive and hold the fouling to the surface. The unburned
charcaol in the powder fouling will adsorb most of the mineral oil
present in the lube. This turns it into an oily sludge that simply
builds up in the breech with repeated loading of the gun. After a few
rounds are fired in a flinter you have the oily sludge being blown out of
the vent which then coats the flint and frizzen. Lubricated flints
strike no sparks.
Now for the real punch line. With the addition of the micronizing agent
they doubled the amount of dye used so the new lube was more orange in
color, compared to the lemon yellow of the previous version, and they
doubled the amount of oil of wintergreen. Convince the rubes that it is
now even more natural. During the past few years there has been much
bitching about the quality of Ox-Joke's pre-lubed patches. I have seen
packs in the store where the lube had turned hard and brown. The mineral
oil migrates out of the paraffin wax into the low density polyethlene
used in the bags. This makes the lube hard and brittle. It goes back to
paraffin wax properties. With these an historic feat is getting the
second ball down the barrel without wiping. Ox-Joke supplies T/C with
Bore Butter which is only a slight modification
of Ox-Joke's standard formula.

Remember the dbate about blowing down the barrel on the message boards.
My off line joke was that as long as you use the repackaged Chap-Stick as
a patch lube you would not get chapped lips from blowing down a cold
barrel.

Then their was Uncle Mike's Apple Green patch lube. Another paraffin
wax/mineral oil lube with methylsalicin in it. Nothing more than a
repackaged arthritis salve. I can tell you that is was very effective on
a knee suffereing degenerative joint disease. So if you are going to go
out in those North Woods in winter weather to hunt the elusive whitetail
you ought to take all three lubes along. Prevent chapped lips, take care
of chest colds and arthritic joints from all of the hoofing through the
snow. No reason for you to return home in anything less than the best of
health in spite ot the weather. Might be a good idea to take along one of
the ascorbic acid-based powders since that is vitamin C. Then Goex's
sugar-based powder might make an emergency trail food.

I joke with Dixon that it is bad enough we have to deal with the ATF,
what next with these products, the Food and Drug Administration too???
Well, time to go sit out on the deck for a smoke and listen to the snow
flakes fall.
 
Great post. :applause: I normally just skip long posts but this one was worth reading. It validates my aversion to commercial ml products. I think I tried Bore Butter somewhere along the line but must not have liked it because I discontinued using and discarded the remainder.
You said:
compared the behavior of the two Chap-Stick
lubes to the behavior of sperm whale oil when it had been used in black
powder guns.

I'm not clear on what you think of the behavior of whale oil as used in bp ml rifles/guns. FWIW, I use a combo beeswax/whale oil as my current patch lube. I bought some of the whale oil from Brownell's back in the '70s when it was still legal. Never used until recently. The cans were rusting away from the outside and I needed to use or discard. So far, very pleased with this lube.
 
Back
Top