doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Black powder shooter question

Can't help but be Brent the smart azz liberal...

Nobody plays the smart azz card like you, Frank. And you do it so well while not having the first clue of what you are talking about. You are a real card shark for sure.

I'm a little late to the party, but I've shot BP from around 1971. Now a days it's mostly in SxS cartridge guns. Here in Michigan we have at least three different SxS Shoots, April - Freeland, May - my shoot at Lapeer, and June at Grand Blanc. In the past many times I shot BP- 1oz 12ga loads. 80grs of 2 or 3F, nitro card, 1/2" cushion wad and OS card. No lube. Usually a 125 to 150 shots in one day. Were the barrels dirty - ya. A little soapy water cleaned them right up. WD-40 after to get rite of any moisture, then good ol Rem-oil. Never had a problem with rust. Brent, did you shoot pistol down at Friendship in the 70's ? There was a master pistol shooter back then with that name.

Paul, your loads and cleaning routine sound remarkably like mine.

As for pistol shooting I am only a master klutz with a handgun. I've been to Friendship 2x, both in the last 15 yrs or so. But I'm a rifle shooter who dabbles in shotguns.

Just wondered every time I see your web name. I made master class at pistol, barely. I was really in over my head because most those guys shot pistols everyday where as I did it for a month or so before the fall shoot at Friendship. We also shot trap in the evening. One year I shot the rifle silhouette match and did quite well. I haven't been there for 20 years, but it was lots of fun. I forgot to mention that when cleaning the barrels after so many shots I pour some soapy water down the barrels and use a tornado brush first to loosen the fouling. Same with my muzzle loading revolvers. A good cleaning with hot soapy water, clean hot water, and Rem-oil. Never had a problem with rust.

Seasoning of steaks is totally different than use of non-petroleum lubes like Thompson Center Natural Lube 1000 to season a rifle bore. But I totally understand that there are some people who are just too stupid to do it correctly, and also too stupid to refrain from bore cleaning products and techniques that simply remove it.

It works... absolutely and 100%... if you aren't so full of yourself to not follow simple instructions. My black powder guns often showed after-rust with my prior cleaning, careful drying, and petroleum bore oiling techniques. Unlike competition guns regularly used for practice and shoots, hunting guns are often stored for months without use. The same guns never showed a trace of after-rust after switching to Thompson Center Natural Lube 1000 over 20 years ago, following the simple instructions I related earlier. Even better, I can come home dog tired after hunting all day and killing, gutting, and dragging a deer, and put off rifle cleaning for a day or two with no worries. Once, I simply forgot to clean my dirty flintlock rifle for over two weeks after shooting it while hunting. Despite that accidental neglect, there wasn't a trace of rust, pitting, or even barrel browning loss from the black powder residue in the bore and around the pan and flash hole.

That's enough proof for me. And no pompous know-it-all anti-lead ammunition ass... especially one brainless enough to fail to understand that an eagle with a huge, way beyond lethal blood level overdose of lead poisoning, could not be healthy and strong enough to fly and perch on a tree limb, is going to convince me to deny what my cleaning patch and my own eyes prove is no mere myth.

After reading one of Keith's post, I tried Thompson Center Natural Lube 1000 plus Bore Butter.

There is a gun restorer out in the valley who I visited recently. He works on only muzzle loaders and does a lot of Civil War shoots...member of a Virginia cavalry unit. I asked him about "seasoning." He looked askance and sort of implied it was an "urban legend" and he had some doubts about this. But it doesn't take away from the fact that natural lube just looks and feels right on my one muzzle loader, works beautifully and I'll continue to use it.

Argo, if you like the stuff, no reason not to use it. But if you go to a national or world championship and see what the shooters there use - you will see gun oil. Regular gun oil. Even, most especially, those shooting high-condition originals in the $5digit range all use gun oil. Multi-time World and National Champions ALL use gun oil. These are midrange and Creedmoor shooters for whom accuracy is of the highest importance out to 1000 yds.

I am not surprised that our Willie goes for urban and internet myths. Historically, he has had a hard time differentiating fact from fiction on many, many topics here over the years.

I realize that BrentD is rather invested in denigrating just about anything I say. He and his spineless friends even resorted to internet doxxing and other cowardly forms of internet, mail, and phone intimidation in an attempt to silence me. Because he is a gutless lying piece of shit, what he will NOT do here is provide actual examples of this false assertion that said, in his words:



I have already noted my own personal experience with black powder cleaning and bore protection products and techniques. I have no doubt that a good cleaning followed by thorough drying of the bore, followed by most any quality gun oil will do a decent job of protecting that bore in a gun that is used regularly.

But what bothered me in the early years of my flintlock rifle and percussion revolver shooting was this. No matter how thoroughly I cleaned and scrubbed with patches, bronze brushes, very hot water, and detergents... no matter how carefully I dried them, typically using clean dry patches while the barrel was still hot, and then even setting the barrel next to my gas furnace plenum to drive off any residual moisture... and then using various gun oils... I would still get a small amount of rust on a cleaning patch when I wiped the bore after months of storage.

I did not have this reddish iron oxide deposit in the bores of my smokeless powder firearms that were stored in the same safe under identical conditions using the same gun oils. The amount of red oxide on the patch was never much, but it bothered me because I knew it represented small traces of steel oxidation in my bores. Even a trace of rust on a patch is evidence of microscopic damage to a bore.

I read the information that Thompson Center originally included with their Natural Lube 1000 product, about the problems shooters have had with corrosion in their black powder guns, and their research that claimed the problem was not nearly so bad until something happened. That was the widespread use of petroleum based oils for bore and patch lubes after Col. Edwin Drake developed oil well drilling in 1859. Prior to that point in history, shooters used various vegetable and animal fat based lubes.

I decided to give it a try, and followed their instructions for seasoning the bore, and most importantly, maintaining that protective seasoning. That's very important. If you carefully season a cast iron skillet, and then vigorously scrub that hard-earned seasoning with Dawn Dish Detergent and steel wool, it isn't going to work. And some know-it-all like BrentD will tell you that you can't season a skillet, and call it an urban myth.

That is the only change I made in my cleaning and care of my black powder guns. Now I can clean a rifle in mid-January after flintlock deer season ends, and confidently put it away until the following November, when I pull it out to check my sighting before hunting. Since the switch to the Thompson Center Natural Lube 1000 for my round ball patches and as a bore protection lube, I have not seen a trace of after-rusting on my cleaning patch.

If BrentD feels that is fiction or myth, that's OK. But all should remember that BrentD has such brilliance and wonderful powers of observation that, during a debate about lead poisoning from lead ammunition in raptors, he was clinging to a junk science report that cited an eagle that was brought in to a raptor rehabilitation facility. This very sick eagle was found perched on a tree limb. The bird allegedly succumbed to lead poisoning from a blood lead level that was way beyond a lethal dose of lead. Yet miraculously, this fatally sick eagle was somehow able to fly, and had the strength and coordination to perch on a tree limb. Here is a list of lead poisoning symptoms from the soarraptors.org website:

https://soarraptors.org/rehabilitating-birds-with-lead-exposure/

Here is another source of lead poisoning symptoms in birds:

The clinical signs include weakness (which can be profound), altered mentation, lack of appetite, paralysis of the legs, circling, tremors of the body and head, droopy posture, seizures, blindness, excessive thirst or droppings, regurgitation, weight loss, blood in the droppings, pale color of mucous membranes due to anemia and dark coloring to the droppings or excessively wet droppings.

Remember, the fatally sick eagle in the junk science article had nearly off the charts blood lead levels... way above a lethal dose. It was so sick it couldn't be saved despite the "alleged" efforts of raptor rehabilitators. I say "alleged" because I don't believe a lot of the obvious non-peer reviewed anti-lead ammunition bullshit that passes for actual science. Yet BrentD (and Larry Brown) couldn't explain or acknowledge that there is no way in hell that a bird that profoundly and acutely sick could fly and perch on a tree limb.

Sometimes you just have to use your brain to see through agenda driven bullshit. Of course, that assumes that you even have a brain.

Of course, this is the same deceptive mentality that can read an unedited transcript of a call between Trump and the Ukranian President, with his foreign minister on the call... and see a quid pro quo, bribery, and extortion... when it isn't in the transcript and the Ukranian President and his foreign minister assure us in their own words that it didn't happen. Some people are just sick, and they can never be made right.