Revised lube

My original lube [12]; Tallow:Olive Oil in a 1:2 ratio, that I used last shoot, had some problems with the stiffness of the lubed patches and the difficulty separating them.

Lube 12

I've now amended the lube recipe to create lube [13]; Tallow:Olive Oil in a 1:4 ratio. After 20 seconds nuking in the microwave, the old lube was melted and the additional Olive Oil was added.

Lube 13

Although liquid after the nuking, we'll see how it looks after 24 hours of cooling down. I have also lubed up some new 0.015 Jeff Taylor patches with the new recipe, and also relubed those lube 12 patches left over from the last shoot.

The other reason for further developing this recipe was due to the ease of cleaning that I found after the last shoot. Using just hot water and a patch on a nylon brush, the soot from the barrel was gone within seconds. No hard scrubbing needed!

Different lube used

For today's trip to the range, I used lube mixture 12 - Tallow:Olive Oil in ratio 1:2. This mixture sets to a fairly soft solid, but stiffens up on the patches. I found I could not seat the ball in the top of the muzzle without the lubed patch pushing it back out. Also noticed that the patches were hard to separate from each other. On the other hand, cleaning afterwards was VERY fast with hardly any soot to come out of the bottom of the barrel. Recommended lube mix!

Highest 10 count

Although only shooting an 87.0 I did shoot my best ever 10 count with 3 scoring shots. The two fliers in the white were due to me snatching the trigger after being on aim for too long.

The group is slight too low again but I think this is correctable with lots of practise. The rest of the setup for this card was 9gns Swiss No.1, 0.015 JT patches and Hornady .350 balls.

Stats

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Running average: 80.88
Detail score 87.0

Barrel count: 262

Cards: 20

New lubes

Off to the range in a few hours to try out some new patch lube recipes:

[12] a thinner recipe than previously tried; Tallow:Olive Oil in a 1:2 ratio. The previous version had the ratio reversed and the patches were really too stiff to use after a week.

[9] using a Beeswax:Olive Oil mix in a 1:2 ratio. The beeswax thickens up the olive oil such that the mixture solidifies after cooling. Depending on results, I may loosens up this recipe by using a lower ratio of beeswax to olive oil, perhaps 1:5.

[6] a multimix recipe of Beeswax:Lanolin:Neatsfoot Oil in a 2:1:2 ratio. This is basically the above recipe [9] with the addition of Lanolin. Again this mixture solidifies after cooling and I may try a thinner version with more oil added.

We'll see how it goes!