Friday, November 09, 2007

Lube Discoveries

Some time ago, Xavier said:

I have been accused of running my guns excessively greasy.
I might well be accused of the same thing. Usually my cleaning and lubing treatment includes some type of gun scrubber compound and Hoppe's No. 9 gun oil. And if you've ever used that stuff you know it can get to be pretty messy. I lube and rub down my guns with it after every time I take them out. I tried something different with the Dan Wesson when I got it, out of sheer necessity because I was out of cleaning stuff and they didn't have what I normally used. I'd heard good things about BreakFree CLP, so I thought I'd pick some up. I'll admit it's pretty good at cleaning, but I am now not so sure about its lubrication abilities, at least on the Razorback; the first couple of times I took it out I experienced a couple or failures to return to battery and it seemed the slide was catching on something as the pistol was going back into battery. I had not had any experience with CLP before and I remembered thinking that it seemed a lot drier than the Hoppe's oil. So I thought I'd go back to the way I've done it with my other guns, and I picked up some Hoppe's No. 9 oil and Birchwood Casey Gun Scrubber last week to try out. I ran the RZ-10 through the cleaning and oiling process with it and took it out Monday with some more Remington UMC and it worked just fine -- no kinds of issues whatsoever. Well, I did have a couple of issues of the slide locking back before I emptied the pistol, but that's about it, and the best I can tell that one was just user error. ;-) I was still getting low velocity with the UMC, though; it was still running about 100 fps slower than the advertised 1150 fps. I don't know if that's the gun or the ammo, but I do have now about 150 rounds of once-fired UMC nickel-plated brass and a fresh batch of CCI large pistol primers. I've had good luck with the CCI primers before vs. the Remington primers. Should be fun to see what happens. I'll be developing some more loads this weekend.