Shenandoah lube test

[Canute Rex]

I ordered some Shenandoah Valley lube, the stuff that is supposed to be a replacement for Lehigh Valley Lube. Last weekend I had a chance to try it out. I compared it to an oddball lube I have been using recently, citrus hand cleaner. Be advised, this is all very subjective.

Shenandoah Vally Lube (SVL) comes in a glass bottle with a plastic flip-up cap. This means no dispensing by squeezing, of course, but more of a shaking motion like soy sauce. It has the look, consistency, and smell of diluted Pine-Sol. I have read the patent application for Lehigh and it mentions pine oil, so no surprise there. Permatex hand cleaner and its competitors should be familiar to all of you - orange container, creamy white product, orange scent. I bought a convenient squeeze bottle for the range.

I was shooting my 50 cal flint rifle, which has a Colerain barrel, with a .495 ball and a .020 patch, on top of 65 grains of FFg Goex.

First I tried ten shots with wet SVL patches. Ramming force stayed easy, increasing slightly towards the end. I ran a couple of SVL soaked patches down and they came up with greenish-black residue, but not huge amounts.

I then wiped out the barrel with a few spit patches and dry patches and fired another ten balls lubed with Permatex Fast Orange Hand Cleaner (PHC). Again, ramming force stayed easy, but it seemed even easier that the SVL. After a few shots with the SVL the ball seemed to catch a bit just before it seated. With the PHC the ball almost seemed to be sucked down the barrel, it was so smooth. The barrel cleaned up easily, without the usual amounts of jet black crud. I have shot with PHC before, and it worked well consistently.

Accuracy was limited by the reality of yours truly pointing the rifle, but seemed unaffected by the choice of lube.

I have a couple of bottles of SVL and I'll cheerfully use it up - it seems like fine stuff. In the long run I'll probably go with citrus hand cleaner. It is a significantly cheaper and readily available everywhere. Both products have the benefit of a pleasant smell.

The SVL is available from a company called Fort Chambers: http://www.fortchambers.com/Products/Accessories/accessories.html

Happy shooting...

Canute

[Mad Monk]

It has the look, consistency, and smell of diluted Pine-Sol. I have read the patent application for Lehigh and it mentions pine oil, so no surprise there.

Canute

Canute,

The patent on the Lehigh Valley lube leaves out an important point.
The starting point in the lube is a pine by-product known as tall oil.  This is a mixture of pine oil and pine resin.  The ratio of pine oil to resin is critical to the performance of the lube.  This provides the correct amount of "lubricity" in the lube.  The tall oil is then partially saponified.  The chemical reaction control and degree is critical to the performance of the lube.

The guy who came up with the replacement did something of an end run on Tom's patent.  So the replacement lube is not exactly the same as Tom DeCare's version.  The performance suffers as a result.

When Ox-Yoke took over the production of Tom's lube they cut the amount of tall oil used but not the amount of caustic used in the saponification so the final pH was that high that it would damage boiled oil finishes on a gun by attacking the boiled oil as if were an fatty material being saponified.  Lyman's Butch's Bore Shine also exhibited a very high pH when I checked some of the first batch into the gun shop.  Using a caustic with a high pH value to gain the "lubricity" is a gross error when it comes to rifle finish damage.

I suspect that the replacement SVL might use only pine oil and no resin which would then infringe on Tom's patent.

I may take a look at the Permatex product to see what the base is.  Citrus oil is rapidly taking over in a lot of cleaning products as it is a good degreaser and a powerful germ killer.  It is also starting to show up in oil finishes as a solvent/diluent in place of mineral spirits.

E. Ogre

[Daryl]

Thanks Canute - interesting and what I wanted to see - test might have been improved if a direct comparrison with LHV could have been done.

When I see it available here, if that every happens, I'll give it a test myself.

Good points, Ogre - I was having second thoughts about orange juice in my bore - don't know why, but it seemed wrong - guess I was wrong- heh, heh. As a cleaner, I have a Litre pump-top orange container of Go-Jo - which is a citrus cleaner with pumice - that ought to toughen loading a bit - HA! - just kidding - would work as a bore polisher though?

[hanshi]

Just curious but in the discussion the mentions of PH and citrus got me to wondering.  Since citrus is acidic and acids corrode metal, is there any chance citrus juices and products could damage a barrel?

[Mad Monk]

Just curious but in the discussion the mentions of PH and citrus got me to wondering.  Since citrus is acidic and acids corrode metal, is there any chance citrus juices and products could damage a barrel?

Citric acid should cause no damage to the bore.  I would remind you that we have seen various powders based on the mixture of ascorbic acid and potassium nitrate for over 20 years now.

E. Ogre

[hanshi]

Appreciate your response.  Let's hear it for good, plain, old fashion black.

[billd]

 A question for the guys using orange hand cleaner, go-jo, etc... Are you using it in cream form or mixing it with water?

Thanks,
Bill

[Daryl]

The go-jo I use has pumice in it - not good for a patch lube - kinds gritty, but great for gettting the grease and BP fouling off your hands.  It comes out the spout as an almost white cream.

[Canute Rex]

Bill, I use the non-pumice type of hand cleaner at full strength. I put a little pea-sized bloop of it in the middle of the (precut) patch, fold it in half, and the lube spreads evenly over the whole surface. I also run a couple of hand cleaner coated cleaning patches down the bore right after shooting and it makes the hot water wash that much faster.

One thing I did notice about the citrus content - when I removed a ball from my ball block I saw that the oxidation had been cleaned away.

Daryl (or anybody) - send me some LHV and I'll be glad to give it the most rigorous testing. Ah, the pursuit of scientific truth is so demanding....

Ogre - I know the MSDS for Permatex hand cleaner is online, if you want to scope the ingredients.

Canute

[Daryl]

Me?? Send some of my precious LHV across this beautiful country - thanks but no thanks, I'll continue testing it myself -

[JCKelly]

Might mention that soaps, all ALL of them, have salt in them. Good ol' sodium chloride. Process guys love it, makes the soap flow thru their piping. Just like salt makes a garden slug flow.

Add citric acid & you have an excellent cleaner, just don't squirt some in your stainless sink & leave on vacation. Will corrode holes in stainless steel, e.g. 304 (18%Cr 8%Ni). I believe the Lemon Joy people deny that their product will eat right thru a stainless sink, given some reasonable time.

Soap today is not what soap was back, say, in the 1960's. At that time the makers neutralized the excess caustic using phosphoric acid.

Environmental types (and a few surviving fish) objected, as the phosphorus was a great fertilizer & grew lots of algae in our lakes, ponds, etc. Algae used up all the oxygen when it rotted. Fish need oxygen.
 
Phosphoric acid is a corrosion inhibitor, for steel. Like, you have heard of phosphatizing treatments on military stuff?

The soap guys switched to hydrochloric acid to neutralize the excess caustic. Hydrochloric is the most corrosive acid you are like to encounter.

And they kept the salt. Then within our memories Soap Guys added lemon, and more recently orange, to some cleaners. Citric acid + sodium chloride = hydrochloric acid.

That is why I prefer not to put soap solutions in my rifle.

[Daryl]

I just quit!

[Mad Monk]

Canute,

So I checked out the MSDS for the Permatex Fast Orange Hand Cleaner and here goes.

>75% water  (Nothing exciting in this.)

<10% pumice( RED ALERT!! - pulverized lava rock - HIGHLY abrasive!!)

<10% D-Limonene (citrus oil) - nothing exciting here, a good de-greaser.)

<3% Ethoxylated alcohol (nothing exciting here.  A surfactant commonly used in commercial floor cleaners.)

0.1 - 1.0% Silica (RED ALERT!!) - (pulverized sand - extremely abrasive.)


This reminds me of a product that was sold to shooters back in the mid-1980's.  Sold to high-power shooters to remove copper from rifle bores.  Some ML shooters tried it after they were told it would clean BP rifles shooting lead slugs.  Then the reports started showing up where the high-power crowd was seeing shot out bores rather quickly with it.
So I was tasked to look at it in the lab.  Turned out to be a light oil with ground silica in it.  At work we used 40 pounds bags of ground silica in the PVC compounds being made.  Including small amounts of this (Cab-O-Sil) in the compound scrubbed the extruder barrels and calander rolls as we ran the stock in production.  The micropulverized silica polished the machinery surfaces by abrasion, removing metal and plastic films.


Another way to deal with this.

If you look at floor cleaners now in commercial use such as Grout Safe or Terra Green Maxx you will see the citrus oil (D-Limonene), Ethoxylated alcohol and hydrogen peroxide.
These would not make good patch lubes but they would be very good bore cleaners.

But in a patch lube, even with cloth patched balls you don't want any hard abrasives in the lube.


E. Ogre

[Canute Rex]

E. Ogre - I use the "Smooth Lotion" version. I looked at the MSDS and there is no pumice nor silica in it.

Here's the analysis:

Chemical                                                     CAS# or ID                    %
Water                                                         007732-18-5               80-90
Terpenes and Terpenoids, sweet orange-oil 068647-72-3                5-15
d-Limonene                                                    005989-27-5                <15
Alcohols, C10-12, ethoxylated propoxylated  068154-97-2                 1-5
Triethanolamine                                          000102-71-6                0.1-1

It claims to have glycerin, lanolin, aloe, and jojoba to soothe my tender hands. On the ingredient list on the bottle glycerin is sixth and the natural items are at the tail end, so I am imagining that the naturals are trace elements for marketing. Dipentene is the second ingredient, which I assume is a terpene.

Whatever it is, it is slick going down the barrel and it stays slick for quite a while.

Canute

[Mad Monk]

Canute,

I had dhecked your original posting and did not catch anything on the "smooth lotion".


The "terpenes" is the "slick" thing you notice.  There are a bunch of chemicals in that family of chemicals.  Most are derived from various types of pines, or connifers.  The tall oil that LVL is based on is a mixture of various terpenes.  A classic example of the terpenes in cleaners is common PinSol soap.  Used in cleaners as both a soap and powerful disinfectant.

I had commonly used PinSol from under the kitchen sink when I cleaned my BP rifles.

In dealing with bore cleaning one must remember that if the cleaner does not remove the patch lube from the bore the game is usually lost.  A film of patch or bullet lube with BP fouling mixed in with it is no longer a protective film.

E. Ogre

[Daryl]

Good point about the removal of lube, Ogre. That's something I've never considered, yet have not had rusting problems - touch on wood. Perhaps once the 'soot' has been flushed out, one should use a solvent - perhaps the WD40 does just that and once cleaned after using cold water, with Lehigh Valley Lube or Hoppe's, the WD40 patches come out pure white - sparking clean. If there was any residual lube covering fouling in there, I'm pretty sure the WD40 would lift the lube and expose the dirt, then the dirt would show on the patch.

[C. Cash]

Thanks for this report...nice to finally have some info on SVL!  Great info all around.........

[Leatherbelly]

    I sure wish Tom DeCare would start marketing his product again. Best lube I ever used.

[John Boy]

The Lehigh Valley Lube Patent 6105591

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,105,591.PN.&OS=PN/6,105,591&RS=PN/6,105,591

[Kaintuckkee]

    I sure wish Tom DeCare would start marketing his product again. Best lube I ever used.

Anyone ever contact this gentleman about making his lube again?

[duca]

I was wondering the same thing. I remember seeing the Lehigh valley table at Dixion's back in the 90's and talked to Tom DeCare about patching and bore fowling. I just finished that bottle and remember someone saying that he was going to try and make it again.

[mjm46@bellsouth.net]

Might mention that soaps, all ALL of them, have salt in them. Good ol' sodium chloride. Process guys love it, makes the soap flow thru their piping. Just like salt makes a garden slug flow.

I think you raised a good point about the salt in soap. What about cleaning barrels with old fashion LYE Soap. If I'm not being mislead lye soap contains only animal fat (or sometimes vegatable fat) and lye which combine to make soap. No Salt, or am it wrong?

[William Worth]

Here's another route to take.

Pine-Sol is made from Tall Oil, Pine Oil and detergent.  Take some Pine- Sol, raise the pH (it's acidic) to 7.0 with some sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide solution (have yet to decide a preference) it will cloud and thicken.  Dilute slightly with rubbing alcohol (if desired) to a clear point.  I juice down patches in a tin with this and allow them to saturate and somewhat dry overnight.   Following a shooting session, I'll use the liquid state of this stuff to wet wipe at the bench with a couple of patches to initiate the later cleanup.  Clean up is accomplished with water only.  They load well, shoot well and will even work out of a loading block.  No wiping between shots.

Technically, I suppose all acid/base reactions produce a "salt".  Even lye soap is technically a "salt".  From Websters:  Salt- A chemical compound formed by replacing all or part of the hydrogen ions of an acid with one or more cations of a base.

I'm not automatically going to run and hide from "salt".

[SPG]

El Ogre,

Glad someone mentioned removing lube from a barrel that has fouling in it. Something for the "barrel seasoning" crowd to give some thought to...

Steve

[Mad Monk]

The key in Tom DeCare's Lehigh Valley lube was the grade of tall oil he used.  One grade gives the best results in terms of being able to shoot any number of rounds without having to scrub out the bore between shots.  He worked with a number of grades of tall oil before finding which one gave the best results.

The chemical reactions he ran to convert the tall oil into a "soap" had to be done with great care.
An example of this was seen in Ox-Yoke's version of his lube.  They simply heaved in the caustic and did not worry about the correct degree of conversion.  The Ox-Yoke version ended up with a very high pH that easily destroyed straight boiled linseed oil finishes on a gun.  The gross excess of caustic in effect saponified the linseed oil finish.

No one I have spoken with seems to know what happened to Tom DeCare.  When his lube was handed over to Ox-Yoke he went back into the military.  I was told that he spent some time in Afghanistan and came home wounded.  When I saw him after that he had a noticeable limp from a leg wound.  Then he just seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

E. Ogre