OK, Thanks to Bigsmoke we now know that ox yoke and bore butter may be the same thing. The pre lubed yellow patches are all I have used. Tell me what the ill effects of these are? I am too new to know. I do know that accuracy is great with them in my experience. What should I be looking for as bad stuff??
As near as I can tell, people don't like the yaller mint flavored bore grease by whatever name it's packaged under because it isn't: Moose Milk, olive oil, crisco, bear grease, goose grease, Ed's Red, Spit, or any one of fifty or sixty patent bore nostrums.
I used it for years, until I ran out and started using lard. I started using lard because I had half a pound in my chuck box when I emptied my little tub of Wonderlube 1000. That's when I discovered that lard works just as well. FOR ME, in my two rifles.
It comes down to individual guns, some like one thing, others like something else. Then there's the odd gun that seems to like everything and the one that doesn't like anything.
This is one of the things that makes shooting frontstuffers fun, messing around until you find that magic combination that works in your gun. Sometimes you'll hit it on the first or second try, other times it takes years. Luck of the draw.
A story.
About ten years or so ago I was at a Spring Rrendezvous where I shot a course of fire of 75 shots over two days with my T-C .50 Hawken Rifle. I used cotton patches hand lubed with 1000 Wonder Lube (Bore Butter) over a load of 50 grains of Goex 3F fired with CCI caps. For the entire course of 75 shots I had no need of wiping as fouling was minimal and all loads went down smoothly. When I got home I found that my daughter was in the hospital being treated for injuries inflicted by her "boyfriend". My rifle went into the rack uncleaned where it remained for five months, well into winter. My son and I along with several of his friends by this time had encouraged my daughter's "boyfriend" to emigrate to somewhere far away on the solemn promise of getting the living sh*t kicked out of him each and every time any of the seven or eight of us saw him.
Over time my daughter's injuries healed. I decided to go to a rifle shoot late that fall and that's when I remembered I hadn't cleaned my rifle for eight months. With great trepidation, I ran a clean flannel patch on a jag down the bore. No rust, no damage, just some dirt. I then cleaned the bore with patches wet with warm water only until I got two clean patches, then I dried the bore with dry flannel patches followed by coating it with 1000 WL on a clean patch. That has been my cleaning regimen since. The bore of my rifle remains as good as it was when new, better actually as I deburred the rifling, getting rid of a "hard spot" about ten inches down from the muzzle some years back, but that's another story.
Was the WL 1000 the reason there was no damage to my rifle over those five or so months? I dunno for certain. The fact is the only thing in that bore was black powder fouling and 1000 Wonder Lube. Draw what conclusions you will.
Three Hawks
