Beeswax As Bullet Lube

One thing leads to another. First, I read about using straight beeswax as a bullet lube, in Paul Matthews’ book called Bullet Lubricants for the Black Powder Cartridge Rifle, where he gave it some pretty high marks. Then, I asked some other shooters about using straight beeswax and got replies ranging from “It will be too stiff,” to “Never tried it.” So, as curiosity bit deeper into my skin, I mentioned to Steve Garbe that I was going to try lubing bullets with straight beeswax for my 50-70, thinking mainly about using it with grease groove bullets. Steve replied, “Give it a good try and send me the story.” That was the beginning of this experiment and the “basic test shooting” suddenly expanded to using at least two different loads, both for the 50-70. Following that, I had the most difficult part of any experiment to conquer, which is just getting started on it.

Next, was finding some good beeswax. There is a “Raw Honey” store not too far away from our diggin’s where bricks of beeswax can be purchased and I wanted to get the freshest, purest, and yellowest beeswax to be found. My thinking was that if a buffalo hunter got some beeswax in the 1870s, it would be rather pure and not compounded with other fats, oils or lubes. So, some of this fresh beeswax was purchased.

Did buffalo hunters buy beeswax? I asked Leo Remiger that same question and he replied fairly quickly with a copy of a receipt where a hunter did buy just under two pounds of beeswax in the late 1870s. We might call that hunter a “rancher” or “homesteader”, because he had his family with him and the same receipt shows clothing items, plus some .45 caliber rifle cartridges in addition to 25 pounds of powder and 100 pounds of lead. The receipt does show that at least some buffalo hunters did buy beeswax, but it doesn’t show what the hunters used that wax for. If they used beeswax as a bullet lube, maybe they used it only until they could get some buffalo tallow or possibly they mixed it; we’ll have to keep searching the old journals for more evidence.

The reason the 50-70 was picked for my first (and maybe last) experiment with the beeswax as a lube was a rather simple one. The bullets for the 50-70 have large lube grooves and that made me think those bullets would give the beeswax the best chance possible. If the beeswax worked well in the 50-70, some could be tried in other calibers later on – that “later on” is still in the future and the 50-70 is the only cartridge being reported on now.

My choice for a rifle was my 1874 Hartford Sharps by C. Sharps Arms with the #1¾ Heavy barrel, 30 inches long. The barrel was made by the Oregon Barrel Company with a groove diameter of .510 inch and a 1 in 32-inch rate of twist. After the barrel was made as a round blank, it was contoured by C. Sharps Arms, and they also did the fit and finish work on the rifle.

The first load to be assembled and tested used 450-grain bullets from Accurate Molds’ #52-450L2 mould, shot as cast, over 65 grains of Olde Eynsford 1½Fg powder in the Starline cases, compressed under a single .030-inch vegetable wad. Those cases had been fired in my Sharps and they were reloaded un-sized, so the bullets were inserted and seated by hand. Then the loaded cartridges were run through a taper crimp die. To complete the description of the load, they were primed with Federal Standard Large Pistol primers. Those primers were marked with a red X, using a marking pen for load identification and 18 of these were prepared for the first shooting test.

In Paul Matthews’ book on bullet lubes, he relates how the beeswax should be extruded through the holes in a bullet sizing die for the best results. Instead of using my sizer/luber, I pan lubed a small batch of bullets. To do this, beeswax was very slowly melted in a small pie plate, with bullets already in the plate standing on their bases. When enough beeswax was liquid, high enough to cover the top lube groove, the pie plate was taken off of the stove. Then, after the beeswax had cooled just enough to become a solid again, but still quite warm, the bullets were punched out with a “cake cutter” and set aside to cool completely. This should be as good as running the beeswax through a sizing die, in my opinion, because no real change, and certainly no chemical change, had taken place.

Punching the bullets out of the beeswax “cake” was easy, as long as the beeswax was warm. After the beeswax cooled, it then became difficult to work with. When I put the pie plate back on the heat, I was able to finish getting the bullets out of the cake. At the same time, the cake cutter was also heated by standing it in the beeswax that was melted again. This made punching out the lubricated bullets easy.

Shooting those “greasers” lubed with beeswax came next and I can’t say there is anything outstanding, either positive or negative, about the way they shot. Those loads went off just fine and the bullets all hit the target, which was a bulls-eye at 100 yards. Their group was not the best but that’s probably more from my shooting than any characteristic about the beeswax lube. All of the 18 loads I had prepared, were fired without wiping the bore. Only a blow tube was used between shots. In fact, my last seven shots were all fired at the same target. Those were shots 12 through 18, and all of the bullets were in the black. To me, that seems to be quite reasonable.

Then cleaning the gun was done, taking notice of anything that might be different, anything unusual, or anything that wasn’t generally noticed after shooting with a commonly recognized black powder lube. Nothing seemed to be outstanding. However, I was probably looking for some change intently enough that when my patched jag first entered the bore, it seemed to encounter fouling that was harder than what I was used to. Maybe that was my imagination. The cleaning patch was moistened with Three Rivers Black Powder Solvent from The Gun Works (thegunworks.com) and after wiping the bore, the patch was very dark, as usual. The first patch was then inspected under a good light, looking for any signs of leading. No lead was noticed. After wiping the second patch, the barrel was clean. So, I must say that cleaning the rifle’s bore after shooting bullets lubed with beeswax was no different than when after shooting with regular black powder bullet lubes.

However, I wasn’t quite through with shooting grease-groove bullets lubed with beeswax. One more target had to be shot so the group – good or bad – could be photographed. To do this, six more cartridges were loaded with just a slight bit of tweaking involved. The bullets for these six shots were lubed with beeswax, as were the previous load, but this time the lubed bullets were sized to .512 inch before being loaded over 65 grains of Olde Eynsford 1½Fg powder.

The first of those six rounds were fired simply into the berm as a fouling shot. Then the next five were fired at the 100-yard target while using the blow tube between shots. The group wasn’t as good as I had hoped, with one shot out of the black. I’m sure this could be improved upon with more shooting.

My next experiment was to try paper patched bullets with a 1⁄8-inch beeswax “cookie” behind the bullets. This was done using bullets from a Tom Ballard mould, weighing 525 grains and with a diameter of .504 inch. Those bullets were patched with two wraps of 9-pound paper (from Buffalo Arms) and they were loaded over 65 grains of Olde Eynsford 1½Fg powder, compressed under a single .030-inch vegtable wad. Ignition, like the previous loads, was made with Federal’s Standard Large Pistol primers.

This bullet, because of its rather large diameter for a .50 caliber paper patch, needed to be seated rather deeply in the cartridge case. With just over ¼-inch of the paper exposed, these loads chambered easily in a clean barrel although it could be felt when the paper around the bullet entered the leade of the rifling. When the barrel and rifling leade got dirty from firing a shot, those loads wouldn’t chamber, at least not easily. Because of that, even though there was the beeswax lube in the loads, the chamber and bore were wiped, generally with a single moist patch between shots.

Even so, while doing some shooting, I tried loading a second round without wiping the bore or the chamber. It worked just fine. Although a third or fourth round could not be chambered easily without wiping the area ahead of the chamber out, fouling simply made that area too tight for the new bullet and cartridge to enter.

The ramrod was put to use again! What I did try however, was to just wipe out the chamber and the rear portion of the bore, leaving most of the barrel un-cleaned but given the attention of a blow tube. For about three shots that worked very well. After that is when my shots began to scatter on the target. Wondering why, I wiped the bore’s entire length and found about four inches of very hard and thick fouling at the rifle’s muzzle. In general, hard fouling near the muzzle is a sign of not enough lube.

More of the paper-patched loads were tried but the amount of beeswax beneath the bullet was simply doubled to a full ¼-inch. Those were fired, at 100 yards again, and even though the loads had the increased lube, the bore was wiped between shots. While wiping the bore, no hard areas of fouling were noticed and the increased lube was working well.

The paper-patched loads did give me the best group of this informal test, although my shooting with the beeswax lubricated loads certainly didn’t break any existing records. Again, one shot did crawl out of the black and that is probably much more my fault that anything I could blame on the beeswax lube.

Further tests and more tweaking the loads could be done. As things stand right now, I’m prepared to give my experiment with beeswax, as a bullet lube, a fairly positive conclusion, based primarily on how it shot when applied to the grease groove bullets. If I use it again with paper-patched bullets, I’ll simply be sure to use enough lube, at least a cookie of 3⁄16-inch in thickness. For grease groove bullets, maybe I should have run them through the sizing die and extruded the lube into the grooves although, at this time, I don’t see how that would make any difference. While I won’t say that beeswax is a really good or a better bullet lube, it is certainly much better than no lube at all.