Brimshiner Black Powder Bore Grease

A little goes a long way. A small dab on a patch, a sabot, or a projectile, or a thin coat wiped into the bore or over a cylinder — that is the whole routine. At typical use a single 4 oz tin runs about 150 shots, and easily a season or more.

No. Brimshiner holds its paste-wax consistency from −5°F to 125°F. That is the property the product was built around, and it is the one customers mention most: “Doesn’t seem to melt out.” “Great consistency for use outdoors in warm or cold weather.”

Yes — real black powder, every substitute on the shelf, and the encapsulated-powder systems that have become popular for the early season. One tin covers whatever you load.

Yes — the active corrosion inhibitors, as well as the layer of oil, which forms a passive shield against humidity, will help to prevent corrosion in storage. Black powder’s byproducts pit bare steel fast, and most of that damage happens after the shooting, while the gun sits. Brimshiner’s active sacrificial compounds shield steel from rust, sulfuric acid, chlorates, nitrates, sulfides, and chlorides. We demonstrated it on 1018 steel plates run side by side under those byproducts — the treated plates stayed clean, the controls corroded. The photographs are on this page.

In the sense nearly everyone means, yes. Shooters use the phrase two ways.

The common modern sense is protection through storage — a conditioned, coated bore that comes out of the off-season the way it went in. That is exactly what Brimshiner does, and the test plates are the evidence.

The older sense is oils worked into the rough bores of early metallurgy, building something like the finish on a cast-iron skillet. That is a real tradition, and jojoba does penetrate and embed well in a cast or ferrous bore. Modern barrels have a more consistent metallurgy than that practice grew up around, but if your muzzleloader is an antique, Brimshiner Black Powder Bore Grease will season the bore in both ways.

Percussion cones should be kept free of all oils and greases, because oil can disable a percussion cap. One of the benefits of a temperature-stable formula is that it will not accidentally melt or slide onto parts of the gun where you do not want it. You can use it to clean such areas, or to protect them in storage, but they should be wiped dry before a fresh cap goes on.

No — Brimshiner is jojoba oil based. Because of its unique chemical polarity, though, it is water soluble, and that is what makes it so easy to clean up with plain water.

Its water activity — the term used to quantify how readily a substance takes up moisture — is balanced so that it does not draw in humidity. That, along with the corrosion inhibitors, is what lets it serve as a rust-preventive coating in storage.

Easier, mostly because there is less to clean. Brimshiner keeps fouling soft and workable instead of letting it bake into a hard crust, so what is in the bore wipes out with water — no solvents needed for it. “Kept bore very clean and was easy to clean.” “Makes cleaning a breeze.”

Rarely — it depends on the gun and the conditions — a bore may accumulate enough copper or lead that a dedicated bore solvent becomes necessary. Using Brimshiner Black Powder Bore Grease while shooting helps to prevent such accumulation from ever getting far, though.

No. Brimshiner is a bore and projectile lube, not a thread anti-seize. Use a proper anti-seize on breech plugs and other threaded joints.

Two places. A dab packed over the seated ball at the chamber mouths, which is how shooters have long sealed the chamber, and optionally a light coat on the cylinder pin to keep the cylinder turning freely. Because the grease does not melt, it stays where you packed it round after round instead of migrating down onto your powder or your caps in the heat.

One shooter running Remington percussion revolvers reports five or six cylinder loads between re-lubes on the .44 and three on the .36, at about 72 shots per outing.

It has a faint woodsy scent of its own — jojoba and wax. There is no added fragrance or perfume, which is the point: at the close ranges of muzzleloader season we do not want to put an artificial fragrance into your stand. Even if added fragrances seem mild or pleasant to us, a deer can smell that from a thousand yards away.

Most describe it the way one reviewer did — “pleasant, low odor natural smell” — but it has a low, natural odor rather than none at all.

It is jojoba based and mild, and the label’s instruction is to apply it with your bare hands without worry — that is how we use it. It is not hazardous, though as with anything used around firearms and ammunition, wash your hands when you are done; the exposure of concern there is lead, not the grease.

On the gun itself, wiping it onto wood stocks and polymer parts will not harm or alter their finish. Brimshiner ArmaRub is the ideal product for actively conditioning and cleaning wood, synthetics, and the outsides of barrels or other metal parts. Brimshiner Black Powder Bore Grease will do no harm to those materials and is an effective cleaner — it just does not do much in the way of actively conditioning wood or synthetics, unlike ArmaRub.

You can, but it is not what it is for. Brimshiner Black Powder Bore Grease is a black-powder specialist. For modern smokeless firearms, knives, and hand tools, the Brimshiner product is Brimshiner ArmaRub, our all-purpose clean-protect-lubricate rub.

The exception would be modern smokeless firearms loaded with black-powder cartridges; there, a small quantity of bore grease can be loaded on the front of the cartridge. I often load .45 Colt cartridges with black powder for use in my Ruger Super Redhawk, and always grease the tips of the cartridges with Black Powder Bore Grease for that task. If you shoot black-powder cartridges in a firearm capable of chambering smokeless rounds, it is of course imperative that you thoroughly clean and inspect the barrel prior to returning to smokeless, and between shots. That is the case whether or not you use Brimshiner Black Powder Bore Grease or any other product, and is a basic tenet of safe handloading.

Because it is a different formula, and the difference is where the money went: multiple active corrosion inhibitors and a jojoba wax-ester base that holds its consistency across 130 degrees. The older greases cost less and did neither.

There are traditionalists who still prefer the simple old-fashioned mixes like beeswax and tallow. If you live where the weather is consistently nice, you do not need the enhanced corrosion protection, and you enjoy the extra cleaning as an integral part of the experience — I do not want to try to dissuade you otherwise, and I am glad there are still some folks using the 19th-century methods. Brimshiner Black Powder Bore Grease is something categorically different and more performant than the formulas we grew up with, and I developed it because I needed something better. For me — and this has been the experience of my customers too — using a modern, highly performant bore grease frees us up to focus on the parts of this traditional sport we enjoy most: namely, shooting.

What makes the cost work is that a tin lasts — roughly 150 shots at typical use, a season or more for most shooters, and one customer reports about four cans across a couple of years of hard revolver shooting. Set against powder, projectiles, caps, and the drive to the range, the grease is the cheapest part of the day.

Though it is rare, I have occasionally come across the opinion online that bore greases and butters are a waste of time. Using one or not is anyone’s prerogative, but I think the benefits are undeniable. Consult your muzzleloader’s manual for whether one is strictly required — in some cases a bore lubricant may not be. But they have been used throughout the entire history of muzzleloading, and they make loading and cleaning so much easier. Regular infantry would at least spit on their patches, or down the bore, if they had nothing else available.

As to any suspicion that this is an overpriced tin of a few household ingredients: I cannot speak for other products, but I can assure you it is not the case for Brimshiner. I spent years developing the formula down to the nearest parts per million, and building the machinery needed to control the temperatures, pressures and inert-atmosphere processing the various chemical reactions require. A halfway decent lube can be made by melting some beeswax and lard on the kitchen stove, and I encourage hardcore enthusiasts to try that just to get the historical perspective — but once you use Brimshiner you will see, it is something else entirely.

Made in U.S.A. from the finest ingredients worldwide, by Blue Grouse, LLC — a family business in Apache Junction, Arizona. Questions: (833) 502-2496 or info@brimshiner.com.