Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Best Gun Oil?

Need to buy some new stuff, looking to keep a blued Mark V rust free in a snowy climate. Anybody find anything working better than break-free?

don't oil it at all,give it good coat of bowling alley wax .water will run off.

I like Rem oil. Easy to find and works well. Break Free seems to attract dirt really bad.

+1 - I use Johnson's paste wax on the outside of my rifles, including my blue mark V 25-06.

I like "triflow" as an all around lubricant on my guns.

Tom

I like G-96 for my guns.
I've also hunted ducks a lot in harsh salt-water environments, and I've used WD-40 in those conditions and never, ever had a problem with it. The guns functioned flawlessly and remained rust free.

For working parts that don't need grease I use TSI 301

For external surfaces to prevent rust, Eezox.

Another vote for Rem Oil.
You can keep it in your freezer and it will still flow well, and I am serious about this.
It seems to have some solvents that carry it into all the niche & crannies, then evaporate leaving a very light high quality layer of oil that doesn't attract dirt or thicken over time.
I trialed it in my muzzleloader breech's & nipples, instead of grease, this past year, with great success, in spite of some abuse on my part.
I noticed that Rem claims to have improved it with new "VCI technology." Do not know about this.
Remoil has been working very well for me for 4 or 5 years. I'm a fan. Hoping the new formulation is not a step backwards.

The best gun oil made simply common automatic transmission fluid. Works over a wide temp. range and already has corrosion inhibitors in it and is a lubricant. You want a rust inhibitor, not gun oil. However, to answer your question, several years ago, my son did a science experiment in which we coated carbon steel razor blades (1095 carbon steel to be exact) with common gun oils and evaluated for rust. We used WD40, ATF, EEZOX, Breakfree, Balistol, RemOil, Ed's Red, and several of the common "gun oils". Each blade was coated on both sides using a cotton swab coated in the oil and placed in a small 16 well container with a lid containg a hole. 4 replicates per oil. We then buried the containers at the edge of a salt lake for maybe 2 months and then dug them up and evaluated for surface rust and pitting. The EEZOX and Breakfree were the only two products which looked near normal and everthing else failed miserably (heavy rust and/or pitting or totally gone from rust eating it away. Personally, I only use EEZOX or Breakfree to protect from rust and ATF as a lubricating oil.

Bristecd,

Thanks for the post. Awesome info.

Tom

As a rust preventative I use Rig Universal Gun Grease....

I've used RemOil for years - never a problem.

ATF:Kerosene; 50:50.

Thanks for all the input folks, I appreciate the combined knowledge.

Those rusted blades must've been made by Browning.....

You might want to give Renaissance wax a try. It works very well on blued metal as well as wood. You'll want to use graphite or suitable oil for the internals but externally I think you might be better off with a good wax not only for the wood but for the metal..........................DJ

I don't think I am going to be burying my rifles in the ground for two months, but I like the experiment. And the way some people keep their equipment lying around in storage in gun safes or damp basements might just might qualify.
I think a coating of something to keep the water off as much as possible and then using something to remove any moisture exposure and coat with a light oil is the best. Most oils are going to evaporate over time, this is part of the plan, to keep things from building up, and the assumption is that you will be revisiting recoating on a fairly regular basis.
Careful with waxing, since it could be a source of building up a coating you don't want. Test the products to see if your oiling product to clean the gun up after use removes the waxing component completely.

Secret is to clean things up after any use in which water exposure occurs. Snow is usually easier then water, unless you are in a location where it is always wet, since if the rifle is cold too, it will mostly drop off and you can keep a lot of it semi-covered to protect.

I like RemOil as well. They now have the easy carry packages you can carry as swabs as well, and can be used really easily in the field for a quick wipedown and coat right after a hunt or shooting where the metal gets wet.

I know that some of the waxing products do build up and get hard to remove and may be effected by the other chemicals you use, like in cleaning out the barrel, etc in an unfavorable manner, so whatever you pick, mix things you use together and see what happens.

I don't wax the metal myself, but would in salty conditions or where the metal is getting a good soaking a lot of the times out. Otherwise, just post clean it to remove any moisture.

I think that a lot of people got brain washed by the Remington people when they sold their spray lubricant so cheap back in the 1980's and 90's.

My problem with Remoil and I am not a chemical engineer - is that it dries and does not protect the metal very well if at all.

Working in a machine shop that did tool and die work, where the products produced has to hold a tolerance of a couple of 10 thousandths and rust was the enemy.
The machine shop quickly learned what worked the best for short term and long term storage and got rid of everything else.
It would not pay for them to pay a machinist hundreds of dollars and spend thousands of dollars in shop time to produce a product, only to have it rust in transit.

Very long term storage - we used Cosmoline.
It was dirty, it was a sticky, gooey mess and it covered everything equally well. When something had to be shipped over seas Cosmoline was the top choice.

But for a gun that you are going to use - Cosmo is not a good choice.

So for something that you want to take hunting for a day or a week or two and not have to worry about having to put it up someplace warm from one day to the next and don't want to have to clean it every day, the next logical choice would be LPS 2.

You can get it in a 1 quart spray bottle or in a aerosol can and you can apply one coat and it will be good for a month to a year depending on what you subject it to.

There is always other solutions for shorter term use such as LPS 3 or LPS 1.

Rig Universal Gun Grease is a light grease substitute for Cosmoline. Works well at rust prevention and not messy if you follow the directions (apply a thin coat). Not so good for lubrication, will turn waxy over a few years. A rag with RIG rubbed in stored in a pill bottle is handy for a quick wipe in the field, or at the gun cabinet for that matter.

Have used Breakfree CLP for over 20 years with no problems to report....

For rust protection I have used Barracade for a while. Seems to work well.