Divers Silicone Lubricant??
I’m new to PCP Air Gunning and enjoying setting up my Condor .22 but some things aren’t working as expected.
For one, I’ve seen the videos and articles that we should be using divers silicone lubricant in PCP air guns and by doing so, we should seldom need to clean them. Well, today, my Condor was starting to open up on the groups. I was trying a different scope, and shots were going all over. I got suspicious and ran a patch down the barrel.
I’ve had black powder smoke sticks that were cleaner. It took a stack of patches and about 20 minutes to get the gunk out. I’m surprised it was shooting as well as it did.
Contrary to what I had been led to believe, the divers silicone lubricant had been burning just like petroleum based lubricants.
So, what’s the story? Is there a lubricating product that resist burning under PCP pressures?
One thing that I really like about my CO2 powered air guns is they don’t burn the lubricant and seldom need cleaning.
Tuko
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I do not oil my barrel or pellets. I have no rust issues. The silicone is for the various o-rings and not for lubing the barrel at least IMHO. I never oil the inside of my PB barrels unless the gun is going into storage but if i will be using it then no oil and i treat my airgun barrel the same. I view rust in the barrel like this: Grass does not grow on a busy street :biggrinn:
I only oil like 4-5 pellets with rem-oil with teflon, and shoot them thru to clean my barrel, then its’ good to go untill it opens up again, 200 good shots anyway.
If you wet a pellet or barrel well with oil, shoot the pellet at high velocity in an air gun, then sniff the barrel, you’ll smell the diesel. I have a break barrel pistol that really stinks the place up.
Most pellets come with a light oil to pervert oxidation. You should have seen the 30-40 year old boxes of daisy pellets I opened last year. They looked like corroded battery terminals, mostly turned to whitish poowder.
Compared to most here, I’m new at the whole air rifle concept.
But until our experts chime in, let me take a wild guess at what is going on.
What I see as smoke coming out of the muzzle is probably mostly vapor especially in these cooler than normal temperatures. I think the black you are cleaning out of the bore is probably lead dust and oil.
I’ve been wrong on occasion but that’s usually because of my poor pick of women.
I only re oil pellets if I bought something new that is terrible dirty Lu of the box. Those will usually be carrying little loose chards of lead shavings and make your fingers black.
Most barrels perform better if polished well inside. That reduces the lead dust also.
Go ahead,beat me up now but remember, I learned to duck when RC beat me up before.
I need to back up in this story.
I’ve been shooting break barrel and pump up air guns for longer than I can remember. I always disliked the dieseling. It left carbon in the barrel which resulted in wear and needed cleaning to maintain accuracy. For the past few years, I’ve been shooing CO2 power air guns. No dieseling. Use any oil I wanted, The barrels stayed clean.
When doing research into PCP air guns, before buying, I wanted to avoid the dieseling problem. The Diver’s Silicon Lubricant looked like a solution because divers, using Nitrox, selected Divers Silicon to lub their O-Rings. They needed to avoid the O-Rings lighting off under the high pressure in oxygen rich gasses. That looked like a solution to dieseling in an air rifle barrel.
I was also entertaining using high pressure dry nitrogen.
Looks like the Diver’s Silicon solution didn’t work. From the appearance of my barrel, it’s burning like the oils. I wonder if the divers know that?
Anyway, I’m back to finding a solution to the dieseling problem. I want to avoid it if I can.
In the video provided be AirForce, for these air rifles, they state that cleaning is not needed. That’s at [23:05] in the YouTube version.
They also advocate that the pellets should be oiled. That’s at [52:45] in the YouTube version. Again, they state that the barrels will not need cleaning.
This does not jive with my experience with air rifles powered by breathable air. At the pressures created by these air rifles, air ignites oil on contact. That produces carbon and other burn products that wear the barrel and needs to be cleaned.
A small amount of oil and dieseling is not perceivable by the shooter but it’s still happening. It affects pellet velocity and creates a mess. It also burns the oil off the inside of the barrel which can result corrosion if not replaced regularly.
All of this is why I went to CO2 in the first place but CO2 just isn’t practical. It’s too temperature sensitive and doesn’t deliver the pressure needed.
So what gives? How do we avoid dieseling when we are putting oil on the pellets and inside the barrels?
Thanks for the help
Tuko
Divers silicone is not a bore or pellet lube.
And, don’t use a brass brush in the air rifle bore either.
Probably no harm done but most barrels should be polished for consistency and,
be aware, some pellets are filthy dirty. Roll several of them around in your hand.
If there is excessive sooty debris you may do better to wash them and some even re-lube them with oil like I use, FP-10. Very little lube is necessary.
?
Did you put the silicone inside the bore?
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Funnily enough I had this discussion a few years ago regarding the possibility of a pcp producing ‘dieseling’.
A break barrel rifle or pistol ‘spingers’ as we call them will diesel if a combustible agent is indroduced. That’s because as the trigger is pulled the piston is released and pressure builds. Building pressure as we all know creates heat. That’s when the ignition of a combustible agent occurs. Now, with a pcp when you pull the trigger air is released from the pressure chamber(bottle or tube). As the air is released the pressure actually drops. This causes cooling, not heating, so no dieseling can occur in a pcp. See ‘Boyles Law’ for a full description. The argument was (made by me) in a pcp there is a moment of pressure building again as the air is released and it encounters the pellet before it starts to move. I think at best there ‘may’ be a little dieseling occasionally. What you are describing does not sound like this. Unless maybe you are smothering your pellets in gunk or something.
I found little or no advantage in lubing my pellets. If they are particularly dirty then a wash and dry is a good idea, but nothing more.