Off face
 

How do they get off face?
In Drew's recent post the parker marketing literature made pains to say that the guns cannot work themselves loose from shooting. Is that actually true? lets say your grandad started using high brass in a 0 frame gun, still true? He went quail hunting every weekend for his whole life, does that use account for the loose as a goose action? Shot 20k rds of skeet to get ready for quail season?
If its not use and shooting, how do they get off face? In some cases, not even a little bit. Like it worked so loose that you could close it on a quarter, at what point (if ever) did grandad stop shooting this, probably when he got the 11-87 but not because it was loose.
jesting aside, these are real questions and any wisdom of experience would be of interest.

Just opening and closing the gun without lubrication on the hinge pin will cause the wear, it’s not a design problem.

As Bruce said, it's usually from wear on the hinge pin. Dan R told me once the wear starts showing up on the face, the process accelerates by more shooting. The shooting causes the "off face" to worsen due to the recoil forces exacted onto the action.

Years ago I had a then new K-32 , we were at the National Capitol Gun Club then in Damascus MD shooting the Westy Hogan . I hate having grease on a gun and kept it more to the dry side . That gun damn near locked up on me that day and actually galled the front of the reciever where the forend iron rubbed against . Now I lubricate a good bit more .

They get off face and loose from use. And accelerated by neglect.

And you have to remember that when the maker says “will never shoot loose”. One must consider what they mean by “Never”. Just like a lifetime warranty is usually intended to be the lifetime of the product, not the owners lifetime. I wonder what makers like Parker expected the realistic lifespan of the guns to be? We know that it was likely not 100+ years.

Also, consider that at the time there were many very cheap poorly made guns on the market. From overseas and domestic makers. Hardware store guns have you. Ones that would certainly shoot loose and fall apart in possibly 10-20 years of moderate use. So when looking at the field of shotgun offerings, that is more what advertising claims are steeped in.

One can easily look at all of the guns today, 100 or more years after they were made, and see the average condition they are in and see which ones were superior in design, workmanship and materials.

That's why I use Chevron Ultra grease, a wheel bearing like grease on the hook and the wear plate. It's v sticky and does not wash away at all. The stickier the better. You can get this stuff for free in a small 2-0z? sample bottle from any Chevron distributor. One little bottle is a lifetime supply of grease for this usage. When I get home from Denver I'll add a photo of one of these bottles. Or Bruce Day can beat me to it and post one of the bottle I gave him.

On surfaces that are not in contact with people and need to slide, I typically use a 40% MoS2 (moly disulfide) paste. It is pretty expensive but one 4 oz bottle is still nearly full after 20 years. It is black and messy, but it literally bonds to the metal and a thin smear will last an incredible amount of time. I started using it for sear engagements in target triggers set at 1-3 oz let offs. It smooths the motion and makes them more consistent without reducing them. I have since started using it on hinge pins, the nose of cocking hooks and rods etc. In those services it eases friction and gives a smoother motion. A dip on the end of a toothpick will do a trigger sear engagement and last until the next gun cleaning.

I have always been amazed at how much some old guns wear at the joint. I am not sure I could put polishing compound in the joint and have enough energy and time to wear it to the point many seem to reach.

One thing that may play into wear of the system is galling due to similar metals. I don't really know about the metallurgy of Parkers, but I ran into to this when I bought an Ultra Light Arms .22 action several years ago. When I recieved the action, I opened the bolt, examined it and closed it. It was rough and grabbed so much I could hardly remove it again. I greased it with the afore meantioned Moly grease. It worked fine but had to be cycled several times to completely coat and smooth. I called Melvin and was told that you had to be very carefully about maintaining lubrication as the bolt and action weremade of exactly the same alloy and would gall instantly without good lube.

I checked all dimensions and found it to be fit properly and to the same clearances of several modern 22 benchrest actions. Those actions have actions and bolts of greatly different metals and tempers, and don't seem to suffer this trait.

Three things are needed for galling; friction, ductility, and cohesive attraction. These three would all be present in a lot of old doubles. (The attraction occurs most commonly in two similar metals). It may be that the hooks and pins of these older guns are of similar materials and temper, and suffer from more wear than would be anticipated due to the galling effect of the metal itself. The galling typically occurs rapidly in discrete incidents and is not a gradually wearing. I suspect a replacement of a different alloy and temper may last longer with or without grease.

I suppose with all the mention of modern lubricants its worth noting that older solutions were more likely animal or plant based but im sure by 1918 or so they were petroleum derivatives. Doubtless the avg person wasnt planning to have the guns last forever, just look at the ones with badly pitted bores.
In carrying these things in the woods its amazing how quickly junk gets into the action, this doesnt seem to be a good mix with grease as opposed to oil. I also wonder about historic conditions, roads werent paved for instance so country living was dustier.

Modern lubricants may be far superior to the lubricants of the past but there’s little today that can beat the lubricating qualities and properties of pure sperm oil applied at regular intervals.





.

I posted here in error. Deleted.

ArtS:

That info. raises my consciousness, but I have two questions:

!) What is an example of a specific condition that would provoke one of those discrete, as opposed to on-going, incidents that actuates the wear by galling?

2) I get it that galling, leading to friction wear, can be due to contact between two moving metals that are similar. But is it not dissimilar metals that are given to galvanic corrosion?

It seems that in either case your gun will benefit from a lubricant at those wear points.

Do you use sperm oil on your guns? Where do you find it?

While some guns are definitely made better than others, abuse will wear one out faster. With that said, I have seen many old, battered and loose Citoris, Winchester 101s, and SKB guns that continued to go bang, even though they looked and felt liked the had lived in someone's car trunk and were fed only high brass ammo. The same can be said about many American doubles. In comparison, the cheap Turkish and Brazilian guns that are sold for less than $1000 at most big box stores often seem to fall pieces or become internally damaged before they hit one-thousand rounds.

Whale harvesting is illegal now, so whatever sperm whale oil you find is going to be rather expensive, and possibly considered contraband (depending on when it was made.)

Sperm whale oil was a good lubricant back in it's day. Supposedly it was even recommended for use on the m1911 pistol, and also was an additive for early automatic transmission fluid.

The company I worked for had as an asset the oldest refiner in the US. Our refining division provided a lot ofengineering support for them and produced a lot of their basestocks. Their Lube and Product Application labs were eventually merged into ours. I spent a significant amount of time over the years on basestocks and lube requirements and even more time working on the mass changes required for the Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel regulations imlemented by the EPA. I was actually attached for two years to the NPRA committee that did a nationwide impact study.

I mention this because the lubricant business was totally changed by this.

Sperm oil was originally prized as a lamp oil, not a lubricant. It was the cleanest, lightest burning oil available. With the advent of petroleum refining around the end of the civil war, kerosene quickly replaced sperm oil as a lamp oil due to an order of magnitude price difference coupled with good performance. It was still used as a lubricant due to it's cleanliness, low odor and it's ability to not gum. It was used primarily as a machine oil, much as we use 3in1 oil today.

Sperm oil has some unique qualities as a lubricant. It's two outstanding features were it's resistence to oxidation which gave it a long service life and it's low corrosiveness. what it didn't have was a lot of viscosity. It was a thin oil and didn't tend to thicken with age. The low viscosity made it not a good choice for high load bearing surfaces.

As the auto industry developed, it's critical role was found in automatic transmission fluid. The combination of low viscosity and stability made it ideal for the service life required. This came to an end in 1972 when the sale was totally outlawed in the US. The impact was pretty grim to the ATF market and transmission life.

By that time, sperm oil had been replaced in almost all other products by jojoba oil, which is very similar to sperm oil but is much better in high load applications. The priceof sperm oil had dropped over the years due to the advent of jojoba oil in other services.

The advent of ULSD had a double impact. Refiners were required to deslufurize diesel intensely to remove sulfur. The product diesel was not as good from a fuel standpoint due to cetane number and the removal of the sulfur greatly reduced its lubricant qualities to the engine, so the oils for those engines required much more quality.

After the Arab Oil Embargo, straight run lube stocks became difficult to obtain. The really good base stocks came from a few naturaly sweet crude oils such as Illinois basin(IBL), the Pennsylvania fields(Penn) and some of light sweet Lousiana crudes (LLS).
There was such a shotage of these crudesthat some of the major refiners built hydrocrackers to make artificial lube basestocks and desulfurize it at the same time. This was the advent of the entire Synthetic Lube market. The plants are very expensive and the lubes from them were marketed at high prices (even though they did it since it was cheaper than the natural basestocks). Enormous advertising budgets allowed them to market them at prices ridiculously high than natural oils.

The construction of the hydrocrackers for low sulfur diesel production allowed refiners all over the country to suddenly produce almost unlimited lube range stock that was easily separate from the rest of the Light Oil product. The operation of a hydrocracker could be adjusted minutely to tailor a product of almost any specification. Once this situation developed, natural basestock production essentially ceased. With all the extra hydrocracker capacity, the petroleum base stocks were routed to the fluid cat cracker units for gasoline productionwhere it is the most valuable feedstock production.

The result of all this is that almost any lubricant produced and sold in the US is synthetically produced. There are really no natural lubricants produced. The industry essentially makes every product to spec and tests each one in their aplication labs to fine tune the product. The bottom line is that about any modern lubricant is very close to any other in the same category and all will perform the same, varying only the with the additive packages used. They also tend to outperform the older natural lubricants. Look at the oil change intervals quoted now versus the 1980's and remember that the new engines require an order of magnitude higher performance from the oil versus the old engines.

The sales ban was a part of a modification to the Endangered Species act. Given the fungibility of the product, I doubt CITES rolled it into their loophole. I would not buy any without a detailed legal search. Attitudes are overboard in the whale arena. PETA is a sweetheart vs the actual assaults and damage done by some of the pro-whale groups performed on the open seas.