[Ed Harris]

Old Timers Gun Care

Good cleaning with hot water, followed by oiling with whale or vegetable oil such as linseed, and greasing with tallow or wax. You have to remember that most earlier firearms were "browned" rather than blued, which was a controlled rusting process anyway, so smooth brown rust was the "in" thing. Boiling the iron parts will stop any chemical rusting action and coating with vegetable oil, tallow or wax will protect the surface. For fine guns, the wealthy people could afford sperm (whale) oil, which was the very best for lubricating delicate instruments and machinery. Use of petroleum-based oils didn't come into common use until the 1870s.

 

[Ed Harris]

Old Timers Gun Care

Jack is absolutely right on the linseed, use it to protect EXTERIOR surfaces only, though it does a good job there and was used to seal many browned metal finishes.

Sperm whale oil is and still would be the best for interior mechanisms, if we could get it. Any modern petroleum product is only a poor substitute. When I was at NRA Col. E.H. Harrison was still using a prized stash of U.S. Army sperm oil which dated from the 1870s and was still good. This was used on many fine old English and European pieces of the flintlock era in the NRA museum and the lockwork interiors were bright and clean inside with a slight oily film still on them as if they were cleaned yesterday!

 

[Ed Harris]

Absolutely! That's EXACTLY why we use ATF as a substitute for the sperm oil in the original receipe for Frankford Arsenal Bore Cleaner in Hatcher's Notebook to make Ed's Red!

For general purpose gun oil I usually take a Hoppe's bottle full of the ATF, K1 Kerosene mix from the first stage of mixing Ed's Red and divert that off from the batch to use as gun oil. In hot semi-tropical climates straight ATF is fine.

Dextron II and Dextron III Automatic Transmission fluid is a decent cheap substitute for Sperm Whale Oil. In fact, early automatic transmission fluid was sperm whale oil based before WWII.