I need to send my bud a pic of how much grease to put on the locking lugs. I can't find my camera at the moment.

anyone got a photo I can copy and email to him?

Idon't have a pic of what you need to send, so this may not be of any help, BUT....

The hypodermic-type tube of action grease I use on my BR guns squeezes out a strand of hard grease about 0.5 m/m in diameter. I apply about 1/4" of that size strand to each lug after each time I clean the rifle and action. Seems to do the trick well enough.


I use "Never-Gall" or some other brand of anti-galling compound on my hunting rifles, because I usually clean them at home in my shop, not in the field or on the range. To use it, I simply use the point of a small nail or brad to pick up a glob about the size of a single "number six" lead birdshot, and put that amount on each lug. I have been using the same small bottle of Never-Gall for 14 years now, and haven't consumed more than about 1/10th of the bottle, if that much. Hope that may help.

well, while my friend is an excellent outdoorsman, he knows zilch about firearms in terms of care.

When I emailed him telling him to make sure he greased the locking lugs, he asked what they were.

I think a picture is worth 1000 words in this case.

I was always taught the locking lugs were the one thing you did not grease. they don't move under stress. they had better not. blish locks and pistols excepted, of course.

I tried googling an image for you and got this page from Brownells:

http://www.brownells.com/aspx/NS/GunTech/NewsletterArchive.aspx?p=0&t=2&i=560

quote:

Originally posted by delloro:
I was always taught the locking lugs were the one thing you did not grease. they don't move under stress. they had better not. blish locks and pistols excepted, of course.

Well, I guess it depends on who does the teaching, and what specifically they are talking about.

The military manuals on the Garand, for instance, show the locking lug seats as one of the critical places which DO require grease. They specifically recommend the military equivalent of what we civilians know as "Lubriplate", amonst other things. Likewise, as was mentioned earlier, almost all benchrest competitors grease the back sides (bearing sides) of their locking lugs. If you order a custom action, such as a Stolle Panda, the manufacturers send a hypodermic-style tube of grease along with the action when they ship it to you. If one is worried about building up crud in the action, then he needs to also periodically clean out any carbon or dust fouled grease and replace it with a new layer. Benchrest shooters often do that several times a day when shooting in matches.

I have occasionally heard, 6 decades ago, not to grease locking lugs, too, but I suspect it had originated with fellas who had heard of rifles being blown up at the U.S. National Matches (Camp Perry).

What they apparently didn't understand was that those blow-ups (mainly Springfield '03s) came from the habit of dipping the bullets of loaded rounds in grease just before chambering them on the firing line, to reduce metal fouling of the bore. Over a multi-round string of fire, that grease ended up working its way all over the interior surfaces of the chamber. It greatly increased the back thrust of the cases against the bolt face when the round was fired and led to some ruined rifles and personal injuries.

Am not sure I would want to grease a Blish lock myself. Object of the Blish lock is to use the friction of two inclined planes, acting against each other, to delay opening of an essentially blow-back system breechblock. Greasing it would seem to reduce the effectiveness of that delaying action. Some argue the Blish lock principle doesn't work anyway, but if it does, I wouldn't want to grease it, on general principle.