"If you want an instant reliability enhancement to your gun, our greases provide it in a dozen ways. If you're the kind of person who wants to know why and how, you're really going to enjoy this website."
~Cherry
About Our Balmz - Make Your Gun Reliable
Grease stays put and acts like a poor-man's sealant, trapping contaminant away from friction surfaces. Oil will migrate it right to those surfaces.
The Basics of Firearm Reliability
The simple reality is that if you want maximum reliability in the guns you rely on, you will not find it with self-loading actions, like semi-autos or full-autos - you need to be looking to what we term "human powered actions", such as revolvers and bolt-actions. Automatics are designed to function under a relatively narrow window of friction and applied energy, and the energy you are physically capable of cycling a pump-action with exceeds the energy an AK or Glock uses to cycle itself with - you can stop those actions with the grip strength of your hand. It may hurt, but you can apply an excess of energy beyond what the gun is cycling under. Human powered actions, frankly, also almost never need lubricant to cycle.
However, the benefits of automatics are exceptional, to where they are the standard choice for all but a small number of situations military, law enforcement, or civilian personnel may be facing. Unfortunately, there is an entire constellation of myth and misunderstanding about lubrication alone, which is critical for their reliability. This segment only addresses those tangentially - we will focus here on the universal fundamentals, independent of design and separate from our lubricants.
Unless otherwise specified, throughout most of this website, when we are referring to 'guns', we are indeed referring to automatic actions.
To truly understand how your gun works, it's important to understand that all self-loading actions channel some portion of the energy released during firing - the combustion of their cartridge propellands - into the action. The bullet escaping the muzzel is, for a brief moment, allowing the barrel to almost serve as In doing so, those actions cycle, ejecting and then chambering a new cartridge.
If you talk with anyone familiar with lubricants in a professional setting, such as farmers or millwrights, they already know these basic lubrication differences between grease and oil. It's Lubrication 101 - and guns possess no magical exceptions to the rules of lubrication, mechanical engineering, or tribology.
You yourself likely already know most of these 'dots', but perhaps haven't quite connected them yet to your own guns. Sealed vs. unsealed machines may make sense, but if you also think back to the most reliable self-loading guns our infantry have ever been issued - Garand-type actions - they were issued grease. John Garand was a master tool and die maker before he built his guns, and he specified grease for a reason. Legendary reliability required grease, on top of the design.
If this causes you to wonder why "everybody" uses gun oil, take a few minutes to look at our History of Gun Lubricants pages, especially Vietnam & The Great Disconnect - our entire shooting culture began to get isolated from this basic lubrication knowledge with the roll-out of the M-16. It's a sordid story, and this resultant loss of basic lubrication knowledge over the last five decades has very genuinely gotten people killed.
The Garand grease cup - the diameter of a dime, 1000s of rounds
You will notice that we do not even sell a 'gun oil' - even though they are far cheaper and easer to make, they're far more profitable, and we wouldn't have to swim upstream against the cultural currents of what "everybody knows" about how to lubricate guns. But oils on guns are simply inappropriate tribology - they will work, but at a fraction of the effectiveness of a properly engineered grease. There simply is not an oil in existence that will stay put and stay wet on a gun for two years, and allow you to pull it out and fire a couple of cases of ammo flawlessly.
Our greases will do just that, in the harshest environments, on some of the most challenging gun designs.