BLACK RIFLE BALM
Our Black Rifle Balm:
- Our best all-around lubricant - excellent on all centerfire rifles and handguns
- Provides roughly 10x the shooting on one application of lube over gun oils - ARs and centerfire pistols typically get 2000-4000 rounds on one lube job.
- Stays put, stays wet, and stays slick and reliable for well over 2 years applied to a gun
- Especially good on finicky guns - as long as mags, springs, and ammo are in good condition, most "finicky" guns get instantly reliable for hundreds or even thousands of rounds after application.
Each of our lubricants is optimized for a given friction and reliability challenge. The Black Rifle Balm is optimized for the high-temp and friction contaminant challenges experienced in direct-impingement AR actions, but the engineering involved also produced our best all-around gun lubricant. It's excellent on all centerfire semi-autos, offers the widest range of high-heat and low-temp performance, and is great on manual actions as well.
The Black Rifle Balm is an advanced, lightweight technical grease, coming in at about the consistency of a creamy mayonnaise - it has over two dozen components that reduce friction in 12 specific ways, enhance extreme temperature performance, inhibit corrosion, and add various types of stability and performance to the formulation. Greases are far more technically complex and advanced in their capabilities than oils in many applications - they're often better understood as a type of sponge and "lubricant deployment system", allowing them to stay put even on unsealed vertical surfaces, seal out friction contaminant and oxidizing agents away from their components and from the friction surfaces they protect, and stay wet, slick, and reliable, right where you put them, for years.
For our lubricant formulations, every bit of this comes down to one thing: extreme gun reliability.
Defining "reliability" should happen more often in the gun world - our company has three different categories of "reliability" that we judge gun lubricants by:
- Durability: How many rounds of fire they maintain their integrity and performance properties across, to reliably stay put and reduce friction to keep a gun firing without a friction-related malfunction (ie, not mag, ammo, or part problem)
- Endurance: How long they perform reliably after being applied on a gun, including sitting on a gun in storage for long periods
- Shot-to-Shot Reliability: How well and how consistently it reduces friction and optimizes the speeds of moving parts at any given moment, on any given shot, including how well they inherently make finicky guns reliable.
As a general rule, on any given gun, the Black Rifle Balm and our other lubricants seem to consistently offer around one order of magnitude better reliability than any gun oil on the market. Guns that need cleaning or re-lubing with oils after 200-400 rounds typically get 2000-4000 rounds on one application of the Black Rifle Balm, sometimes much more.
Oils thin out, flow out, and dry out from the unsealed friction surfaces of guns, often on the order of weeks or months, depending on climate and other variables, while our greases stay put and act like sealants, being wet, slick, reliable, and right where you put them up to 4 years after being applied.
But it's the shot-to-shot reliability, and how our greases instantly turn finicky guns reliable by plummeting the friction they experience, that is the biggest shock to most shooters. This has been extremely common with ARs of various quality and builds, 1911s at every price point, heavily sprung sub-compact carry guns, and a lot of lower-end or entry level guns of lower quality build. Few shooters understand just how much of an issue friction is, until they see a properly engineered lubricant make a hopelessly finicky gun of theirs stone-cold reliable, right in front of them. As long as mags, ammo, and springs are good, the Black Rifle Balm instantly takes them from having multiple malfunctions every magazine, to going hundreds or even thousands of rounds reliably, on one lube job. The rare exceptions when it doesn't happen have, in virtually every case we're aware of, revealed parts severely out of spec, missing, or broken, that were not obvious before - it has served as an unexpectedly good diagnostic tool that way. If you're having any malfunctions with any of your guns at all, after you've ensured that ammo, mags, and springs are good, the Black Rifle Balm is a cheap next step before visiting a gunsmith.
Whether in competition, at work, or in self-defense, if you need a lube that will help provide your centerfire guns unquestioned reliability, the Black Rifle Balm is tough to beat.