"To understand weapon reliability, start thinking in terms of friction surface, and friction contaminant."
~Cherry
CherryBalmz - The Basics
Heat, dust, environmental exposure - a sea of friction contaminants reducing weapon reliability, long before a firefight. Properly designed weapons lubes and operator knowledge mitigate this in a dozen ways, while improper lubricants and misinformation can make it lethally worse.
CherryBalmz was founded on fundamental science with a focus on reality: our lubricants are engineered for what happens to guns in a gunfight - including what happens to a gun in the days and months before it needs to be used. The core of what we do is maximize reliability through friction reduction.
Our approach to developing weapons lubricants follows a philosophy similar to our firearms training in our personal lives: reality-focused excellence in the fundamentals, before moving on to anything else.
At the most fundamental level, our lubricants are engineered to stay where you put them and to keep lubricating, even under scorching heat, thousands of rounds of gunfire, and even if they're on your weapon after months of storage.
And a critical part of this excellence-in-the-fundamentals, reality-based approach is that our lubricants are simply designed properly - there are no special tools, "metal preparation", or voodoo processes needed - just slap it on your gun and shoot for 1000s of rounds.
Part of this performance is achieved by utilizing 100% synthetic base stocks as the foundation of our lubricants, which excel in meeting both high and low temperature operation. This is very difficult to achieve. The standard-issue CLP in our military of the last several decades, for example, has a flash-point of 201°F. Dark car seats can get hotter in the summer sun. Our formulations stay fundamentally sound up to temperatures roughly twice that, and can survive any torture a gun can put them through.
What really sets our lubricants apart, however, are what are known in the lubrication industry as 'additive packages' - this is where the serious lubricity and protection occurs when the harshness of real-world friction contaminants hit. Additives provide anti-wear, anti-friction, extreme pressure, and anti-oxidant/rust inhibition properties, among others, which we cover more in the Educate Yourself section.
The most effective lubrication for machines, generally, mimics 'hydroplaning' your car - getting two surfaces separated on a film of fluid - but it's difficult to do in the open, unsealed, short-reciprocating machines we call guns. Improper viscosity and lack of additives increase the rate at which the metal asperities (often erroneously called 'pores') of your friction surfaces penetrate the fluid film and grind against each other, causing friction, wear, and malfunction.
Along these lines, a little-known truth of viscosity is that certain lighter weight 'gun oils' can actually increase the wear rate of your weapon over other lubricants - a 'whetstone effect' - which we also explain in the Educate Yourself section. A proper additive package addresses 'boundary lubrication' when surface-separation is not possible, laying anti-friction and anti-wear components right over those friction spots.
Ideal lubrication generally achieves complete separation of friction surfaces on a fluid film.
All of this is basic tribology - the science of friction, lubrication, and moving surfaces. Our selection of base-stocks, additive packages, and physical properties for our lubricants provides fundamentally excellent lubricity, protection, and enhanced longevity in weapons in the harshest of conditions. Our lubricants are simply engineered properly, for the machines we call guns, for the environments they operate in.
Our lives may very well depend on the reliability of our weapons - minimizing friction is a paramount concern in self-loading firearms.
Should you choose to dig into the science a bit, you'll understand just how important it is to formulate a lubricant specifically to machine and environment. However, inherited myth, misunderstanding, and lack of information are just as much of a problem in keeping guns running as the chemistry of lubricants. Some of these myths are genuinely lethal.
If you go to our store, you'll notice we don't sell 'gun oils'. If you want to understand why, move ahead to our Educate Yourself section. Fair warning, it's a bit of deep dive, but if you're serious about understanding the realities of weapons lubrication and survival, it may be worth your time.
All we ask in sharing this knowledge with you is that, even if you never intend to purchase any of our lubricants, please keep an open mind to a field very few fully understand - it's not complicated, just new to most shooters. Evaluate our information dispassionately, based on the science and experience we share, and keep it in mind the next time you take out one of your firearms. Weapon reliability is very much a life-or-death issue, and your understanding of friction reduction is key to your weapon's reliability and longevity.