Pan Lubing Bullets with a Toilet Wax Ring
Russ Chastain 12.31.20
(Image: Screenshot from pan lubing bullets video)
Last week, we posted a video from FortuneCookie45LC about buying toilet wax rings, which are super cheap, to use as bullet lube on cast bullets for reloading. You can check that out by clicking here.
Using toilet wax rings for bullet lube costs much less than buying “sure-nuff” bullet lubricant, but you have to deal with its ring shape, since it doesn’t come in the right configuration for feeding it through a bullet sizer/lubricator. We suggested cutting it into small bits to be shoved into a sizer/luber and compacted using the feed mechanism, or melting it to pour into a mold of the right configuration for the sizer/luber.
But what about other ways of lubricating bullets? Our video host doesn’t like pan lubing bullets, but he will do it in order to show how it’s done and answer a viewer’s question about it — and he does it using one of these el cheapo wax rings, along with some paraffin and candles.
Pan lubing bullets consists of placing bullets upright in a shallow pan, and pouring molten lubricant into the pan. It flows and fills the areas between bullets, and of course also fills the lube rings in the bullet’s body. You then have to get each bullet out of the lube while retaining the lube in the bullet’s grooves — and during the pour you also have to be really careful not to spill the melted wax, which can cause burns as well as being super messy.
He removes the “cake” of lube and bullets as one unit, and simply shoves each bullet out of the wax — at first. Then he experiences some lube loss, so he comes up with an alternative method in which he pushes from one direction to break the bullet loose, then pushes it out in the other direction.
He knows his stuff and is happy to share useful tips, but his camera work ain’t much… he keeps getting stuff out of focus. Oh well — we get the point.
So when it comes to pan lubing bullets, the answer is yes — you can do it with a toilet wax ring.
