Rossi Rifleman

Variations on that 'Vietnam' recipe has been going around for about 100 years. Typically noted as Ed's Red.

http://www.noebulletmolds.com/smf/index ... 20or%20jag.

In addition to the tendency for a lubricant to solidify somewhat in cold weather it can also dry out over time. It isn't a bad idea to remove and replace any lubricant periodically to ensure it doesn't dry to the point it doesn't work. I picked up a Remington 700 that had been stored with what seemed to be WD-40 inside it. Whatever it was had dried completely to a varnish like substance that had glued the bolt release in place that required smacking it with a screwdriver to break it loose enough to pull the bolt.

It doesn't get near cold enough here for wheel bearing grease to get gummy.

Same in my neck of the woods. The real culprit is the humidity.

Our perspectives will be relevant to our environment. In northern New Mexico, it gets plenty cold in winter. I have switched to Super Lube because of that, because, as somebody already mentioned, it stays slippery over wide temp. range, unlike conventional greases. It's thin layer, with teflon additive, keeps things slidin'

Well, that's my story, but I'm stickin' to it.

My uncle was in Korea armed with a M1 Garand. He didn't talk about it much but when he found out I had a 1911 and a M1 Garand he told me a little about his time in Korea. He said he couldn't hit anything with the 1911 and resisted carrying one even though his LT wanted him to ditch the Garand in favor of the pistol. As he was a driver the pistol would have been more convenient but my uncle said he could reach out with the rifle but just couldn't hit with the short gun.

He said it got so cold the grease on the Garands froze up. He mentioned using hair oil instead. He said at one point they had enough antifreeze to put it in the water cooled machine guns OR to put it in the vehicles but not both. He said they put it in the machine guns and cranked the vehicles every hour on the hour to keep them from freezing up.

I typically use a light grease on slide rails for handguns. I've seen heavy grease on a friend's gun make it a sluggish jam-o-matic in Atlanta. I never had any issues along those lines until I moved to the SoCal desert. One very darned cold day in the desert mountains my P14 started jamming with ammo that had previously been fully reliable. I don't think it was really the grease I was using for lubricant but a combination of lightly loaded 200 grain LSWC target ammo combined with a heavy 20# recoil spring and I think the extreme cold was having a retarding effect on the combustion reaction when the cartridge was fired plus possibly some thickening of the lubrication. Note this was the SAME configuration of the gun AND ammo that had worked great for months, I hadn't upped the spring before this trip for example. As a result of that experience I did drop the spring to an 18# one. I upped the power level of my practice ammo in general. I also have a tendency to try to use a lubricant that's known to work in a wide temp range and not to tack up with fouling.

Yep, cold temperatures can reduce functionality enough to push a system over the edge and start causing failures.

I've read that in particularly cold or dusty/sandy areas, the military's standard procedure was to strip the lubrication from firearms completely and run then dry. The idea being that the increased wear & tear was an acceptable trade-off for the increase in reliability that not having gummy lubricant brought.

You're right, temperature will affect combustion & pressure (and by response, bullet velocity). If I remember right, the M16's original twist rate of 1:14" was increased slightly to 1:12" after field testing in arctic conditions. The cold temperatures decreased the bullet velocity (and spin rate) enough that bullets started tumbling in flight.

Ditto on the ATF/Acetone mix! Use ond of those old style metal oil cans.