Mutton Tallow

[rickk]

I am down to my last pound of Mutton Tallow from Dixie Gun works. I have used the Paraffin / Tallow / Beeswax formula for BP lube forever, and was hoping not to have to try something else.

Anyway, as others have already mentioned in other postings, Dixie Gun Works does not have any in stock and no longer has a source. I did quite a bit of searching and found out some of the reasons why it is hard to come by.

Apparently, because of "mad cow disease", tallow is now highly regulated in international commerce.  It used to be imported into the US primarily as an additive in animal feed, but that is simply not allowed any more. The few barrels of it that BP shooters would use every year just isn't a market that India or Korea feels profitable enough to support.

On top of that, the bio-fuel people have figured out how to turn it into a fuel product. This means that the countries that once had mega-tons of the stuff as excess to get rid off are now using it more profitably for their own domestic use as a fuel.

So, has anyone found a decent source of Sheep tallow in the US in 1 or 5# containers?

Alternatively, I am looking into my local farm connections to see if anyone locally either has it for sale or would be willing to offer it for sale if there was a market. I am trying to get my hands on 50# of it locally to start with. I figure the local sheep farmers have no idea where to sell it so aren't interested in making it, but I figure if I post a standing offer then some might materialize.

[Paladin UK]

Ho rickk

There is no shortage of it here in Merry old England!! (Makes a bloody change for us to have something you cant easily get)!!

It is used a lot here by Plumbers, so perhaps if you change your search area to the Plumbing trades you just might strike lucky
Hope this helps



Paladin (Whats still a tad hungover  ) UK

[fourfingersofdeath]

What about the local butcher? He should be able to get it for you, but you will have to render it down in a pan on very low heat.

[rickk]

fourfingersofdeath, If I rendered it anywhere on my farm, my wife would evict me.

Simply melting up a few pounds of lube at a time is an outdoor job best done in the winter when the windows are closed. Once it all blends things are not that bad, but the tallow by itself is something that even I would pass up an opportunity to smell while being melted if possible.

Paladin, what the heck are the plumbers doing with the stuff in the UK? If they are using it as a soldering flux, in the US the flux has become very high-tech since the ban on lead solder in plumbing occurred.

[Sir Charles deMouton-Black]

What about the local butcher? He should be able to get it for you, but you will have to render it down in a pan on very low heat.

I went to a local butcher and asked for lamb fat scraps.  The guys knew about muzzleloading and were VERY cooperative, when I explained why I wanted it!

Cut all the meat off first, and cube it fine.  After boiling gently for about  1/2 hour, more if you want, pour it off into a container with a nylon stocking filter.  Cool it. and then later pick off the solid cake of tallow.  BTW;  I took the fat remnants and fried out some more tallow, but it came out sorta brown, but still works.

[hellgate]

A locally owned independent butcher shop would be your best bet for mutton tallow. The closest thing to lamb I can get my hands on is deer tallow. Even smells & tastes similar. I can't understand  why my wife just loves lamb chops but doesn't like venison chops. Anyway, whenever I get lucky and shoot a fat deer I peel the fat off it's back and render it. As Sir charles said, the boiled tallow comes out whiter than the fried stuff but both seem to work OK. So, my current bullet lube for all things black and sm***less is 50/50 beeswax and deer tallow. I do an occasional marathon rendering, give some to friends and only smell the house up every few years. I do it when the wife is out of town and she never knows what I did with her kitchen.   

[Fox Creek Kid]

Phone company lineman used it as well a decade or so ago. Luckily, I bought about four tubs from Dixie a few years ago & still have 2 or three.

[rickk]

I might have stumbled across a rendering plant not to far away that occasionally has some at a great price. Still working out the hows and whens.

[Dick Dastardly]

Here in liberal Wisconsin, the folks that do deer processing have to pay to get rid of their tallow trimmings.  Good place to look if you want deer tallow.

DD-DLoS

[Noz]

Replace the mutton tallow with a toilet bowl ring. Works!

[Fox Creek Kid]

Replace the mutton tallow with a toilet bowl ring. Works!

Toilet bowl rings are made overseas now & who knows what chemicals are in them. Besides, they used to use toilet rings to replace beeswax and not the tallow.

[rickk]

Toilet bowl rings used to be beeswax, but now they are paraffin wax.

Old or New, they are not Tallow, and far from a cheap source of Beeswax or Paraffin.

I bought a whole bunch of Beeswax and a whole bunch of Paraffin for decent price.

Now just need to find the Tallow for decent price, and I think I found it.

Like Dick Dastardly is saying, it apparently ain't worth a heck of a lot to them. What I am paying for it might just be the cost to convert it from fat to Tallow, either of which isn't worth much any more now that they can't use in in animal feed.

It is just a matter of being at the right place at the right time to acquire it. It just might be a month or so before they have it for me. If this source works out, I might be able to re-supply Dixie Gun Works.

[Noz]

The new toilet bowl rings are not beeswax but are a sticky nasty stuff that acts very much like tallow in that it softens the mix and sticks to everything. It's been established that the fact that a product is petroleum based does not enter into the lube equation, It is where it comes from on the cracking tower. I'm using the toilet bowl wax in the original pearl lube with excellent results.

[john boy]

Toilet bowl wax rings ...
http://www.herchem.com/specs/johniring.PDF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_jelly
And a word of caution "Petroleum jelly weakens latex condoms, increasing the chance of rupture." 

[Wolfgang]

An interesting thread. . . . is there really any great advantage to using the mutton tallow ?   

I initially used good old / readily available / and CHEAP, . . . "Farmer John's"  lard . . . worked fine . . but was messy in the warm Cailfornia summer weather. 

I now use a 50/50 mix of toilet bowl wax and olive oil and am very happy wtih it. 

[rickk]

To the best of my insight, and I could be wrong, the tallow seems to be is what does the softening of the BP residue. The BeesWax and Paraffin seem to make a suitably not to hard, not to soft carrier for the tallow.

Tallow resembles crisco in consistancy, and the two waxes make the tallow a bit harder even while hot. They may add long term stability to the tallow as well as far as it degrading. I keep Tallow in the fridge, but once mixed up, I pour it in to cat food cans and don't bother to refrigerate it. It does not seem to degrade at all in that form. I don't know what would happen if tallow was left out of the fridge for a long time. What I do know is that by itself it does not smell good, but once mixed with wax it does not smell too bad at all.

However, this is all sort of a guess. Exactly which of the three ingredients does exactly what I am not 100% sure of. What I do know is that it is some sort of "classic" recipe and that it does seem to do what it is supposed to do well.

A few random side notes...

I pour it into metal cat food cans after mixed. It is easy to handle that way. I can stick a can into the BBQ grill for a few minutes (outside, where the smell floats away) to melt it. I drop in wads, let them soak up the lube, pick them out with a toothpick, set them down on waxed paper to cool and store in a ziplock baggie.

If you leave the mixed stuff where mice can find it, you will discover that they will eat the stuff like it is ice cream or something. They will leave you lots of little mice turds in payment.

The mixture looks a little bit sad... sort of a light yellow/white color. The wax candle making people sell this concentrated wax die for coloring candles. If you add a bit of dye to the mixture, you can make it all sorts of pretty colors.  

[hellgate]

Speaking of coloring lubes: I used to melt a piece of broken kid's crayon into my lubes todesignate each type. I used a blue crayon for the cold weather formula: 1:3 beeswax and olive oil. I now pretty much use deer tallow and olive oil in a 50/50 mix for my bullet lube. The BW/olive oil wadsn't wuite as good ad BW/lard or BW/deer tallow. A pound of lard is pretty cheap too.

[Wolfgang]

Rickk, . . .

"If you leave the mixed stuff where mice can find it, you will discover that they will eat the stuff like it is ice cream or something. They will leave you lots of little mice turds in payment."

I gather that you found that out from experience . . . 

[fourfingersofdeath]

Paladin, what the heck are the plumbers doing with the stuff in the UK? If they are using it as a soldering flux, in the US the flux has become very high-tech since the ban on lead solder in plumbing occurred.

The Mutton Tallow is used in conjunction with loose hemp strands to seal off the threads in the old cast iron water and gas pipes which used to be used in the 50s when I helped my Grandfather who was a plumber. He had a tripod mounted thread cutting die which I used to feed the pipes into and lubed them up with fatty tallow. When the thread was cut a female union or bend was fitted (we used to buy those already made up, thank goodness). The threads were sealed off with the hemp which had a generous amount of mutton fat/ tallow applied. The excess was then ceremoniously wiped on your pants. I used to do this job for my grandfather before I started school. I started school a few months before my 5th birthday.

I was very proud of my prowess cutting the threads, greasing and applying the hemp and asssembling them and helping hammer in the  spikes with the half ring that held the pipe against the wall. I was alos very good at preparing the oil based paints and knew how to apply just the right amount of Red Lead to get a good painting consistency. I have passed many lead level tests as an adult and my mother nearly fainted a few years ago when I told her about this. At the time a lot of people were converting to gas water heaters in theeir bathroom and I was ver ylight and used to walk across the slate tile roofs and solder lead sheet around the glue pipes with a hand held blowtorch and a big soldering iron. You would be locked up if you got a child to do that nowadays. I was at schoold a few years later when the new water heater was being installed. They didn't have enough laddders to cross the slate tiles and I took the blowtorch, soldering iron, flux and solder stich up and soldered it in. The head nun came out and had a cow, but the Priest  thought I was pretty cool and gave me 2 shillings, which bought a big ice cream and a big bag of lollies.

[Fairshake]

The reasons that mutton tallow works as a good thing for BP lubes is that for one it will not go rancid as many others do. It is also a lube in itself and explains the use by plumbers when threading pipe. It has a very long shelf life but will change if left in the Louisiana heat too long. I put some that I thought was lost because of the heat into the freezer and left it for about 2 weeks. It made perfect lube when used again. I tried everywhere to find some local to no avail. I know of one restaurant that sells a lot of the meat and that is my next stop. I received some elk, bear, and moose tallow from a friend and will try it on my next batch to see if I can see a difference. The mutton tallow that DBW sold for years smelled good enough to eat. I know that dogs, coons, opossum really take to it.It makes with my other ingrediants a very good lube that has never failed even in compressed 45-70 loadsfrom 34 in barrels. That is a good test for any lube although I never used it with low humidity places like the far west. The thing that most forget is that the sheep make lanolin which is great with BP shooting.