Firearm Lubricant Scent: Does it Scare off Game?

Have you ever heard the saying, “the nose knows?”

Some of us have bigger noses than others, but in general animals have a far more advanced sense of smell than the humans who hunt them. If you’re a seasoned hunter, you know that your clothing, your choice of hunting products and your hunting spot all help determine whether you go home empty-handed or dine on fresh meat that evening.

How well can animals smell?

We humans don’t survive by our noses. Unless, of course, you’re a professional candle tester with a calibrated nose able to detect the faintest fragrance. In contrast, most animals use their noses for security.

How good is their sense of smell? It’s said the average dog can identify smells more than 1,000 better than us. Of course, we don’t hunt dogs. What about bears?

Of all the animals in the woods, bears have the best sense of smell and can detect a rotting carcass more than 20 miles away.

Animals boast far more olfactory receptors than humans, which explains the advantage.

Search the Internet and you’ll find evidence of a multi-million-dollar industry built upon products capable of covering or destroying scent. You can even buy an ozone-generating machine that’s marketed to help remove odor from your clothing. Your scent and the scent of your hunting products absolutely affect your success in the woods. If you just want to sit and watch the birds, then go ahead and smell like a trash heap. That’s more opportunities for guys like me.

Have you considered your firearm cleaner?

Animals can smell nearly anything, including the cleaner and lubricant on your firearms. Not to pick on one brand, but have you ever used the bore cleaner from a certain company that uses orange bottles? The scent permeates your house for days. If we can smell it, imagine what the animals you’re hunting can smell.

The AMSOIL advantage

For this reason, we designed AMSOIL firearm products with as little scent as possible. While it’s impossible to eliminate scent from cleaners and lubricants completely, it is possible to use chemicals that minimize scent.

Proper application can also reduce scent. Here are my recommendations:

• First, clean your firearm with our Firearm Cleaner & Protectant
  
  
• Next, wipe down your firearm with our 100% Synthetic Firearm Lubricant & Protectant. Apply just enough to coat the critical areas, but not so much that the fluid is running in all directions
• Finally, allow your firearm to sit untouched for a few days. This allows the products to vent and decrease scent

Will your firearm be completely scent-free? No, but don’t worry; I guarantee that your clothes or what you ate for breakfast will be more odoriferous than the products on your firearm.

Here’s how I recommend cleaning your firearm:

Video transcript: AMSOIL: How to Clean Your Shotgun

After a beautiful day of bird hunting with the pup, one of the important things to do is gun maintenance. You know, you can go out, shoot a couple boxes of shells. There’s a lot of spent powder in the barrel and the receiver. You need to get that stuff out of there so the next time you load some shells in and a bird gets up in front of you, you don’t go “click.” So what we want to do, I’m going to demonstrate here, take this gun apart, clean it up real good so the next time we go out she’s ready to go.

So we’ll spray the rag down here, start cleaning out the barrel. This is the kind of stuff that you’re getting out of the barrel, and this stuff is going to be found in your receiver too. This is the stuff that’s going to gum it up and slow it down. So after we put a nice pass through there with some solvent, we’re going to come back through with a copper brush, spray that with a little bit of solvent as well.

You’re going to run that brush through the barrel a few times. I’m going to go after it again with a little more solvent just to make sure that you get the barrel nice and clean. Typically run one last one through to remove any of the solvent that was in there before we go back after it with some lubrication. Look at the rag.

It’s pretty white. So now we’ve got a good clean barrel. We need to go after the receiver of this thing. So what I’m going to do is just take some of that same cleaner, wipe it on another clean rag.

In this gun, it’s a little harder to take the bolt out without pulling a few pins out, so we just kind of go after it. You can move the bolt back and forth, exposing different parts of the receiver. Make sure that you get that thing nice and clean. After we use our patch with solvent on the inside of the receiver to clean it out, we’re going to go back with a clean, dry one, try to wipe some of that residual solvent back out.

See if there’s any — see if there’s any residual powder left behind. As you can start seeing, a clean white rag goes in; a clean white rag comes out. The gun’s pretty clean. This gun needs to be lubricated now, so what we want to do is we want to make sure that we provide a nice thin film inside the receiver so you get a good smooth action, pull shells and eject shells really good.

And then we’re going to wipe the gun down, get all the dirt out of it from when it’s been out in the field. So, since we cleaned the barrel out, we’re going to want to go back in and give it a little bit of corrosion protection, and that’s where this lube is going to come into play. I’m going to do the same thing with the receiver now, put a little bit of this lubricant on a clean rag, just a thin film, give it a little bit of protection from sliding components back and forth as you’re using it and also to give it that layer of corrosion protection. Go back for a clean rag, a little bit more oil on there and just give a good clean wipe down to the exterior of the gun.

There we have it: a good clean gun, nice smooth action.

Remember – reducing your scent is important, but it’s not the be-all, end-all. Do your research and use the products you trust. Just don’t rely solely on “scent-free” products. A good hunter presumes he always carry a scent and uses wind direction to his advantage to not alarm his prey. Apply these tips and you might just find yourself enjoying fresh meat for dinner this evening.

Happy hunting!