My firearms project blog
Hey guys.
I was watching a gunsmithing video on cleaning bores, put out by AGI. (American gunsmithing Institute), and they have a pretty neat rig you can build with a minimum of money/supplies.
Get a steel or aluminum cleaning rod that extends the length of your barrel. At about 4 inch intervals, wrap a little electric tape around the rod. This will prevent it from ever coming in contact with your barrel. Next, get some speaker wire, split it down the middle, and tape one of the wires to the end of your cleaning rod.
(This will be connected to the negative end of your battery.)
Next get some household ammonia. You can pick it up at the dollar store for about 1 gal. (It's a diluted mix of water and ammonia. I think about 25%)
Make a plug to fill the end of your barrel. You can put whatever you need to keep it from leaking. I used a spent cartridge, with tape wrapped around the end to prevent it from falling out and to make it watertight.
Insert the cleaning rod into the bore, and fill the remainder up with ammonia. (I use a eye dropper to be precise.) Careful with the ammonia, it will start bubbling when you hook the battery up to it. You might need to top it off every couple of minutes.
Finally, you'll need 1 "D" cell battery. Connect the positive side of the battery to the other speaker wire and tape that wire to a metal part of your reciever or maybe even a sight. Tape the NEGATIVE side of the battery to the wire running to the taped up cleaning rod.
Wait about 15-30 minutes, and disconnect the battery and take the rod out. You will notice rust and/or brass fouling on the rod. You can wipe it off with steel wool/patches , and if the bore is still rusty/fouled, you can reinsert the rod and refill with ammonia.
Make sure to wear eye-pro and gloves when handling ammonia, and do this in a ventilated area, or outdoors. I've found that in heavily fouled barrels with a lot of rusting/pitting, it can take a couple treatments. The diluted ammonia doesn't hurt your bore either. Just make sure to re-oil your bore and rinse with hot hot water and clean with clean patches to dry up any water.
When you oil a barrel, you really need to slather a lot of oil on your rifleing. Even in a soaked patch, it won't fully cover your bore, and that's how the original rusting starts. When a barrel is put away in storage, and it's not fully coated on the inside with oil.
P.S. If you like spending money, there's something put our by brownells that is basically the exact rig I wrote about, but it costs about 145.00. LOL. I'll stick to my D cell and cleaning rod though....
Have the bore blown out to 45 cal. I have seen, in a book, a Finn Mosin that was bored out to 45 and that was one mean looking round! It was in a Gun Digest article they had all diferent kinds of Finn Mosins that were necked up and down. Really interesting!
The solid soft lead bullet is undoubtably the best and most satisfactory expanding bullet that has ever been designed. It invariably mushrooms perfectly, and never breaks up. With the metal base that is essential for velocities of 2000 f.s. and upwards to protect the naked base, these metal-based soft lead bullets are splendid.
John Taylor - "African Rifles and Cartridges"
Forget everything you know about loading jacketed bullets. This is a whole new ball game!
My firearms project blog
What SuperMag said! It probably looks much worse than it is.
Decades ago, I accidentally neglected a Mossberg pump shotgun by leaving it in a closet for a couple years in a shack in the woods in NC - very hot and humid! I was sad to see it all brown and crusty looking, but glad to see how easily it cleaned up with OOO steel wool and oil.
Iron oxide (rust) is about fourteen times more voluminous than the iron it takes to make it. That's why when you knock off a piece of rust it only leaves a relatively small pit where the iron came from that made it.
Like the man said - steel bore brush. And you might try brushing bore with soapy water (to remove oil-based products), rinse in hot water, dry, then letting some rust dissolver like Navel Jelly or similar stand on it for 15 minutes (use a .22 cal bore mop to apply thick layer of jelly), hot water rinse, bore brush with soapy water, rinse, dry, and repeat several times.
Then one of the compound lapping processes described above should restore the bore shine - small, shallow pitting probably isn’t much of a big deal.
Note that bluing is an iron oxide process and so rust remover will remove bluing.
Isn't Norm Johnson in Wisconsin? The author of so many firearms related articles?
BP | Bronze Point | IMR | Improved Military Rifle | PTD | Pointed |
BR | Bench Rest | M | Magnum | RN | Round Nose |
BT | Boat Tail | PL | Power-Lokt | SP | Soft Point |
C | Compressed Charge | PR | Primer | SPCL | Soft Point "Core-Lokt" |
HP | Hollow Point | PSPCL | Pointed Soft Point "Core Lokt" | C.O.L. | Cartridge Overall Length |
PSP | Pointed Soft Point | Spz | Spitzer Point | SBT | Spitzer Boat Tail |
LRN | Lead Round Nose | LWC | Lead Wad Cutter | LSWC | Lead Semi Wad Cutter |
GC | Gas Check |