I bought a used and abused M1861 Springfield rifle-musket at the gunstore….badly rusted looking bore...hard/burned powder fouling 1/4 inch deep at the base of bore deep enough it had plugged-off the flash-hole. The butt-plate was terribly rusted too.
The gun is otherwise ok...good stock...external finish fine excepting the butt-plate. Lock and hammer barrel exterior have some rust stains and patina but are still more or less 'bright'. Some parts are suspiciously bright...like the barrel bands and stock nose-cap...the trigger guard is also clean and shiney. Did Euroarms use some stainless steel parts on their muskets??
Who actually made the Italian Euroarms guns?...The thing has a BS date code which should be 2002 vintage
The bore...he bore looked just awful! I scraped on it with a bore brush and Hoppe's and CLP for a bit...then some steel wool and it helped some. That's when I discovered WD-40 'Rust Removal Soak'....I mean really! That stuff is awesome! I threw some rusty tools in a pan plus the rifle's butt-plate and covered in the WD-40 soak. I plugged the nipple with wax and filled the barrel with soak too. Let the WD-40 soak work for an hour or two and dumped the barrel...swabbed the bore and there was a huge difference!....got rifling all the way down! I did the 1-2 hour bore soak thing three times and have a clean bore with some pitting..however it's shiney and looks serviceable now. Vast difference from the red rusted crusty hole it was before.
The soak stuff cleaned my tools and the butt-plate nicely too(left over-night in soak).