General observation: what happened to cleaning practices in the 1880s?

[jonk]

Most black powder cartridge guns I've examined and owned have shiny bright bores, even if the outside of the gun is pretty poor. At worst, some very light pitting or frosting. But generally these guns seemed to have a good serviceable bore. In my own experience I have a Mauser 71, 71/84, 3 Vetterlis, a Kropatschek, and a trapdoor. All have bright shiny sharp bores. Obviously, they were cleaned promptly after shooting dirty old black powder with hot soap and water, or something similar.

However, as soon as we cross into the smokeless era, we start to see very pitted, corroded, rusty, dark bores. Many such guns are fresh from the importers, meaning it isn't some latter day shooter ignorant of corrosive primers who mistreated them, but apparently the soldiers themselves.

What happened during this transition? I know the Brits emphasized pouring a pint of boiling water down the enfield's bore (and most Enfields have a sharp, shiny bore as a result) and the US issued a bore cleaner effective on corrosive primers, but what about everyone else? Did common sense about cleaning go out the window with smokeless powder?

[oldhickory]

My guess is they figured they didn't need to clean them after firing smokeless loads not realizing that the primers were still very much corrosive.

[madsenshooter]

It took some time for a fellow from the Bureau of Mines, to figure out just what was making rifle bores rust, though they'd been cleaned. This wasn't until 1922, and we'd been using corrosive primers since 1892. The Germans were ahead of us on figuring that out, their first noncorrosive primers were made in 1901, and the Swiss in 1911. All these tidbits are from Hatcher's Notebook. The same corrosive primers were used in blackpowder arms, but the fouling, according to Hatcher, completely masked, diluted and washed away the small amount of solid material left by primer combustion. In smokeless powder firearms the material deposited by primer combustion had a fine clear place to land.

[jonk]

I can buy the idea that in the 1800s, hygroscopy (if that is a word) was not well understood; surely they knew what chemicals were going into the primers but perhaps they didn't understand what they did; and it was a non issue as they knew that black powder residue itself was an issue and treated it accordingly- and the same routine that removed black powder residue also worked on the corrosive primers as a nice side effect.

That should be no excuse however for WW2 guns witnessed with sewer pipe bores. Even if it took some nations awhile to figure out what was happening.

I still rather suspect the solution was understood to be hot water, even if the cause of the problem was not. I've seen cleaning funnels for Enfields, Turk Mausers, and M95 steyrs that fit the chamber or over the muzzle. Some of these clearly date to the pre WW1 era and on from there.

[KCSO]

If you read any of the old books you will find that there was a period when shooters really didn't know how to clean their guns. The new smoklless powder flouling would just wipe out of the bore leaving it looking clean and the corrosive priming still lurked in the grooves to rust later. Untill somone discovered that the old water based method of cleaning was still needed for smokless powder, not to remove residue but to remove primer salts, folks were running any oily patch through, looking down a CLEAN bore and putting the gun away. Stewart Edward White goes into great detail about teaching his safari gun bearers proper cleaning proceedure for his guns including a wash out with boiling water. In addition metal fouling was raising it's ugly head and was simply not understood. Whelan goes into this in detail also. Currently we have a whole generation who have no idea what corrosive ammo is and boy you should see the surplus guns they bring in. I just tried to clean up a Finnish Mosin that had been left 3 months w/o cleaning and was subject to corossive ammo. The outside was 99% perfect and the bore was ruined. The owner said,"well I was told not to clean my 22 unless it was really dirty".

[NickSS]

There is a lot of truth about cleaning bores during about the first 30 years of so of the smokeless powder era but most of the surplus on the market today is coming in from eastern Europe were the were used in war and peace for years with corrosive priming. I have read a lot of books concerning combat use of weapons and frankly most soldiers at the front were very hit of miss about cleaning their weapons. Most only cleaned them when they were rotated out of combat. Given the poor training of most eastern European armies during WW II they might have cleaned them even less than our GIs did. On top of that a lot of the rifles we got in the import stream were probably battle field pickups. They were sent back from the front and held until some arsenal guy got a chance to inspect and clean it. They probably all had rusty bores by then.

[jonk]

I had considred that Nick, and I agree. Russian peasant soldiers barely knew how to operate their firearm in many cases, much less understand WHY they needed to clean it.

The Germans though, until we got to 45 and the last ditch efforts with Volkssturm and such, surely knew about this and trained their soldiers accordingly. Yet I've seen non Russian capture mausers with pretty poor bores.

I just don't get it. As a soldier, your rifle hitting what you aimed it at could quite literally could mean the difference between life and death. All it would (should) have taken was one sergeant in training to tell his men this, and point out that a lack of cleaning would lead to poor accuracy. Take care of the weapon that's gonna save my life? Sure!

Again, I get it why eastern armies, partisans, etc. would have issues and even western armies in the late 1800s early 1900s if they just didn't know, but that doesn't excuse it really.