"New" Mosin Nagant- I hate cosmoline!

[Beaverhunter2]

I've had a Finn 91/30 for several years and its a pretty decent shooter with J-words. I'm planning to start casting for it soon.

I just picked up a Russian round receiver arsenal rework (cheap) thinking to let my son play it. It's had a rougher life than the Finn so he may get mine while I take the newer one. It's got a 1 1/2" counterbore and the rifling's a bit worn. The rest of it looks pretty good for a Russian rifle made in 1942 while they were trying keep the Nazi's at bay.

I've been fighting the cosmoline for three days using Hoppe's #9, mineral spirits (that's what worked on the Finn) and now, gasoline. I've worn out one .32 cal bronze brush and two .357s (yes- .357s) and used up a 1/2 pound bag of patches. The lands are bright, the grooves are dark, rough and still have a layer of cosmoline at the bottom that laughs at me everytime I look down the bore.

These really are some interesting rifles. Solid, basic, effective. Exactly what you'd expect from a country barely hanging on in the midst of the biggest war in history. I know there are literally millions of them out there. Still, it amazes me that you can get the rifle for less than I'll pay for the mold to cast boolits for it!

I'm thinking of taking the rifle to the range and trying to loosen it up with some mil-surp ammo I have. Any suggestions on this last bit of cosmoline before I turn it into a tomato stake? While we're at it, any recommended molds for M-Ns?

Thanks, guys!

John

[piwo]

Steam works well for removing cosmoline for the metal parts as well. I've got 5 variants of Three Line Rifles (Mosin Nagant) but never casted for them, though I believe cast is the answer for these rifles. They have an "inbetween" bore diameter, and cast could fix this well!

[Ghugly]

My son and I are in the middle of the same mess. After wearing out 3 brushes and both of us, we went to the local hardware store and cobbled together an electronic bore cleaner for 8 or 10 bucks and gave it a go. It cleaned an unbelievable glob of black gooey crud and copper out of it. Feeling really good and confident, we went after it with the brushes and patches only to find out it wasn't any different from the first go around.

We will get there.

[BigDaddie]

Have u tried an electric bore cleaner??? Checkout surplusrifle.com for directions on ow to make one. You will be very surprised by the results.

[Beaverhunter2]

Thanks, BD! I'll check it out!

John

[TNsailorman]

Some get almost hostile with me each time I suggest "Simple Green" cleaner because ("gasp" ) you have to use hot water. However, I have not found anything that will remove dried grease or cosmoline as fast and as simply as this stuff. Take the metal out of the stock, disassymble and spray down good with Simple Green and let set for about 30 minutes. Take a old tooth brush and brush away any stubborn grease. Soak again in fairly hot water for 10 or 15 minutes. Wipe dry with a cloth or paper towels or blow dry with compressed air or a hair dryer. Be sure to oil down and wipe thoroughly each and every piece with a good oil such as Break Free and re-assymble and your in business with a clean rifle. This sounds like a lot of work but it goes pretty fast. I have cleaned quite a few old surplus rifle from all over the world with this method and it works. It will even work on a wooden stock to get the soaked-in grease out. Just don't soak the stock in hot water, just wipe it down with hot water and a tooth brush or other non metal brush.

[Kraschenbirn]

+1 on Simple Green, hot water, and bristle brush. Have used that combination on all my Milsurp stocks as well as for removing leftover stripper gunk after scraping down loosened poly-finishes from commercial stocks.

Bill

[acsteve]

I like bore scrubber in the arisol can. I do use a big can per gun and seems to be acetone or simimlar. It really breaks up grease. It works for me

[corvette8n]

I took the action out of the stock and poured boiling water down the bore and over the action, did that a could of times. I also set the stock out in the hot sun to cook out the cosmo.

[HBAR2989]

I use castrol superclean. We clean some realy nasty compressors with it at the shop. This will even clean the stocks down to bare wood. Just wear some kind of protective gloves.

[mike in co]

for the bore:
naval jelly and ss bore brush.

i had several offending rifles, which surfaced to very good or better with this process.

30-40 strokes, soak 5-10 min, patch out, do it again.

the only time to use a ss brush in a bore.

mike in co

[twotrees]

Ez-Off oven cleaner and a water rinse. You'll raise the grain but some good stock oil, after a 4 O' steel wool rub will take care of that.

On Blued parts,I don't think so, cause there is Lye in it and that will mess up blueing.

Good Luck.

[Ricochet]

Oven cleaner will take the shellac (which is the original and proper finish for all Russian Mosins) right off, and the lye will eventually deteriorate the wood. I have a Yugo M24/47 that was cleaned with caustic cleaner before I got it. Took off all the oil finish and turned the walnut wood the same greenish black that iron pills turn stool to. Best I could do was to stain it with a red mahogany dye stain before reoiling it. It's essentially black now.

[Gunfreak25]

As said above. ABSOLUTELY DO NOT use oven cleaner on your rifles stock. Not only is it horrible for wood fibers, but it will strip the finish right off your stock. And then some! If you want instructions on how to properly care for the wood, let me know and I will post them. The lye in oven cleaner may burn your stock, turning it a green or gray color. You will be sickened by it!

For the metal, mineral spirits will remove all of the cosmoline very quickly. Use a small plastic dish and fill it with some MS, and put your small parts in there to soak for a little bit, take them out and toothbrush them with more mineral spirits. For the action, do the same thing, I fill a kitty litter pan full of a little mineral spirits, stand up the action verticaly, just use a paint brush dipped in the MS and brush it all up and down the metal. It will drip down back into the kitty litter pan for you to keep using until it gets too greasy.

For the bore, I am the one who wrote the article on making and using an electrolysis tank. The method also applies to making your own electronic bore cleaner. Here's the post to the tank: http://www.surplusrifleforum.com/vie...p?f=80&t=62728

To make an electronic bore cleaner (EBC for short). It's basically the same as using the electro tank, except your using 1 single long PLAIN steel rod in the barrel. First you will need to buy a rubber stopper at lowes, a few pennies that's all. Drill a hole in stopper just deep enough to stick the end of the rod into. Next stick the plug in the chamber, tap it in good. For the rod, a 4 foot long plain steel 3/16" rod works great. You will also want to pick up 1 rubber O ring that will fit around the rod, but is still smaller than the bore diameter of your rifle. This keeps the rod from contacting the barrel, if it does, it will short out and you will need to find a new source of electricity to power your EBC. Anyway, after plugging the chamber, stick your rod down the barrel, making sure to center the end of the rod in the hole drilled in the rubber plug. This will keep it centered in the bore, then fill up the barrel with a 50/50 mixture of ammonia and water (do this outside, the fumes are unbearable). Then slip on your rubber 0 ring at the top of the rod, about an inch into the muzzle. Use a multi meter to make sure everythings okay. After checking that, hook up your power source. I use a cell phone charger with the end cutoff the cord to expose the positive and negative wires. The positive will have a red sheath over it, or a black sheath with a white stripe down it. Hook up the positive to the steel rod, and the negative to the barrel, or the front sight globe works fine. Then plug it in and let it work for an hour. You may want to do this with the action removed from the stock. Sometimes the Ammonia will foam out of the muzzle, and if it gets on your rifles stock finish it will eat it off. After it's done, unplug your wall charger, remove the wires, and yank out the rod from the barrel, there should be significant copper and lead fouling stuck to it. Steel wool this off, and oil your rod to keep it from rusting. Next pour the contents of what's in your barrel into a container to dispose of later (or the toilet works). If you did it right, alot of black crud will dump out of the barrel. This is loosened lead fouling. Next use a cleaning rod to pop out the chamber plug, quickly pass a tight fitting patch down the barrel to remove the loosened fouling, then scrub the bore like any normal cleaning with your favorite bore cleaner and .30 cal brush, then pass another patch down the barrel, oil, and now your done. If the barrel is pitted, the pitting will not go away, but the grooves will hopefully appear deeper.

[3rptr]

Thanks Gunfreak!

That will help us a lot.

3rptr

[Dan Cash]

Some get almost hostile with me each time I suggest "Simple Green" cleaner because ("gasp" ) you have to use hot water. However, I have not found anything that will remove dried grease or cosmoline as fast and as simply as this stuff. Take the metal out of the stock, disassymble and spray down good with Simple Green and let set for about 30 minutes. Take a old tooth brush and brush away any stubborn grease. Soak again in fairly hot water for 10 or 15 minutes. Wipe dry with a cloth or paper towels or blow dry with compressed air or a hair dryer. Be sure to oil down and wipe thoroughly each and every piece with a good oil such as Break Free and re-assymble and your in business with a clean rifle. This sounds like a lot of work but it goes pretty fast. I have cleaned quite a few old surplus rifle from all over the world with this method and it works. It will even work on a wooden stock to get the soaked-in grease out. Just don't soak the stock in hot water, just wipe it down with hot water and a tooth brush or other non metal brush.

I have not tried Simple Green in this application but it should work. Last cosmoline gun I cleaned was done with heavy detergent and boiling water. Boil the metal components and dip the stock long enough to loosen the cosmoline then wipe dry. Gasoline finished the job on the stock. It took about an hour or hour an a half; gun was a #4 SMLE.

[Beaverhunter2]

The stock on my 91/30 isn't too bad as far as oil/cosmo. It does have a few "battle scars" that I'll probably just leave. The outside and the small parts cleaned up with mineral spirits. The bore is my challenge. I think I'll try the EBC.

Thanks to all for the advice!

John

[Gunfreak25]

I'm sorry, but "simple green" degreaser is NOT appropriate for use on gunstocks.
Many of these degreasers will only remove the very surface oil off of a stock. Not only that but they also require you to soak the stock in water to get the chemicals out of it. Any chemicals left in there can potentially harm the stock over time. Rule of thumb when it comes to cleaners and wood, if it's not designed for wood work, don't use it! Using a "hair dryer" to dry the stock is NOT good at all either. If a stock is wet and is exposed to too much heat, the stock may form hairline cracks.
Trust me, i've been that route and it's not fun. After getting a stock wet, the only way to let it dry is at room temp for as little as 48 hours depending on how wet it is.
As for using chemicals to remove the hard glossy built up surface oil from a stock, the best thing to use is a product by Klean Strip called StripX. It's designed for use on wood so you don't have to worry about it burning the stock or harming the natural glue found in a stocks wood fibers. I heavily brush on the StripX, let it sit 20 minutes, then use a hard plastic scraper to scrap off the loosened up gunk.
Then you'll want to use a hard bristle nylon brush with the stock hovering over a source of running water. You don't want to soak the stock, but get it wet enough and scrub enough to where the slimy feeling from the Stripx is gone. Then let the stock sit at room temp for 30 minutes. By this time the very surface of the stock isn't so wet, and you can tell if it needs another go with the stripper. Let the stock dry 48 hours to be safe. I like to use this StripX method on a stock that has a hard layer of surface oil built up on it. The StripX will clean the very surface of the wood, removing this layer of hard oil, making it much eaiser to weep out the oil later. So this Stripx step is completely up to you.


If you need to remove cosmoline from a gunstock, the absolute best way to remove it is with heat. Slow, gentle heat. Heat is what was used to put it into the stock, heat is what can be used to remove it. Your stock has been soaking in oil for 60+ years, if you do it correctly you can remove most of the cosmoline in just weeks. Yes, that's right. Weeks. Truth is that's how long it takes to remove the oil PROPERLY from a gunstock. If yor stock is small enough, and your oven is big enough, and the wife will let you, you can put your stock in the oven at the lowest temperature possible. Mine has a warm setting of 175, perfect for cosmo removal.
You will want to lay down some foil on the bottom rack to catch any oil drips. Remove the stock from the oven every 20 minutes, and wipe it down with some paper towels to soak up the oil. Then back in the oven it goes. You will want to keep up this routine until it stops weeping oil. When it's reached this point, wipe down the stock one last time, and let it cool to room temp. Then use some 0000 steel wool and denatured alcohol to scrub the stock's surface. Do it in small area's at a time, scrub, then quickly wipe the area clean with paper towel. Repeat this until you've scrubbed the whole surface of the stock. This alcohol scrub method will further remove any cosmoline in your stocks surface. Now you will want to let your stock sit for a couple days. You will notice it will get dark again, this is the oil rising back up the surface. After sitting for 4 or 5 days, it's ready for the oven treatment again. After it's stopped weeping in the oven, take it out, and give it another alcohol scrub, then let it sit another 5 days. Depending on how oil soaked a stock is, this may be all that's needed to do a good refinish job. But for heavily oil soaked stocks like that on some Enfields or Yugo SKS stocks, you will want to continue the oven weeping, alcohol scrubbing, and 5 day wait period until you've noticed the stock has simple stopped weeping oil. Now your wondering to yourself. "Hey I can make my stock look clean in just a couple hours with some oven cleaner or purple power scrubbed onto the stock then washed out". Yes your right, this will work quicker. But let me say it again, you'll only be cleaning the very surface of your stock, these cleaners are not only harsh on wood fibers, but they don't get down into the stock, deep where the oil lies. What happens is when after using these cleaners, people will see the stock clean, and begin the finishing process of applying some form of linseed oil, polyurethane, or other varnish.What they are doing is trapping the oil in the stock. Later on this may cause hard finishes to chip or flake off with time, or with oil finishes, they will just weep out when the gun gets hot.

Now, if your stock won't fit into the oven, you can put it on the dashboard of your car in the hot sun. I like to wrap the stock in paper towels, then put it inside a black trashbag, then put it on the dash. Only because the heat is not as intense as the oven, I remove it and wipe it down every 45 minutes. When it's done weeping oil, you'll want to do the alcohol scrub technique again. And just repeat all the above instructions until your stock is clean.

Remember, there are 100 ways to refinish a gunstock. However there are few ways to properly refinish a stock with appropriate methods. The person who taught me all about the stock work I know today is a good friend of mine. He's been doing stock work for over 22 years, and he was taught all he knew from an old gunsmith. I took the time to type this, hoping the information would help those in need of removing oil from a stock. But should any of you just do "what you want to do" and fail to listen to my advice, don't come posting to me when your stock won't come out right.

[Shiloh]

Some get almost hostile with me each time I suggest "Simple Green" cleaner because ("gasp" ) you have to use hot water.

I've used scalding hot water and Mr. Clean. Chased this with Ed's Red on brushes and patches when the bulk of the Com-Bloc grease was removed. Worked for me.

Shiloh

[Gunfreak25]

The dishwasher works very well for the barreled action and larger parts as well.