The Screwdriver, the rifles worst enemy.
It's seems older used rifles come in two categories those with pristine unturned screws and those that are buggered. Seems you never find just one, sometimes every screw on the rifle has been trashed even the little pointer on the Lyman 48.
Not only are the heads messed up but many time you can see where the screwdriver blade skidded across both the metal and the wood.
You all know what a proper fitting screwdriver is about so will skip that, this is about fixing the bad ones.
At one time I used the lathe to clean up the heads of screws but they just never looked right. Now I put the screw into my padded vise slot up and use a fine flat file to clean up the head. I then the same file with 320 grit paper and polish in the same direction as the slot. For really bad ones I have a set of screw slot files which are "Safe" on the sides.
I then drop the screw head down into a little Oxpho-blue in a small glass bottle and let it sit, clean with steel wool and oil. Over the years I have been tempted to get a dozen sets of 1903 screws and rust blue them but have not.
One reason so many screw heads are messed up is the screw slot was not cleaned before the screwdriver was used. I use a set of dental cleaning picks to get all of the crud out of the slot before I ever reach for the screwdriver.
