doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion Classic & Custom Single Barreled Sporting Rifles @ doublegunshop.com Cleaning the Classics.

Most of the work on both the early scopes and sights is finding or making the parts. When my eyes were a little better I have replaced crosswires, pulled many scopes apart and cleaned them but not sure I would tackle that today.

You can clean the bore and if it's bad enough that it will not shoot you have a couple of ways to go, re-barrel or re-bore. T

I suppose this is common knowledge,I clean lenses by first blowing and brushing with one of those gadgets made for camera lenses.After any possible grit is removed,I clean with alcohol,(rubbing),on a Q-tip.While hunting in the boondocks,this degrades to a hot breath and a wad of toilet paper.
I know better than to try and take a modern scope apart and haven't gotten the nerve up to do an early one.

Any secrets to removing stains on a Lyman slide, without abrasives?

I think this thread has about run it's course and can only think of one more thing.

If you are having a restoration job on your pre-war custom rifle get help before you send it off. Ask questions and find out what the rifle originally looked like.

A while back I looked at a early (1923) American custom rifle just back from a well know shop. The bolt was jeweled, should have been blued, the finish was like you would find on a bowling ally floor and the blue was wrong. Now the owner may have wanted it all that way and I have no way of knowing one way or the other but IMO the rifle lost half it value.

Sounds almost as bad as a proud gunowner that showed me 3 Civil War carbines on his wall, all reblued(hot salts) with sanded and gloss poly'd stocks. Egad, almost lost my lunch!

Mike, I know this post is for "cleaning", but I often see cleaned up guns with the sharp edges just not right on the wood. Same goes for metal, I guess, but are their any tricks or suggestions to keep the wood edges sharp and looking right during clean up ?

I've cleaned up a lot more metal than wood, hopefully one of the gunmakers who visit this forum will chime in.

I got a G&H rifle from our friend Terry years ago that was a mess, someone had rounded off most of the metal and then hot blued it. The bore was (is) perfect so I have no idea why this was done.

It was another case of not worth it to sent it out as the cost would have been many times the worth of the rifle. The wood was covered with a lot of dirty, what looked like true-oil, it was horrible. This was one of the first stocks I soaked for weeks in raw linseed oil and it came out fine. (I'll post pictures)

I started keeping track of my time refinishing the metal and threw out the list after I hit forty hours and still had a long way to go.

I used straight, many times, tool steel blank bits as the backing for my emery cloth. All the holes were rounded off and the rib was rounded over in many places. Just took a lot of time and nothing finer than 320 grit.

When I was done with the metal prep I sent it to Charles Danner for rust blue. The only mistake I really made was I should have had the caliber markings re-cut, I may still do this.

Again I hope we can get some pros to post on the subject.

Again, this has been an excellent thread. It has helped organize those random bits of knowledge floating around in my skull for 50+ years. I have a couple of questions still.

1. Besides super glue and epoxies, do you use either carpenters or a hide glue when repairing cracks? I know the new synthetics have advantages but wonder if there is still a place for the old varieties.
2. Flitz and SemiChrome are both very fine, as in grit, polishing compounds. Has anyone used either for bolts or the other bits that would have been polished or does it remove too much. My distant memory, the part that still works, recalls a Flitz seller at the local shows that sat polishing an old Colt DA revolver (prewar) at every show I ran into him at. His point was to prove that it didn't harm the original deep blue finish.

While I realize we have Ren Wax and other better protective products; I recall that in the 50s & 60s as a teen, my favorite protective coatings were Hoppes No.9, Rig and Johnson's paste floor wax for those seldom used pieces. Johnsons served me well on wood and metal for decades in the humid Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast environment.

[quote] All the holes were rounded off and the rib was rounded over in many places. [quote]

Mike,

Trying to picture the rib repair. Did you reconfigure the entire rib so as not to appear wavy after squaring the corners?

Thanks,
Ken

Ken,

I clamped a long piece of flat (square) stock along the top of the rib. I used steel tool bits with paper glued on the bottom and emery cloth glued on the side. 90% of the work and time was spent truing up the sides of the rib. I'm not sure I would take on such a job today with the memory of the last one ;-).

Mike,

Your a brave fellow!

Ken