doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com ? about SKB 150

My wife shoots a SKB 150 20 ga and we usually use light reloads. Today we had several problems where the 2nd barrel wouldn't fire. I am pretty sure it is due to the light reloads not tripping the inertia system. The gun doesn't have a recoil pad so that isn't the problem.
Has anyone altered or adjusted their similar gun to accommodate light loads. At the end of the round she tried my 20 ga W 21 and hit 2 of the tougher targets on the course and said wow it swings itself.

Might be time for a strip and clean before making adjustments to the trigger. There is an order to these things. My boy and I shot trap this afternoon, we had the barrels of both guns so hot you couldn’t touch them. High eighties for temps. Perhaps some junk made it into the workings of your single trigger?

Best,
Ted

take off the stock, very easy to do, not like a Parker, spray it up good with WD-40 and you should be good to go for 10 more years.

Dirty Harry

take off the stock, very easy to do, not like a Parker, spray it up good with WD-40 and you should be good to go for 10 to 20 more years.

Dirty Harry

That ain’t how I would do it. WD-40 isn’t oil. Spraying WD-40 into a mechanism isn’t cleaning.

Best,
Ted

^^^^ I am ignoring this user^^^^----------One thing to remember about using WD-40, Harry. It is a mild solvent and degreaser and was made for breaking down grease and grime as you say. But since it is a light oil, you are supposed to clean the oil off because it will leave a film. I would then oil it with a good oil- something like Clenzoil. That is what I did recently with my Remington 552 BDL deluxe that I hadn't cleaned in years. Now it works as slick as a whistle. Good luck and thanks for posting.

SKB's are popular with the cowboy shooters and many have had a gunsmith convert the gun to mechanical reset rather then inertia.

Having said that, if it only happens sometimes, look for other possibilities, including maybe upping the load just a little more, gunk inside or maybe the gun isn't being held tight enough to the shoulder on every shot.

Problem solved, give her the 21

the fact that she likes your 21 is a good sign...

Good solution! Then you have an excuse to go on the hunt for a replacement 21 for yourself:)

Enablers....

Best,
Ted

I’m with Ted.

If you have ever sprayed a mechanism with WD-40, you will see after a time it dries to a sticky waxy substance.

That’s exactly the opposite of what you want inside of a shotgun action that is probably starting to show some wear.

I might use WD-40 as a water displacer on a duck gun but not when it’s cold.

If you are up to it, carefully take the stock off and clean the action with a can of brake clean, let it dry, and then lightly oil, the pivot points with a proper machine oil.

When you crack it open, you will probably be quite surprised at how much crap blows back through the firing pin holes.

take apart spray with Ballistol and move on. Great stuff. I put that sh** on everything.

The only product that is far WORSE than WD-40 in *this* respect, is Ballistol. Believe over 100 years of bad experience of German gunsmiths.

The naivité and gullibility of US Americans vis-à-vis P.T. Barnum'esque advertizements continues to astound me...

Regards from the birthland of Ballistol,
Carcano

Say its not so. Been using it for 30 years. I'm not alone.

I don't think it matters what you use to clean the insides of a gun with as long as it is clean of residue before you oil it with a good lubricant before you put it back together. I cringed when someone mentioned brake cleaner. You spill that on a gun stock and take the varnish off of a gun stock and it would be something to regret. Mine came out just fine brushing it with a gun cleaner and final finish of Clenzoil. But-to each his own. Good luck.

If a person is smart enough to clean a metal action with brake cleaner, their greatest fear is probably getting bug spray on their stock. Not cleaning their action.

WD-40 is a water displacing lubricant and rust preventive, not a solvent or especially, not a degreaser. Mineral spirits, acetone, lacquer thinner etc are solvents. I've never had any problems with WD-40, but I've only been using it for 60 years.
JR

I clean my actions one way now, with an ultrasonic cleaner. I wish I had owned one many years ago.

After a couple cycles in it, with heated solution, I dry it quickly and thoroughly with a hot air gun, then lube appropriately. And, there's not a can of WD-40 on my property. The ONLY thing I cannot improve on WD-40's ability to do is displace moisture. For everything else there are better products.

Maybe just take it to your gunsmith

As I said earlier, I would use a gun solvent myself but WD-40 would probably work as a cleaner. You can always use a brass brush if you need to. But to each his own. I am sure everyone likes the way they do it after years of cleaning a gun, right? Can't go wrong with doing it your own way.

If you only shoot when it’s warm, maybe.

If you want your guns to malfunction, just spray them up with WD-40 and go hunting when it’s cold.

WD-40 leaves a waxy sticky material that collects more shit, not less. And when it’s cold, good luck with your firing pins.

When I’m cleaning a shotgun barrel, there is usually a can of WD-40 on my bench. Right next to that is a proper bore solvent, Outers and Remington brands are there today. I toot some compressed air down the bore, which, removes some of the dry crud. Then, mostly because it has a tube to direct the spray, I hit the bore with WD-40, and run a patch or three down the bore. I spray the bore cleaner (both come in pump plastic bottles) down the barrel, brush with a bronze brush, and finish when the patches come clean. I never oil a bore. The guy who ran the French proof house in St. Etienne explained why I should never do that, and, I don’t.

Nobody ever told me to use WD-40 to initiate bore cleaning. I think I just started doing it because it was handy, moved the heavy crud, and allowed me to see the bore in a bit cleaner fashion when I got busy with actual bore solvent, and a bronze brush.

I will use a bit of WD-40 on a clean cloth to wipe fingerprints off of blued metal. It actually gets used for very little in my world, and a can runs most of a decade if the pressure doesn’t seep out of it over time. A few have done that to me.

If you are taking a stock off a double, hosing it with WD-40, and calling it cleaned and lubed, you need to up your game. It isn’t clean, or, lubed.

Best,
Ted

My daughter has this same problem with a 20 gauge Browning Superposed that she's been shooting for several years. That gun is about the same weight as your wife's Model 150 SKB.

She's 5' 8" and about 130 lbs. The 3/4 oz. loads I loaded for her almost never trip the inertia trigger. Even 7/8 oz. loads don't work all the time.

She's moving to a 28", 12 gauge Superposed this year; we'll see how that works. I also have a 2nd 28" 12 gauge Superposed on the way - this one a Fabrique Nationale Grade C1 - that was made in 1975 and should have the mechanical trigger instead of the inertia trigger. One or the other should help the problem, and longer barrels and extra pounds should smooth out her swing.

As to WD-40. When I had my gunshop in the late 70s I had a number of duck guns come in that weren't firing the second shot. The culprit was WD-40, hunters after a day of hunting would spray the stuff in the action or alongside the trigger and the stuff turned to a brown goo eventually thickening to where triggers didn't reset or fire. Mineral spirits cleaned them up for me then light sewing machine oil sparingly worked well.

I have a German commercial sewing machine that I converted to treadle. I left it at my mom's when I got divorced, my sister lubed it with WD-40 and kept using the stuff on it because it got harder and harder to use. After I brought it home it took years of cleaning to get that crap out of it.

I've been using WD-40 for years... but the only place I ever used it on my guns was for a quick spray and wipe of dirty or wet shotgun bores.

For cleaning an action or trigger assembly, there are much better products than WD-40. Same thing goes for lightly lubricating and protection afterward. There are plenty of good gun oils available, and the amount needed is so small that the cost per gun per year is negligible.

WD-40 absolutely will leave a waxy buildup that can make things sticky over time. It may have more of a tendency to do this than other lubes. But the fact is, any oil or grease will dry out or oxidize over time. They will all thicken and collect dust and dirt much easier than a perfectly clean surface too. The old dried out dirty stuff should be removed before just adding more. In sub-zero temperatures, even a small excess of lube will thicken and create the drag that can slow down a firing pin.

The military has for years used firearm maintenance products with the abbreviation CLP. They are all in one products that are used in the field to Clean-Lubricate-and Protect. They are a compromise. CLP products won't clean and dissolve old grunge and dried lube as well as something like Brake Cleaner, Carb and Choke Cleaner, or Shooter's Choice. But they also won't leave parts so clean and dry that they quickly flash rust either. It shouldn't take a lot of intelligence to know that these stronger solvents could damage a stock finish, which is why guns are stripped instead of indiscriminately spraying them on everything.

So the problem isn't so much with WD-40. The real problem is people who use it incorrectly, and in places where there are better products to use.

so update, the skb action is clean and lightly oiled. The same shells function fine in my Rizzini BR550, which is also a inertia trigger and the skb functions fine with factory shells. I am just going to go back up 1 die on my MEC press. My gunsmith says I could put a lighter spring in but it doesn't look easy to access and not worth the gunsmith $ in my view.

Don’t use CLP on anything related to a shotgun.
Or anything else you value

It is designed to creep. Lubricating the actions of military semi autos.
It will creep everywhere
Because that’s what it was designed to do. Protecting every nook and cranny inside of military semi auto firearms.

If you want oil everywhere (or whatever concoction CLP is ) put it on your shotgun.

In no time, it will coat the inside of all of your cases, all of your fancy Frenched display cases, and any place else that your gun rested even momentarily.

Barrel down in a beautiful walnut display case with red felt against the barrel ends? Bingo.

But down in a rifle storage locker, with a Sorbothane recoil pad? Bingo.

It creepily creeps into every creepy creepable creep like place.

Unless you’re hunting Ducks in Afghanistan, I wouldn’t recommend it.

You’ll have a whole lot better results just keeping a tub of pre-lubricated rem oil wipes in the cup pocket of your truck door.

Without all the creeping.

I'll add to the CLP story. When I was in the National Guard in the early 1990's we had M-16's from Vietnam. When the weather was bad or the training budget was low, we would have a weapons cleaning day or weekend where we would clean all the M-16's & other weapons. We would clean the M-16's with CLP and after very carefully scrutiny from the armorer, the guns would go back in racks when clean. A couple of months after a weapons cleaning weekend the armory got inspected and all the weapons cleaned with CLP had dirty barrels. The CLP had pulled more carbon fouling from the barrels as the guns sat in the armory racks.

More plainly the CLP will continue to pull carbon fouling out of the barrel until there isn't any more. Sounds great in theory, in practice, with an old gun, you could clean it every week for a year and the CLP will still pull fouling out of the steel.

I don't really see any downside to a gun barrel cleaning product that continues to clean out carbon fouling until none remains. In fact, one of the big fears with older vintage guns that may have pitted barrels is that even aggressive cleaning and scrubbing may not get all of the accumulated fouling and residue out of the bottom of the pits. Pits usually aren't as deep as they look, but nobody wants them to get any worse.

I've used a military surplus CLP and a couple commercial CLP products, and never had any issue with them creeping into the wood or anyplace they didn't belong. I still have a bunch of Breakfree CLP from years ago when the local Big Lots Store had it for 19 cents a can. Wicking or capillary action is essential for any penetrating oil to be really effective. And any light thin lubricant will creep downhill due to something called gravity. The trick is to not use an excessive amount.