First Time Cleaning of Miltiary Surplus Firearms

[tlarkin]

My bolt is a bit sticky, so I shouldn't boil it? Should I soak it in say kerosene?

[Cyrano]

Originally Posted by tlarkin

My bolt is a bit sticky, so I shouldn't boil it? Should I soak it in say kerosene?

Tlarkin, first thing I'd do is feel the bolt head and the extreactor, looking for burrs. If I didn't find any, the next thing I would do is prop the bolt up in a disposable foil baking pan, bolt head down, and heat it at 200 degrees F. in the oven for half an hour. Take it out while it's still hot using oven mitts or channel lock pliers and wipe off any cosmoline that still clinging to it while it's still hot. Let the bolt cool to room temperature, put it back in the Mosin and try working the action.

One of the gun shops around here has a chamber brush made for the M14/M1A/M60 specifically meant for cleaning the chamber. If the bolt is still sticking when you use it with a live round, see if you can find one to buy and use it to thoroughly clean the chamber. This is important if you've been shooting the bimetal or steel cased cartridges instead of brass cartridge cases, because they are coated with a lacquer that at the temps generated when you fire a round, will combine with any cosmoline present to form a kind of 'glue' that's a real pain to remove and which will induce a case of 2x4 Bolt if you shoot a lot of them.

If after this you still have sticky bolt, take the bolt out of the rifle and soak it for an hour in a disposable foil baking pan of mineral spirits, swishing it around for a minute or so every five to ten minutes. This will dissolve any bits of cosmoline that may still be lurking in the bolt in almost all instances of sticky bolt. (The cosmoline will show up as little brown 'streamers' in the mineral spirits as you move the bolt around.) Then take it out, completely dry it, and put a few drops of gun oil (I can recommend the teflon oil made for use in the AR-15 line of rifles) at every point where the bolt turns or has a moving part.

Before you put the bolt back into the Mosin, go to the auto parts store and buy a tube of light lithium grease or fluid grease as it's sometimes called; it'll cost you three or four dollars. Take a dab of it - you don't need much - on your finger or a long-handled cotton swab and use it to lube the channels the bolt moves in. (Try and keep it out of the trigger group, though; that prefers gun oil.) Drop the magazine base plate and use it to lubricate the follower and the magazine spring, too. Close the magazine back up, reinsert your bolt, and work it rapidly 25 or 30 times as fast as you can. I am sure you'll notice a difference in how easily the bolt cycles. Mosins simply prefer fluid grease there. It shouldn't make that much of a difference, but I've found it really does.

If after all of this you still have sticky bolt, somewhere in there is a solid bit of gunk, likely a mix of cosmoline, lacquer, powder residue and dirt, that's impeding proper action of the bolt. You're going to have to completely disassemble the bolt and hand-clean each part in mineral spirits with brass bristle brushes. Be sure when you reassemble the bolt to check the headspacing! I prefer a no-go gauge, but you can do a decent job using the Mosin manual and the issue screwdriver's gauge notches.

One other thing you can try. If you have two Mosins, or a friend has a Mosin and will cooperate with you, try your rifle with a different bolt. If it still sticks, the problem is in the chamber or the receiver and not the bolt. Clean the chamber meticulously. Then do it again. And then a third time, just to be sure you've covered every last bit of it. As a last resort, as I said in the first post, lock your cleaning rod and a 28 gauge/.410 gauge bronze cleaning brush into an electric drill and use that to scrub the bore with mineral spirits before cleaning it.

If after all this your bolt still sticks, it's time to take the rifle to a gunsmith. I'm stumped.

[Ricochet]

The original post is good about methods of cleaning. And as noted, it's your firearm to finish as you like. Since we're in the Mosin Nagant forum and many folks would like to keep their rifles looking original, it's worth noting that the original finish for all Russian Mosin Nagants is shellac. That's not just an expedient finish for the refurbishing process, as it was for the captured Mausers. (The Russians had plenty of shellac on hand, it was what they used on their rifles, the captured Mausers were theirs to do with as they saw fit...) It's usually pretty dark colored, and what I expect they did was to buy cheap raw "seed lac" in bulk from India, put it in cloth and dissolve it in alcohol letting the cloth filter out the twigs, insect parts, etc. It's a very easy finish to apply, much less work than a proper oil finish, very forgiving of less-than-perfect surface preparation or existing old finishes, oil contamination, etc., and it's easily touched up. New shellac dissolves the old, so it blends together perfectly. Personally, I much prefer one with the old brown shellac, chips, dings and all, to one that's been stripped, bleached light and covered with glossy polyurethane, or one that's been oil finished like a nice old Mauser (but not the way the Russians originally did them.) Just my opinion.

Finnish Mosins are another matter. Most of them were finished with some sort of oil finish, and the most commonly recommended stuff to reproduce it is a 1:1:1 mixture of turpentine, linseed oil and beeswax (which is a well known old time furniture finish as well.) Some say that pine tar should be part of that mixture, perhaps instead of the beeswax.

[gandog56]

I boiled my bolt in an old pan I don't use.

[Cyrano]

That'll work too, gandog. The important thing is to get the metal hot enough to melt the cosmoline and let it run out before it cools down below 135 degrees F. Boiling water is hot enough to do that, if you boil the bolt for a good long time.

[Jack75]

Wait so can i use liseed oil on lets say a k98 stock without having to strip it and sand it?

[twtalbot]

I've found that denatured alcohol does a good job dissolving cosmoline without harming things like the glue in laminated stocks. It's easier than mineral spirits to dispose of; it can be left in a shallow pan or soaked up in paper towels and left in the open to evaporate. Foaming bathroom cleaner is also effective at cleaning dirty, greasy stocks. When sanding, remember to use a sanding block to preserve sharp corners and only sand enough to get rid of the grain raised by the cleaning.

[RedneckCatholic]

Well--

Here's what I do/did--disassemble the gun, sprayit with birchwoo-casey "GunScrubber", watch all the cosmo and accumulated grims run off.

The give the bore a brushing, wipe down the bolt parts. The patches at this point stay clean, from the "GunScrubber", then give everything a nice coat of breakfree.

10 minutes and done.

[gokuboy26]

here's what the DPD looks like I found it at Walmart for a couple dollars...today is the first time I've used dpd... I'm a beleiver! it worked great!

[SFC Paul]

I can remember when the M14 came out.There we sat on the lawn in front of the barracks and I got my first taste of cosmoline.Just a lot of oily rags,brushes and a big vat( 50 gallon drum cut in half) of fuel oil.Then we had to repack M1s in that same gooey stuff.Boy if I had know then what I know now I could have had all the M1s I wanted..I guess a lot of milsurp comes this way.I know I had to clean the MK1 when I got it from century.But that goes to prove that the rifle probably has not been used since some soldier turned it in after the war.

[the_harbinger]

hmmm... sound like to much work for me.i just cleaned the shit out of my 91/30 like i would any rifle(im anal as hell about keeping all my guns sparkiling clean) it took a while but its clean now. it was a 2 day process, day 1 ,hoppes solvent,30- brush,elbow grease,hoppes oil,lots of paches. day 2, same procces exept add a step for jagging patch or 5 soaked in solvent and a step for using rem oil befor the hoppes oil. as for everything else it was no more work than any other gun ive cleaned. i dont think mine was as bad as the ones your taking about here .

[Cyrano]

If your Mosin wasn't as bad as the first one I got, count yourself fortunate. I didn't have to dismantle the bolt, but that was all I didn't have to do. It took half a gallon to get the barreled receiver clean.

First, I plugged the chamber with cotton and then filled the barrel with mineral spirits and let it sit. Then I flushed it with more mineral spirits into a bucket. Then Louis the Mosin Kahuna and I took turns with the bronze bore brush on his GI M-14 cleaning rod getting the cosmoline out of the bore. One of us would hold the thing in the gun vise while the other pushed and pulled the cleaning rod. After about five minutes of this, it moved smoothly and I switched to mineral spirit patches to get the last of the cosmoline out before going over to Hioppe's, just in case I missed something.

The metal parts cleaning took about two hours, mostly degunking the barreled receiver. For some reason, the wood wasn't nearly as badly coated and that only took half an hour or so.

But when I go to the gun shop and look, the Mosins and the SKSes they have in stock are always gunked up pretty bad. The Steyrs, Turkish and Yugo Mausers and the British rifles have much less cosmoline on them, if they have any at all. And the ones I bought from Southern Ohio Gun came covered in what looked like motor oil. They were easy to clean. I think they take them out of the wood and steam-clean them; just open the bolts. line up a bunch of them and blast them with live steam or something, then dip them in a barrel of oil to protect them in transit. But they were nowhere near as bad as the russian and Finnish guns at the gun shops around here.

[Espresso]

I boiled all of my small parts (magazine, screws, bolt assembly, trigger assembly) in water with dish soap for 10 minutes. Then I ran warm water over them to get all the soap off, dried them vigorously with a hairdryer, then used Hoppe's on every square millimeter of surface. After that I used Hoppes' oil at the interface of any piece that touched another piece.

As for the receiver/barrel, i just put that in a bathtub and poured three or four pots of boiling water down the barrel. No cosmoline to speak of. I made sure to dry it as well to prevent rust.

[Dennis]

You Guys Do understand the difference between soviet cosmoline and other countrys cosmoline.
There was a secret Program run by evil soviet scientists, they added a secret compound they developed To the cosmoline that was applied to the Mosin Nagant Rifles that where kept in the old Salt mines All those years ago.
What this compound is, we dont know, but we have seen its affect on many Americans exposed to it. We call this Mosinitis
Those of us who suffer from Mosinitis have unusual behavioral problems that develop after exposure. We become "addicted" to The Mosin Nagant rifle.
We find ourselves buying more and more Mosain Nagant rifles.
this weird "Addiction" has no known cure, the only relief we have found to work is to maintain a constant supply of fresh mosins.
At first one or two a week will seem "ok" then 4 or 5
I can regulate down to about 4 a month or so, sometimes are better than othertimes.
best of luck to you with this

[rwsmd]

Hey, Thanks so much everyone at Gun & Game for the excellent info about cleaning the Mosins. I am a long time military history nut, but have just started collecting military firearms. Got my first Mosin Nagant today, so I need to read and learn as much as I can. Thanks again, guys!

[Morgan]

I've always just used ATF fluid its cheap akong with a tooth brush knocks off all the heavy stuff.Warm water an dawn if its on the wood. Then I shoot it and clean it like always CLR and warm soapy water for the barrel.

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[Jonthemac10]

What exactly does Cosmoline look like? color, texture? that sort of thing

[jsmaye]

What exactly does Cosmoline look like? color, texture? that sort of thing

A cross between ear wax and petroleum jelly.

[Twitch2120]

its yellow-ish, goopy and has that generic old smell. i recommend some latex gloves unless you want to smell like it for a day or 2