Recent Arrivals - Two Weeks

The past four days have been interesting!

Yes, I've gotten to know the wonders of the way cosmoline will make an occlusive seal with just about anything so as to not allow you to separate parts with such a seal.  On the SKS that I have been working on that seal has been between the stock and the receiver/barrel assembly.  Getting the instructions right, in that the assembly moves away from the stock in a rotation style movement was a great help!  I had spent time puzzling over the instructions and finally found another set of instructions with pictures to demonstrate the procedure.

Not that this helped, mind you, beyond knowing that you should expect to see some progress doing things the right way.  Needless to say with anything that could be holding the assembly to the stock taken off, it wasn't budging.  No, it was worse than that: I could get just the barest hint of motion and sweat at that and when I released the stock and assembly the pieces came back together again.  That is the power of air pressure working against you.  You are forming a vacuum because of the sealant and when you try to move the pieces apart the air pressure starts working to bring them together again.

What came next was a further application of Aero-Kroil (mainly because it is supposed to go along metal surfaces displacing other stuff) and putting pipe cleaners through any opening that was available, mainly between the assembly at the rear sight base.  After struggling most of the day with that I then put on another application of antique restorer as it had moved the exterior of the stock from a dust magnet to a skin magnet.  Yummy!

The next day, finally, with the use of a rubber mallet... if you don't have a rubber mallet around your house, get one!  Mine has been ever so handy at non-marring use on things beyond pistols and rifles and if you really have to beat yourself on the head with something, there are far worse things than a rubber mallet.  Now, where was I?

Oh!  By holding the receiver in my left hand (like da book said!) and keeping the bayonet locked forward and pressed into a sheet of plywood and gently rapping the buttstock upwards to put force in the wanted direction of movement, I got my very first sucking sound in this project with lots of suck to it.  One or two more light taps with the mallet and then a couple with my gloved hand, then some very continuous pulling and... the receiver and stock were forced back together by air pressure.  The second attempt finally got the parts free as I had introduced some air into the sealant.  Next time I will use that handy-dandy can of compressed air for that to start with.

The parts came free:

I folded the bayonet back once the parts were free, just like it said in the book.

More glistening and it isn't gold.

I now had a major component separation achieved for the takedown!  Throw a party!

Amazing!

Progress had been achieved!

Except, of course, for the tablespoon or two of cosmoline that now was congealed inside the stock area and, of course, coating the barrel/receiver assembly.  I am not joking about quantities, and I used up the better part of a shop rag and two paper towels getting the surface amounts off.  Huge amounts came off in the antique restorer rag, as well.  Not just soak in amounts, but glistening puddles of the stuff.

The next day was cleaning all the metal I could get to, removing some of the fun parts like the gas diverter for the grenade launcher and sweating over getting the sight leaf for the grenade launcher up so I could clean under it.  Then sweating to get it back down again.  I debated about taking the front sight apart, but realized that coating the threads of the adjustable pin for the sight was actually a good use for cosmoline.  Anything caught under the ring will soak out when the barrel is heated from firing and that won't be much.  All the exterior surfaces, however, got cleaned... and cleaned... then cleaned again... nylon brush, pipecleaners, tooth-picks...

For anyone wanting to clean rifles with gas block and escapement systems I can't picture living without pipecleaners and tooth-picks.  Project type tooth-picks from your craft store, not toothy tooth-picks from the grocery store.  If you need to push in a small amount of a rag or get something that will conform to a small hole to work away at material adhering to metal, those two are musts.

Yesterday all the exterior components were finished, the bore finally properly cleaned out using first the water based cleaner/degreaser, and then the evaporating one, then lots of swipe downs with Militec-1 patches that still got some blackness on them.  I've come to expect that since I don't have a huge ultrasonic tank for such things or an electro system to force that stuff out.  The bore is chrome lined and when I sight through to a piece of plywood against a wall I get that lovely triangle of inverted image on the top of the bore.  I couldn't ask for anything nicer!

After that comes the first wipe down with drops of Militec-1 on the exterior metal surfaces.

The stock got to rest yesterday to let the restorer stuff do some more work, and I was already getting the hand tackiness feeling on it by the end of the day.

Today the metal got covered over and it is now time to work on the stock.  Cosmoline is no longer being left in orange patches on my cleaning cloths, but it is still felt on the hand.  It is just bad.

Some other discoveries were of some use marks on the stock covered by the finish.  This includes what I think are pieces of tar... or possibly some asphalt... or someone just dropped the stock on the floor of the arsenal and it didn't get wiped down before a finish was applied to it.  Pride of workmanship there isn't for the stock.  And there are times I begin to suspect the finish hadn't even dried before they packed it away.  There are also drip marks from the finish not being properly wiped down.

I'll have to search around and see if I can find a used Yugoslav SKS stock somewhere and refinish that.   While BLO is the 'official' arsenal finish, there are a lot of stocks that soldiers had to finish on their lonesome, so there has to be some variety of that on the military side.  With BLO the way it was put on you can't really tell it was Beech wood... no idea what to do on that front.

On the metal side I need to get the retaining pin in the bolt out so I can, first, clean that because it is still sticky and, second, replace the firing pin with a firing pin and spring combo so the pin can never go through a slam-fire or get locked forward... that is purely a safety issue and as I consider safety to be the first thing with firearms, it has to be done.  So far the retaining pin is not coming out for love nor money... and a bench arbor press that I can put a pin punch into would be a lovely addition to the hardware around the shop.  I know I can get the basic press, but pin punch adapters for the head?  Haven't looked but there must be something for that given how often that routine is done with machine parts.

So that is where things stand as of right now.  The stock has gotten another go-around with blemish remover and antique restorer and is now resting, the heat is bad enough that I am going to rest, and doing that I will look for a low-end bench arbor press with pin punch replaceable heads.

Life is grand.

Recent Arrivals - A Week and a Half

When last we left our intrepid explorer he was finding out just how well the Yugoslavs had packed cosmoline into their SKS 59/66 arsenal reworked semi-automatic carbines at the factory.  There is an interesting comparison between a Mosin-Nagant 91/30 reworked at a Soviet arsenal circa the early 1950's and a Yugoslavian arsenal circa the mid-1960's.

First up is the metal work is very good to excellent on the rifle and well crafted for what it is, which is an early 1950's design by Siminov from the USSR.  It was made to be put together quickly and cheaply in the third world countries that had any manufacturing base available to them at all.  Under Tito the relationship between Yugoslavia and the USSR varied a lot, but the underlying Communist system of the importance of basic metal work comes through.  The M-N dating back to an earlier era of machining from the mid- to late-nineteenth century is always well done, of course and without doubt, and they are beefy rifles as the metallurgy of the late-nineteenth century just wasn't up to the task of a lightweight receiver and rifle barrel that wouldn't blow itself apart.  While the era nearly a century later was different, the work to get precision machining done is apparent.

Second up is the stark difference in the wooden stocks of the two rifles.  The M-N you feel was put together by some actual craftsmen who understood the wood's strengths and weaknesses and followed the old patterns because they worked and were good for the purpose.  There are variations over time with the M-N stock, but I have yet to run across one that didn't feel that at the arsenal they actually did understand that getting a rifle stock that felt good in the hands was a morale booster: someone cared enough to do good work and entrust you with it.  The SKS stock feels like it got a basic cut at a wood mill, about 10 minutes under a shaper, a quick pass over a belt sander, and then had BLO used to give it a finish.  As I understand it some SKS's lack the finish and were packed away in cosmoline with bare wood.  Also the lack of finish (though not fit) was addressed 'in the field' which you can picture as some soldier writing home to mom to see if dad had any spare sandpaper and something to finish wood with.  If the smooth feel and deep, dark grain of a M-N stock made you feel as if someone cared about you and the rifle, the SKS stock definitely puts the rifle ahead of you.  You are there to pull the trigger, nothing more.

I would like to compare precision parts making, but the M-N was meant for a different era and isn't, say, a Colt 45 or, just a couple of decades on, a Mauser C-96.  It came from the early bolt-action era and that is that.  I've taken a few trigger groups apart and the SKS is pretty much dead simple with all of two springs and a leaf spring stamped part.  It isn't a VZ-61 Skorpion with a couple of tiny, precision springs and a hammer spring ready to fly around the room for the unwary.  Nor is it that contraption that runs a Marlin 60, with all its tiny springs and retaining rings.  Those are both later than the SKS, yes, but having looked at original parts for both that are within that timeframe, I have to say that the Yugoslavs don't have the raw ingenuity of the Czech gunsmiths.  It is a good, solid, relatively reliable trigger group with nothing fancy on it.

Why is that important?

Just a second while the pictures from the start of yesterday's work start to give a feel of what you deal with on a carbine like this.  So here we go with the basic Level 2 to 3 strip.

I got the bolt and carrier off pretty easily and didn't have to worry about the recoil spring being springy as the coefficient of friction that was given to it by 45 year old cosmoline was more than enough to render worries about springs flying all over the place pretty much moot.  How bad is this rifle packed with this stuff?  There is a piston in the gas tube that in the takedown books say you have to watch out for sliding out when you take the tube from the receiver.  I used a wooden dowel to push it out.

Now lets see what is inside the receiver.

OK.  It's not that bad.

No, wait I take that back!

It's worse than I expected.

You can even see the hammer from the trigger group there and what you can't see is the lovely coating of cosmoline all the way down and in.  And the same goes for the magazine, too.

Plus I need the cleaning rod out from under the bayonet fixture.  It is coated with cosmoline... not just the bayonet but the rod all the way down to the screws.

Yummy.

There we go with the piston out of the gas block tube, the cleaning rod, bolt and carrier plus cocking handle, recoil spring... and I believe I got the gas block tube spring from the receiver out by then.  The warning was that it would come flying out at Mach 2 if you didn't watch out when you moved the lever on the rear sight all the way up.  I moved it up.  Then I checked to see if there was a spring in there with a handy-dandy pin punch.  There was!  And then it oozed out at a pace that snails would laugh at as pitiful.

Now onto the trigger group.  You can see the exterior cleaning hasn't done much for it.  On the M-N I would be close to half-way by now with the wood, the metal all finished and waiting on the wood.  Here I have to extract stuff and always I get the unpleasant surprise that the Yugoslav arsenal probably pre-packed each part in cosmoline before assembling the parts... no they didn't, but that is what it feels like.

You can see the difference between cleaned metal on the lower part of the trigger guard and just about any other metal on this carbine.  If it glistens it has a layer of cosmoline on it and the stuff here has even had a quick two-pass cleaning.  This spells trouble ahead.

Out comes the trigger.

If the parts look indistinct it is due to the fact that they are coated well enough so that I had few worries of parts flying around with it.

This is where the trigger was.  See that glistening on the inside where light barely bounces down to the paper towel and back up?  No, you probably can't see that all too well.  How about on the right where the inletting is orange and a bit circular?  That is a spring.

After this came the part where I had to give the bolt and trigger group an initial ultrasonic cleaning so that I could start the detail strip to get a more thorough cleaning.  The first ultrasonic did a wonderful job on the surface gunk and allowed some parts beyond the trigger to actually move.  Amazing!  Then, since I have never done a trigger group like this with the instruction of 'use the cleaning kit tube on the hammer, put the back of the trigger over the edge of the workbench, press straight down until the hammer moves below the trunnions, and then move the hammer slowly back until it comes free' or words to that effect, my spelling isn't so hot.   That is only AFTER you get the hammer to swing forward.  Getting the hammer to swing forward is a lining up of the interior trigger parts so the trigger engages the sear to release the hammer.

It said so in fine print at the bottom of the page!

Two hours of pipe cleaners, degreaser, Kroil, wiping, trying, getting some gunk out from under the disconnector via the tiny hole in the trigger, degreaser, Militec-1, and, finally, all lined up and the hammer came free and as I had properly positioned my hand so as to ease it forward, it was eased forward.  THAT spring was free to maim you via compression release and it had a sworn duty to do so.  With that came another half hour of grunting, complaining and generally finally figuring out that 'straight down' means straight down, the hammer came free and the cosmoline did its job of slowing the hammer spring no end.  It wasn't coming out at Mach 2, that's for sure!

It is a good idea to dedicate at least one pair of gloves (leather work gloves for outdoorsy work, not garden gloves) for doing this sort of thing.  I buy those suckers by the dozen pack at surplus sites and while the stitching on the back and interior sucks, the things still hold together (more or less) and serve as a wonderful way not to get bruises or your skin caught when formed metal gains a life of its own.  By the time you are done with them they will be black on the front from cosmoline, and you can use them as a dust magnet.

All the pieces parts could now be disassembled including getting all the springs out and going down to just a couple of components that isn't worth any time disassembling as you can easily examine them for rust (hah!) and cleaning under them.  Ultrasonic for all of that for 3 minutes, rinse, and Militec-1.  Bag it all as I will be ordering a Wolff spring kit to get positive sear tension on the trigger group as it is currently neutral.

I did try to get the barrel out!  Really!  Bayonet in the forward, locked position, press down, left hand on the receiver and right hand hitting the stock, while the bayonet is pressed to some plywood on the ground.  Uh-huh.  'The barrel will come free easily' so it says in the manual.

I've heard that one before.

Cosmoline is keeping it in place and I put tiny drops of antique blemish remover on the rings the barrel passes through.  Just left it as the amount of caked on stuff at those points is awful.  If that doesn't work it will probably either be Kroil or Aero-Kroil or WD-40 to let it all sit overnight.  I still have lots of small part cleaning and inspection to do.  So ordering the spring kit ought to just have it arrive in time for final stock cleaning prior to re-assembly.

If, if I say, I am lucky.

Recent Arrivals - A Week Onwards

Now last we left the intrepid cosmoline cleaner he had finished with the hardware of the Mosin-Nagant 91/30 and was working on clearing the stuff from the stock.  Ahhh... such heady times! 

Now after repeated applications of antique restorer with a process of wipe-on, wait 5 minutes, wipe-off, go and do something else for a day so that you wipe down the next day before re-application... and this stuff will continue to leech out cosmoline for a month afterwards... it is now time for the final wipe down and re-assembly.

A beauty to behold!

The benefit of doing this slow route is that if you have an area dedicated towards gun cleaning you can go through this slow process and continue on with other projects.  Makes me wish I had an area dedicated to gun cleaning...

The wood actually is pretty dark, but I should probably do a color balance there to get something a bit closer to what it actually looks like.  Since I don't have P-shop on the machine I use for the majority of my posts, this will have to do.

That is much closer to what things are coming out like!

Sorry for the low-light effects for the pictures, but I also don't have a dedicated platform for taking pictures.  The wood I'm using for contrast is whatever the anonymous 1x4x8' stuff is at the local Home Despot.  They don't say and I would only guess oak, given the grain spacing and knots that show up, but that is probably wrong.

The finish is not grainy, as indicated by my poor picture taking, but smooth.  And not 'cosmoline on finish' smooth, but clean smooth like shellac on wood.  That is the finish on Mosin-Nagants, btw, garnet shellac (or a relative) at a pretty hefty cut.  I use some 1 lb. cut that I mix up in small batches for touch-up work and it re-melts the old stuff and allows for a somewhat cleaner appearance where the finish has chipped or worn off.

Basically this rifle is finished and just needs a final check-out before firing.  The chamber looks great, the rifling is sharp and the bore shines.  There are times when I begin to suspect these rifles were never fired, but that isn't indicated by the carbon deposits on the stock.  Still this one is in better overall finish shape than my prior ones, although the stock appears a bit more dented in the buttstock area from original use: minor dent irregularities were smoothed out, sanded and finished over from the arsenal.  Either that or it was just poorly cut in the first place and they decided to smooth over the imperfections...

Now for box 2!

Yes, that other box behind the first one on day one.

This is not another M-N (although I do like the batch this one came from) but something different.  Spooky, huh?

Time to pull up some pictures I took on the first day.

In comparison the M-N was just coated with cosmoline.  This baby is packed with it.

Yup a Yugoslav SKS 59/66 with grenade launcher/compensator and bayonet!  Unlike the USSR which must have been scrimping and saving on cosmoline, the Yugoslavs decided that for every SKS they must make sure a quart of cosmoline goes into it.

All that glistens is not gold... most of it is probably cosmoline.  There is no real concept of 'bare metal' the way this thing was refurbed at the arsenal.

If you are unwise enough to touch that with your bare hand, you will be putting that hand into a degreasing solution.  This is no thin coating of cosmoline, like with the M-N, but congealed masses of the stuff in every crevice of the rifle.

All I can say is every place you see a dull gleam... you wouldn't want to touch it with your bare hand.  Plus some smart fellow along the way may have wrapped this rifle in paper for a few microseconds as there are flakes of paper embedded in the cosmoline on the surface.  They are just so infused with the stuff you can't really see them.

I wore gloves getting this baby out for display.

It got put back in the box while I got a nice book on the SKS rifle that would go through its lineage and have a detailed strip described in it because this rifle will have to go down to component parts.

Now a week later, with those materials in hand, I started out with the idea that I really do need to touch this thing with something other than gloved hands so started work on a few of the top parts to get things ready for stripping down.

Sorry for the brightness of the paper towel there.

This is a treated/untreated photo of the handguard over forearm, where the handguard has been treated with antique restorer and the handguard has not.  While there are some tonal differences in the wood, the top now allows for the flash to shine off of the finish (done with BLO from what I understand) while the cosmoline is just... everywhere on the bottom.

Words do not describe it, really.

The effect is less pronounced on metal, but the very top of the grenade launcher and gas tube have been given a quick once-over and the bottom barrel and bayonet have not.  Still it is possible to recognize that there is, finally, clean metal showing up top!
I dare you to do that with any other solvent that smells like a forest has invaded your sinuses!  Just not going to happen.

Here the rear portion of the buttstock has been cleaned with a once-over and the part in front past the grip area has not.

Yesterday was the day to really begin work and the very first thing that is in the procedure is to get the cleaning kit from the buttstock...

Uh-oh.

Yesterday, after re-assembling the M-N, I had my first job on the SKS.

Clean the cleaning kit.

And I thought the butt plate on the M-N was bad!

Little did I know.

I put all the small parts into my handy-dandy ultrasonic cleaner with weapon cleaning solution, and gave them a 3 minute cycle.  A couple of the smaller parts, like screws, could be taken out at that point. The rest got a repeat of that and, yes, the milky substance I found from the M-N is, indeed, cosmoline that has been cavitated with bubbles as that happened to the globules of the stuff on the parts here.

While that went on I began to apply antique blemish remover to the rest of the stock hoping that it will fight its way through the cosmoline.  The wipe-on was... well... sticky and awful.  The after 5 minute wipe-off wasn't much better.  Today the overnight wait is done and I will be getting on with actually starting the thorough take-down and strip of everything from everything else.  I couldn't see through the bore... well, I could see the lovely soft glow of light attempting to get through cosmoline...

Buy your milsurp Yugoslav SKS and get a FREE quart of cosmoline!

YMMV.

Recent Arrivals - One day

It is one day later and a lot was accomplished yesterday.  I started off with a few pictures today and if they are awful... well I am no photographer.

First all the metal parts got removed cleaned.

The bolt and takedown tools got an ultrasonic cleaning in the small ultrasonic machine I picked up a year ago, and I used some specially made cleaning solution mixed 11:1 of water to solution.  I made sure to get the bolt thoroughly immersed so that water was all inside it and then turned it a few times during the process to get rid of any bubble build-up.  That was a fascinating process to watch as the cosmoline was coming off as white strands as surface cavitation was getting bubbles into it so as to lift it up from the metal surface.  I confirmed that after a five minute cleaning by feeling one of the strands and it was a greasy light mix showing its origins to be the cosmoline.  The solution was milky white and since the formula is safe for disposal it went away, being all biodegradable and stuff.

I applied WD-40 to parts that would take a few minutes for me to get to while I disassembled the bolt.  There were some milky white pieces to get off the interior, but they were no longer adhering to the metal, just sitting on it.  The bolt was in fine shape with no pitting or other marks on it, smooth to the touch and thus needing some Militec-1.  A drop or two spread around via a rag is all it takes and then another drop or two via pipe cleaners to get at the hard to reach parts, a dot of the Militec-1 grease (that I have in these lovely syringes able to get a tiny dot of grease out of the end) was put on the threads going into the bolt or any other high wear areas.  A bit of struggling to get the bolt reassembled, due to the spring more than anything else, and that was that.  Next was the drop of magic metal protector on each of the take-down pieces and cleaning pieces and I was ready to go after the buttplate, magazine and receiver.

Now with all of that stuff spread out before me I started using some of the all-natural, won't harm a natural finish on wood and will clean metal antique restorer sparingly on everything.  By sparingly I mean a clean rag folded over four times and you slowly wipe over the surface of the wood or metal, flipping to damp clean surface as the one you are using gets junk built up on it.

The left rag is a small projects rag that started out about half-dirty, the one on the right was a clean-up rag that started out pretty clean.  These have both gotten the quick one-minute hand washing with gentle dishwashing liquid then rinsing and drying.  Any first application of this stuff will pick up all sorts of surface grime and generally get dirty quickly.  That left rag was initial wipe down of practically everything from the inside of the stock (particularly the  magazine area where cosmoline will find a way to build up and get into the chamber if you don't get it very clean) then the exterior, then across all the metal on the exterior of the receiver, screws, magazine, butt plate... if it has cosmoline on it, it gets wiped.  And you don't use much of this stuff, either.  I used the blemish remover on the butt plate and wood there as the cosmoline was caked in and just awful.  That sucking sound getting the butt plate loose was cosmoline unwilling to release its hold.

By the time you get everything dampened its about 5 minutes and time to wipe over all the areas you just hit with a clean dry rag.  That is the right hand rag and the stuff that came off with it was not nice, particularly where there was some carbon build-up in the cleaning rod channel.  I actually did a re-application there as chunks of carbon came off to reveal the finish and wood underneath...

During this process the first rag, the one I wetted down a few times, was getting that lovely orange to yellow-orange color of cosmoline on it.  So was the dry rag.  The photos were taken before I used a dry rag on the stock today, and it was getting that light coating of cosmoline on it, too.

All of the metal got the Militec-1 wipe-down after I did the stock wipe-off.

Total time to get things where they were in the photos was about 2.5 hours, not counting camera time.

From that I got to see some areas of wear that were covered over yesterday.

One of the benefits of the antique restoring liquid is that on metal it starts to break the cosmoline down, beyond lifting it off the surface, meaning that my standard cleaner/de-greaser KG-3 can get rid of it.  Normally I can't do that to cosmoline all that well with that stuff, but after one wipe of restorer, one wipe to remove it and one spray and wipe of KG-3 I am down to metal finish.

Today was stock wipe-down #2, putting all the fabric goods into a batch of liquid de-greaser and then rinsing it, and doing a cleaning of the bore starting with the antique restoring fluid, KG-3 and then Militec-1.  Nice, shiny bore!

The next few days will be restorer wipe-down/wipe-on/wipe-off until there is zero cosmoline on any of the rags.  As the restorer adds some oils into the wood surface to help close up the pores, it will take some days to finally get the cosmoline out, but well worth it.

Recent Arrivals

Oooooo!  Boxes!!

There are two of them there.

Now what does this portend?

Hey, there's a drill press on a stand next to the workbench... that wasn't there before, was it?  Hmmmm....

Still there are boxes and it is time to see what sort of refugees have arrived here in those cardboard containers.

Uh-oh!  Cosmoline!  The dreaded nemesis returns to coat and adorn any hand, glove, or errant finger that gets close to it and then it will spread everywhere. 

And look!  There it is hiding just waiting to jump out at the unwary...

Most evil of materials that protects all and seeks to coat all.  Including you.

I speak from experience here, trust me.

It came with its pouches bearing gifts of cosmoline... no, that just isn't something you want to hear at Christmas.

There it glistens adorning metal and wood, putting a dull sheen on it all.

Refugees from a bygone era bearing gifts after they were last looked at and packed away for a war that never came... yet...

And yet, for all that, there is beauty under there, hidden and trying to show through.

Then, of course I opened the second box....