Just curious about your experiences in cleaning the bores of military arms that appear to be dark, neglected, rusted or whatever. My experiences have been mixed especially when working on military arms that may have been shot with corrosive ammo and not properly cleaned. When the bores look like an old water pipe they are usually too far gone to be cleaned up and rebarreling may be cost prohibitive. I have had some amazing results cleaning up a few bores that seemed rusted and pitted, but were actually coated with old gun grease and just very dirty. What have you found to be the case? All the best...
Gil

boil the jug and pour down the bore.... then clean
or plug muzzle with rag and fill bore with CRC lube type aerosol leave over night ...then clean

some really crappy looking bores still shoot quite well all thing considered.

Elvis,

Good points. I have seen very dark bores that still performed well with cast bullets. So it depends, you win some and you lose some. All the best...

Gil

I remember my dad using paint thinner to clean the 3006 when he got it. He got it through the CMP and it was packed in cosmoline. At the time I was very young - 3 or 4 years old and it seemed to take a long time. Mom didn't like the smell so he took it all down stairs into the basement. I watched him clean every part of that rifle. It had been issued in 1942 so it wasn't a new rifle but it can still shoot sub MOA groups at 200 yards.

My CMP 30-06 M1 had a new barrel put on it by the CMP and I could only shoot 8" groups at 100 yards with Federal Match ammo. I sent it to a retired Army amorer who did the rifles for the Army Rife Team. It now shoots 1 moa but I can't get the gun apart to clean it. Must be bedded pretty well.

I “acquired” an old but factory refurbished SMLE Jungle Carbine in .303 British some time ago. It had been well oiled and wrapped in hessian, then stored for quite some years. The bore didn’t look at all good...black as the inside of a dog’s guts...so I went to work on it with solvents and a good application of Ed’s Red. I even used a bronze brush on my battery powered drill to give it a very thorough scrubbing...no significant change. The bore still looked real crappy.

I headed off to the range and put about 20 rounds of PPU factory ammo through it, then did the usual cleaning regime. Lo and behold, the bore shined like a new penny and the lands were as sharp as the day they came out of the factory. The rifle shoots to “military standard”, which is not quite MOA, but I’m a happy little bugger.