I had the fortune of acquiring a Mk4 No1 enfield this weekend as the result of a trade. The seller had told me the bore was rough but alright, so I had low expectations going in and even lower after we couldn't get the bolt out to inspect the bore.

Despite this, with the deal I was getting, I decided to take the plunge. I got it home and after a soak in penetrating oil, I got the bolt out and I swear it was the dirtiest bore I have ever seen in my life, including the cosmoline soaked mosin I bought last year. It took four one hour soaks with T14 bore cleaner, scrubbing and about 120 patches for it to come clean, but under all the dirt was a near-pristine bore.

I'm curious what other similar experiences with dirty used guns you all have had over the years? I've bought a fair number of used guns and am always astonished by the amount of grime inside of them.

I don't like to buy used guns...just my quirk, but that's me. I have on occasion, because some of the guns I would come across are no longer in production, and have been for so long that finding a NIB model is highly unlikely (and suspect.) Like, I bought a couple of Model 28s, but they were pristine and they were in a LGS that I trusted. When I do buy a used gun, if it's not immaculate I pass on it...again, just my preference. No offense intended to anyone who likes to do otherwise.

My first S&W was a 28-2. Went to the range & my mild .357 handloads wouldn't extract. Took two days of scraping, soaking & scrubbing to get the carbon rings out.

Coulda used some help from a few of the "the carbon ring myth is overblown!" people who always seem to be around.

Never understood people who will put up a gun for sale that's filthy. Bought a M66 no dash that I don't believe had seen any oil or solvent since the Carter administration.

I guess some people use a gun until it gets dirty then get rid of it and buy a new one. Kind of like underwear.

My lgs had a Venezuelian 7 X 57 Mauser that was very collectable, and in pristine shape - on the outside. Several Mauser collectors had been in to look at it, and they all thought that the bore was shot out. I just couldn't believe the bore was that bad with the rest of the gun almost perfect. The store lowered the price to me by 50% when they couldn't sell it to the big collectors. It took all weekend, but when I was done getting all the copper out of the bore it was perfect too.

Tom

I bought a Winchester 94AE from a pawn broker on the west coast a couple years ago in 357 mag. The gun looked a little rough, but I apply Proverbs 3: 5-6 and had peace to follow, so I bought it (GB) The pics showed a 3-4 inch abrasion on the barrel, and bidders were scarce. The auction ended mid week, so I didn't have much competition on the auction, and the combination of these factors secured the gun for me at a very good price. When I picked it up from my dealer, the first thing I did was take a general look at the whole rifle; man was it filthy! Next, I grabbed a rag with some form of lubricant on it just to see what the deal was with that abrasion. Well, it just vanished! It was evidently some kind of transfer scuff mark from something the gun had rubbed up against. There was no damage. Then I started (now a little more excited) to check out the rest of the gun. I found the bore, like you, to be the dirtiest in my memory. After MANY passes with brush and patch it was in beautiful shape. I don't think it was ever cleaned, lubed, or had its metal or furniture polished. Each took several times, but under the goop there was lovely bluing, and lustrous walnut; it shoots great too! I think some pawn brokers , etc, just want to turn the stuff over as fast as possible, but I would have looked a little closer at a Winchester.

I like the old mil surps like the enfield's (both U.S. and British), swede mausers, heck any good mauser and some of the oddballs like martini's (mostly 22rf) and some of the U.S. service rifles. First thing I do when they get home is a strip and clean. Have a yugo mauser that was so loaded with grease it too a dunking in mineral spirits and a stiff brush to get it all off. Frank

I picked up a Winchester Model 70 Stainless Steel Classic BOSS in 7 mm Remington Mag, from Gander Mountain (via internet). When I took it apart for cleaning, it looked like it had spent the winter under the ice behind a beaver dam. Whoever took it to Gander for sale, must have just hosed it off and wiped it down with paper towel. Took a good week of cleaning to get the patches to run through it clean.

Then there were the Mini-14's.... Lots of carbon/gunpowder/copper buildup. Days of scrubbing and soaking.

Most, but not all, of my used gun purchases have been cleaning nightmares. But all cleaned up nicely. Probably better than when they left the factory. I have taken to putting a tag on each one with the date it was cleaned/oiled. Memory gets a bit fuzzy when you're dealing with more than a couple firearms.

I buy patches in 1000 bag increments, as I'm a bit OCD about cleaning guns.

What is this underwear of which you speak?

Several years ago I was looking at a Llama .32 in a pawnshop on South Nevada Avenue, the dealer wanted 189.00$ for it and swore up and down that it had never been fired. I opened the slide, stuck my finger in the chamber and it came back blacker that your mother in law’s heart. I just looked at the guy.

Now for a good one, I bought my 4006 for 200.00$ from a friend who told me up front that it had “feed jam” issues, I think what he meant was “failure to extract” issues. Anyway, I took the gun home disassembled it and put the slide in a jar of Hoppe’s over night then gave it a good scrubbing. Haven’t had the first problem with it

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Retired Career Security Guard

Just this week, a man I used to work for gave me a Hi-Point 995. He told me the red dot was broke (he'd broken the knobs off), but otherwise it worked fine. He'd bought it used from one of the NCOs at work who claimed to have fired about 400 rds through it. The guy who gave it to me had put about a thousand through it.

I took it to the gunsmith for a full inspection & cleaning since I know nothing about a 995. Well, they told me the gun had probably never been cleaned. The carbon buildup was so thick, "it was peeling like paint."

They got it all cleaned up, put a new red dot on it and I took it to the range today for the first time. Had a blast. It's the first red dot I've ever used, first optic for that matter.

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USAF 1981 - 2001

I have had several milsurps with copper mines instead of bores. Once when I went to my FFL who had received a Finnish Mosin for me he told me it had rust coming out of the bore. Turned out to be petrified Sisu grease and after some scrubbing the bore was fine.

The most stubborn deposit I have ever seen is fouling from cupro-nickel jacketed ammo. Maybe Sweet's will shift it but the normal Outer's bore cleaner does not get it all.

I have other rifles that were obviously shot using corrosive ammo, not cleaned properly so will always be pitted. Does not seem to affect accuracy that much.

It just amazes me how dirty they get. I understand I am OCD about cleaning so I keep that in mind when I see other people's guns and how 'clean' they keep them. I wonder how many 'malfunctioning' or 'inaccurate' firearms have been sold or traded away when a little cleaning would have given them a new lease on life.

I bought an early fifties ruger that looked almost pristine in the photos and then I field stripped it :-O I had to soak the grip frame in a can of mineral spirits overnight to soften up the petrified crud.

Many years ago I bought a imported Blue Sky Korean M1 Garand . You could not see any rifling at the end of the bbl. I cleaned and kept cleaning the bore till it had rifling . It was a bit on the dark side but it turned out to be the most accurate Garand I've owned out of the 5.

This happened at my first duty station in Germany. Just back from a field problem on the way from the motor pool to the barracks I took my M16A1 over to a solvent tank in the motor bay and ran whatever the Army was using for solvent at the time down the bore.

A little later I’m sitting in front of the Arms room cleaning my weapon and the section chief picks up my upper receiver, looks down the bore and absolutely goes off on me because the bore is filthy. He tells me the bore looks like I never cleaned it and by god better get on that right now.

I picked up the receiver , looked down the bore and I could see the funk in the barrel so I took a patch and ran it through and it came out filthy, nasty, black but the bore just gleamed. I have no idea what was in that solvent but it sucked every ounce of the funk in that barrel to the surface so all I had to do was basically wipe it off

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Retired Career Security Guard

I would say that 7 out of 10 used guns I have examined with the intent of purchasing have had dirty bores. Sometimes it's nothing more than old oil and dust and wipes out with nothing more than a patch, but more often it is plain old firing residue. It's bad enough that gun show sellers don't take them time to at least run a few patches down the bores of their guns but really irritates me when retail shops display dirty guns. I always have my own bore light and some cleaning supplies with me to do it myself. A couple of those packets of baby wipes are good to have to wipe your hands off after cleaning the gun at shows or shops too. On more than one occasion I have told the store managers that when their salespeople are standing around with no customers he should assign each one a section of the inventory and have them at minimum run a few patches with Break Free through them so their customers don't have too !

This is one of my pet peeves, dirty firearms on the shelf or rack. It seems these cruddy things did not upset the previous owner or the gun shop that puts them up for resale. I sorta use this as a barometer of the mechanical condition of the firearm and the "care" it received and usually steer clear of em. However this can result in a good buy of a "shot out" rifle for instance. Most big game hunting type rifles never get shot enough to be "shot out" and just need all the copper fouling removed to restore accuracy. Learning how to properly clean and maintain a firearm is one of the fundamentals of firearms ownership.

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Stay safe people!

I got a tip on a Winchester 9422Mag XTR model I have been seeking. The pic showed rust & some stock issues, asking price 450$. Well if it were about any other gun I wouldn't have bothered but I hotfooted it 1 1/2 hrs away to look at it. When I saw it I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. The seller was working in a garage & it looked as if the gun had been sitting in a puddle of brake fluid? or something that bleached the stain from an area around the buttpad, surface rust just about 40-50% of the out side, the bore so dirty you couldn't see the rifling, but inside the receiver looked surprisingly good & I had to wash my hands after handling it, but nothing "MAJOR" hopefully. When I grew up you took care of your belongings or my parents took them away. If something was broken it got fixed, NOT thrown away and another bought. I gave the kid the lecture of how a few minutes care & I wouldn't have hesitated to pay 6-650$ but as is, if the inside is as bad as the outside it could be worthless and I can no way pay him 450$ & offered 300$, we settled on 325$. App 3 hours of a complete strip clean, brush, scrub, 4-0000 steel wool, shooters choice solvent, pb blaster (for guns), and clp lube and the insides are pristine, the checkering is beautiful, wood has nothing below the finish,a few spots remain on the metal, but the majority of the bluing is deep & dark blue. (no sanding needed) and all the surface rust is gone. it is by no means museum quality but improved to maybe 75- 80% (when I re finish the wood stain & tung oil) & could easily get 650-750$ for it, but it's never gonna leave my hands and already shoots great.

As a hobby, I clean and put back into working order, antique guns brought to me by friends. Many arrive in brown paper bag, having been disassembled decades before and never reassembled. The amount of "stuff" I find is amazing. The fact that many of these guns are still working is amazing. I bought a Winchester model 54 that when disassembled, the magazine box was 1/3 filled with decaying vegetation including tree branches and leaves. I come from a region and time when guns were simply tools to be used then put in the corner of a garage till needed again with no more care than a man would give his shovel or rake. I had a rancher friends pre 64 Winchester model 70 on my bench a few years back. Bought new in 1948, it went into a scabbard and stayed for the next 60 years, only withdrawn to shoot an elk or a deer. Somewhere along the way he felt it needed "sprucing up" so with a paintbrush he put new varnish on the stock. The fact he didn't take the barreled action from the wood before he gave it a bath in new varnish left lots of protective varnish on the barreled action as well. I wasn't the least bit surprised as I had just worked on his brother-in-laws early Savage 99 a week earlier. Being an early model it wasn't drilled for a scope mount. And the owner now being an older gent who needed a scope to see, the solution was simple one. He bought the appropriate scope base for the rifle and arc welded it to the action. Problem solved. I have always admired honest wear on a gun. Given a pristine antique gun to view and hold or a working gun with little finish left, I choose the later. I have to admit I have taken my S&W model 19 to the car wash and hosed it down after removing the grips. Then tied it to the rack of the truck on the drive back to camp to air dry the old girl. This was a result of it being in a roll over in a steam, with it being buried in the stream bed. Hunting season is short and clients waiting, so this seemed the best solution.

About six years ago a hock shop had a Colt 1917 hanging on the wall. The outside looked fine but it had a modified Pachmayr grip for a Ruger Red Hawk on it. The price was $599. I looked down the bore and couldn't see any rifling. It looked like heavy lead build up. I passed on it. A few months later it was priced at $499. A couple of months later it was at $399. I knew a gunsmith that had a Colt New Service barrel for a 45 Colt that he would let me have for $75. I talked to the pawn broker and got it for $400 out the door. Went home and ran a bore snake down the barrel and out came a wad of oily fuzz bunnies. The bore looked like it did in 1918. Someone had oiled the bore and put it up for years and it had accumulated a lot of dust and fuzz.

I know of a particular store in my area that purposely doesn't clean any of the used/consignment guns they put out for sale. They say they go out they way they came in. I talked a good friend of mine into a Model 10 they had, heavy barrel -6, that was dirty but cleaned up just fine and shoots great!

Easily 90% of the firearms I've bought over the years are used, or "pre-owned" haha, disappointed with 2 of them and sold them off for what I paid.

I buy used guns mainly and have been shocked at how dirty some are inside. I figure the money I save buying used is worth some effort on my part to clean them up. On the other hand I've bought some that looked like they were never even shot or just a few rounds. Those I really like.
Before he died my buddy gave me his Ruger Red Eagle (early standard 22 auto). I learned from Ruger it was one of the first built and likely in Ruger's garage. Jim had never taken the gun down as he didn't know how to and shot it all those years no problem. He had cleaned it from the muzzle though and fortunately caused no harm doing so. After letting him know it was a valuable 22 he still gifted it to me and I broke it down for cleaning and holy smokes it was dirty. I cleaned it all up and shoot it on occasion. Dirtiest gun I've ever seen and says something for those guns.

A little off the main topic but pretty related. What is with many people that own stainless guns that think you never have to clean them. I see way more filthy stainless firearms than blued or nickel.

For those that think stainless doesn't rust, stain or corrode; you're so wrong. They need care too.

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Bill Bates

One of my best friends took me in for six months when I had a contract job a few states away from home. He has a K-98 that he bought in K-Mart in NJ which should give you an idea as to how long he has had it. I looked it over and started to clean it. It took a couple of weeks of intermittent work to get patches to come out clean. In the beginning, they would alternate black and green as I mined through layers of carbon and copper. I told him that when he got to purgatory in the afterlife, an old-time oberfeldwebel was going to take him to the armory and make him clean rifles until his time was up.

Russ

One of the best buys I ever made was a 3" 624 at my LGS a few years ago. It was absolutely filthy, inside and out, and I paid about half of what they were going for back then.

I disassembled it, cleaned it thoroughly, and refinished the grips. (Yes, it had the original finger-grooved combat grips.) It looks like new now, and shoots very well. If the LGS or the prior owner had taken the time to clean it, they could have gotten a much higher price for it. Go figure...

Or oil lights...

I bought a FN49 in 8mm a few years back. The gun is decent shape but the bore was rusty. I got home and cleaned it thoroughly and still after cleaning the bore did not look good. I eventually put some rounds down range. I got home and cleaned it and the bore was 10 times better than it was before. The bore is a little dark but it has strong rifling. Basically what I'm trying to say is do not judge the boar after you first clean it. Go out and shoot it then clean it and see where you are.

James

If you have time to lean, you have time to clean

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Retired Career Security Guard

Glad your's cleaned up Jmmit0c6. Yep, had similar, but worse experience with a Mk4No1 I picked up back in the 80's. Filthy bore, seller said it was a "good shooter". It shot...but key hole every shot at 50 yrd. Found that the first 5-6 inches of the muzzle were ruined, i.e. extremely trashed to the tune of .324!.(Wish I knew the bullet in the muzzle test back then!). Anyway it sat in the corner for the last 30 years. While I am not one to hack up Milsurp weapons, I couldn't stand having a weapon that could not be used, shot or hunted with. So, I figured I'd try to make a shooter out of it. The throat and remaining rifling was is good shape. Trimmed the barrel back to good rifling approx. 18". Still putting the finishing touches on it and we'll see how it turns out. Thinking she'd make a handy piece to carry when hunting the dense, swampy wetlands on my property.

I have no idea how the 1st 5-6 inches of the muzzle could have gotten so F'd up?

Sometimes you find more than dirt. When I bought this used Mini-30 I gave it a swab through the bore, a couple spritzes of oil & off to the range. Generally OK but did hav a few weird misfires. Almost as if the hammer didn't strike completely.

Since I was using corrosive Yugo x39 I cleaned it as soon as I got home.

Hello... look what I found bouncing around in the trigger housing...

I very much like used guns. Nice ones turn up, often when you least expect it. Earlier this year I wandered into the LGS and, to my surprise, there was a six inch 19-4 in the case. Target trigger and Target hammer. Cool. Asking price was ... are you ready for this ... $300 plus tax. Now, the revolver was dirty. There was some corrosion. So I figured to see how things looked on the inside. As expected the bore was dirty and fouled and the cylinder charge holes were dirty. The Pachmayr Gripper grips had been "modified" by someone w/ some sort of grinder. Brought it home for $265 plus tax.

Soaked it in Marvel mystery oil for a couple of days and then scrubbed all the metal parts w/ a copper Chore Boy. The bore and cylinder were easy to clean. A few swipes with a bore brush and they were excellent. The area under the grips had some corrosion. There was wear where a holster strap had rubbed. I dropped the Pachmayr's into m junk box and put a spare pair of S&W target grips on the revolver. I put a drop or two of Kroil on the hammer and cycled the action some.

So what is the outcome. I have a six inch 19-4 with a total of $282 tied up. I couldn't have found a .38 Special in decent shape for that kind of money. This thing handles and shoots wonderfully. I can't remember the last time I found a S&W .357 Magnum for anywhere less than $400 or more. I had been looking around for a Model 14 that I could use for target shooting. Maybe this will suffice? Guess we'll just have to see!

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Thanks, I almost exclusively buy used guns anymore. My interest in milsurp and older revolvers kind of make it difficult to buy new guns. The only new gun I own anymore is an RIA 1911 because I can't buy a used WW2 era 1911 on my grad student budget lol.

Sounds like an interesting project, be sure to post pictures when it is all finished.

I like when they take 100 or 2 off the price because it's dirty.

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Regards,
Guy-Harold Smith II