A Busy Busy BUSY Weekend and MOAR Rifle Restoration Pix!

Greetings and Salutations!
What a busy weekend! Like non-stop ‘stuff’… meeting and making a new fren, meeting up with a old fren and HIS new female fren, and a whoooooooole lot of gunsmithing in between.

Sleep? What is this ‘sleep’ of which you speak!?!

Friday right after work, I had to do a bunch of pressure washing as the HOA assholes were up my ass about dirt on the side of the house. That’s the major issue I have with this place is that the X bought it in an HOA Area… I had no idea until after it was a done deal. At least right now, the old bitch we used to have is retired now… I purely wanted to stick a spear up her ass, and feed her to the Gators up off of CR 452. The new chick at least is nicer and more accommodating. After 2 hours of shit-work, I came in, made dinner and crashed the hell out.

Starting off with Saturday, as I said I went to bed waaay early as I had to go an have a meetup with a ‘fellow traveler’ if you will. He’d DM’d me and let me know he was going to be in town, and could we do a face-to-face meetup?

To be honest, this guy? Been around a while and is sort of in ‘lurk mode’ regarding his online presence. Not sure if you know about him/of him, but this’s a clue:

One of the “O.G. Right Wing Bloggers” Karl Ushanka!

Like Hells YEAH!

He was in town to meet up with his son, Karl Jr. and they were on their way then to meet up with another fren, and wanted to know if we could meet IRL?

Gretchen, Sapper and Myself met up with him for a (somewhat) early Brunch (10a.m. for Gretchen is like ‘zombie time’) and we then went and had a cigar for ‘afters’… and as you can see, he knows of my propensity for hats, and gave me both a sample of his ‘signature hat’ the Obama Ushanka, and his book. I in turn gave him a copy of my Charlie Mike Comic. I feel honored to have met him. As I said, after brunch, we went for a chill at a local Cigar Bar.

Well Sapper, Karl, and Karl Jr. had stogies… I settled on a beer… and no joke a very hard to find beer here… namely a Costa Rican beer called “Cerveza Imperial” or just Imperial:

It’s a really great brew, only outdone by the Imperial Silver.
It’s like the national beer of C.R. I fell in love with it when I was down there visiting with the other Countries who live there. I also found it quite humorous that the Eagle on the can has a distinct ‘Germanic Quality’ to it… and according to Wiki

The Imperial logo was designed by the brothers Enrique and Wolfgang Hangen who, at the time, were owners of the advertising agency “Casa Gráfica.” The brothers also created the logo for other Costa Rican beers, such as Pilsen and Bavaria drawing inspiration from the iconography of their native country, Germany.

Huh.
As DeadDad would have said “Where were YOU in ’42 there Herr Wolfgang?” In all seriousness, it WAS brewed by a transplanted Kraut, however that was in 1924…

We had a very productive and enjoyable time.

I look forward to meeting up again in the near future as our goals and ideas seem to run along parallel paths. Leastways I hope!

THEN it was go home and get a bit of rest and work on the rifle before the next adventure. I really didn’t do a lot… I mostly pulled the pieces-parts out that I had started the day, day before on. I’ll get into that in a few, as I don’t want to stop the narrative.

After a bit of a kip, Gretchen got herself changed up, and I put on some ‘going out’ clothing, and we then went to a Bar in Apollo Beach, and met up with Cowboy and his new girlfriend. We went to meet up, but also to see the Soul Circus Cowboys. That’s the band that featured Cowboy in what turned out to be an eerily prophetic music video:

Cowboy is literally the Cowboy who’s the subject of the video. And as side note, the black and white horse he’s giving some loving to at 0:34+/- is Chip who was Addy’s bestie:

Leastways I think it’s Chip.
So we went, heard the tune(s) and met his new girl. She’s about a year younger than me. Tall blonde. Nice. Gretchen and I danced and had a few beers, and then off to home as it started raining, and the venue was an outside gig.

Sunday was a wash as far as any outside work went. The reason as mentioned was the rain. I ended up working on the rifle, which is slowly but surely coming along quite nicely. I’m waiting on some MOAR pieces parts, the reasons I’ll explain down the road.

In this case, on Thursday night I started the full disassembly. Let me tell you… there’s gross, then there’s DAYUM! My shooter/mechanix gloves are now black on the palms as I had run out of the nitrile, and figured I can wash them later. I started by removing the heaviest grease/Cosmo (so I could get to the screws) and went from there. The first part:

I yanked the bolt out, and gave it a rough wipe down. I then proceeded to tear it down to inspect the firing pin as well as the spring:

Surprising me, the firing pin AND spring were in perfect shape! No deformation, and the spring measured within correct tolerances! A plus as now I don’t have to spend any shekels to replace it/them!

I then pulled the mag, and as you can see, the lower left front side of the mag? ALL of the feed/retention lip is gone… Either sheared off or broken off to demil the mag itself. Bit of a pity there as even just a MK III mag shell is like worth $20…

And as you can see, the Cosmo is mighty think in there, and on the Donor Rifle off to the left… The Primary being on the right in that pic. Now.. as far as further teardown? Well here’s the trigger guard/trigger assembly after I pulled the screw and started to pull it out:

Sometimes you can just smell a picture eh? In this case Cosmoline and Curry IMO. LOTS of Cosmoline. I swear the assembly made a sucking noise as I worked it out… it was thick and tarry.

I then started working my was towards the muzzle. In this case, it was now time to check the middle barrel/wood band. On a SMLE, it’s hinged and held in place with a screw, which passes through the front primary sling swivel:

Again, that’s sealed in Cosmo… I’m sensing a trend… How about you?

However, the screw (despite it’s mummification) actually came out pretty easily, and then the hinge? Well again, I was pleasantly surprised that it too was in perfect shape:

And then:

Dirty and Nasty (like your Mom) but serviceable.
With that removed, the top fore end wood popped right off:

So of course, this meant I may as well remove the short rear wood sight guard.

I was exceptionally pleased to see that BOTH pieces of wood were, despite the grime and grease in unbelievably good condition. In fact the inner spring clamp that holds it in place was so nice and tight, when I s-l-o-w-l-y pried it off, it “Popped” off with some force, and flew across the room!

Thankfully the grease didn’t get on anything important.

Since I was on my way back to the rear so to speak, I took a second and removed the safety and pieces-parts from the left side of the receiver:

Yeah… at this point the Cosmo was starting to really get on Ye Olde Nerves. And I wasn’t even remotely done with the teardown. I ‘went back to the front’ as the last major part to be removed was the nose cap:

I’m telling you, whoever sealed this thing for long term storage went waaaaaay above and beyond… ESPECIALLY for a fucking non-shootable D&P ‘toy’. Now, of note on this particular part:
If you see that large round-ish bump to the left of the screw and bayonet lug, that’s where the ‘stacking sling swivel’ would normally go.

This particular rifle however is an Ishapore SMLE, made in 1944. The Hindu kids didn’t ‘stack arms’ like the Brits did, so they never bothered to add a hole to put the third sling swivel in. Not that you could use a sling on a stacking swivel, as it looks like this:

The purpose of this was to allow them to hook the slings to each other’s rifles, on the order of “Stack Arms!” The result looking something like this:

So the Indians didn’t have it on the majority of their SMLEs.

To continue:
I got the nose cap off, again with a gross sticky-sucking sound and it showed as such:

And the cap itself after I had chiseled out a cartoonishly large chuck of Cosmoline from between the “ears” of the sight blades came out like this:

The last two things I needed to get rid of were the butt stock and the main lower. I took the butt off first as I knew I was going to need some extra maneuverability when it came time to hammer the main lower off. I sprayed some penetrating old down inside the butt, and then after it had worked, I removed the brass plate:

…and man, I’ll be honest. That rear plate? Out of four rifles I’ve done (so far) that rear plate is in the best shape out of all of them! That scratch on the top one was my ham handed fault in trying to pry open the oiler door. It was like unused and OMG in perfect shape!

I’m sorely tempted to put that on one of the other rifles when I’m done cleaning it up. Time will tell…

Once the butte was off, I proceeded to break all the ‘seals’ of dirt and grease and 40 Years of Funk to get it fully torn down:

You have to be exceptionally gentle and patient so as to NOT damage the wood unnecessarily. I managed to do so, but it took a looong minute in doing so. The grease and whatnot was really binding the parts together let me tell you.

And there it is.
Which means it’s time for the next step:

A “Witches Brew” of Funk-Killer.

To start with, I poured a generous helping (2 cups) of the mineral spirits into the bucket, and then added the entire contents of the DMX into it. To this, ALL of the ‘fiddly-bits’ and pieces/parts went in for a nice overnight bath:

I’d manually agitate it every so often just to ‘shake things up’ and allow things to melt off.

While that was ongoing, I plonked the stock parts into another bath of -just- mineral spirits. Those only got about a 6 hour bath, as I didn’t want the wood overly done. After that happened, then I took them straight to the dishwasher, and gave them the “High Heat-Pot Scrub Treatment” The results sort of speak for themselves:

Some of the paint markings started to ‘melt’ which I’m good with. They need to be completely remediated either way, so it means that it’s within my ability to get the shit off without resorting to extreme measures that could potentially damage the wood.

The one thing I did however notice is the stock appears to be a much lighter color of wood than the rest… Not sure (at that time) what it portended, but hey, that’s part of the fun.

So tune in tomorrow for the further restoration adventures!
More Later
Big Country