Armory Sponsor
Posted: 8/6/2024 4:17:59 AM EDT
|
...and now getting to the inevitable questions. Or really one question, the rest I've been able to find answers to easily. A few years ago I bumped into a site with an article from an older guy talking about cleaning black powder guns, pretty much saying that the standard advice of "scrub them within an inch of their lives ASAP after shooting" is bullshit, and that it removes the coating which protects from wear and rust. This rang true, on the basis that without some serious evidence I am not going to believe that every single one of the hundreds of thousands of people who used black powder guns historically immediately sat down to disassemble and scrub them, complete with chemicals and hot water they would have had to carry with them and/or make in the field......... And going by the accepted wisdom, their guns must have been completely trashed rustbuckets within months. Yeah. That's bullshit. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the article again. Does anyone have a link to ii or otherwise know of it? |
|
There is a guy on youtube that recommends using boiling hot water to clean his muzzle loading rifles. That's a good way to burn yourself. I find water temp doesn't matter. I use everything from warm water directly out of my kitchen faucet to ice cold well water out of my garden hose when cleaning my BP revolvers. Some people use dish soap. I don't believe that helps or hurts anything. I run patches down the bore and use Que-tips in the chambers. I might or might not remove the nipples or just use an old toothbrush on the nipples. I then hose everything down with whatever gun oil on hand. I do have a can of Ballistol which seems to be favored by BP shooters. A lot of BP shooters love Ballistol but then in the same breath will say you shouldn't use petroleum based lubricants with BP firearms. The problem with that is Ballistol is petroleum based. When it's time to shoot, I wipe a dab of T/C Bore Butter on the Arbor (aka cylinder pin) of my Pietta Colt revolvers. Bore Butter on the Arbor will allow me to shoot a Pietta Colt 5+ days straight without cleaning. It keeps everything moving. Before I load, I will fire off caps on each nipple to clear them of any left over gun oil. Before caps got hard to find (Elections, Covid, Remington Bankruptcy), I bought 10,000 Remington #10 caps. There's a bunch of wives tails surrounding black powder shooting. A frequent statement is "Well my grand daddy did it this way, that's the way I do it, and you should too." The only hard fast rule I have is NO SMOKELESS POWDER in Black Powder Firearms. ---- Don't get me started on Chain Fires. As long as your keep your fingers, face, and body parts away from the front of the cylinder a chain fire will not hurt you. A chain fire will not hurt a modern steel frame reproduction BP revolver. |
|
This is probably the article you have read. The man has others on his website. He seems to be a thorough and methodical man. I employ some of what he does in his other articles. When cleaning I use equal parts of Hydrogen peroxide, Isopropyl alcohol and Murphy's oil soap. Then I follow up with Ballistol. |
Know Guns, Know Peace, Know Safety...No Guns, No Peace, No Safety
|
Hot to warm soapy water and plenty of rags and some old toothbrush’s and toothpicks I wash the cylinder in the sink with flowing water and they look new in the bottom. No scale Ram rod with a bore brush to keep the rifling clear and clean Oil things up after it is dry. But not much in the chambers Some Johnson paste wax on the outside is a good way to keep things looking nice and helps to keep the rust away if the oil dries up |
|
This is the site that will have a lot more traffic for your questions: https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/ |
|
Originally Posted By kychas: Hot to warm soapy water and plenty of rags and some old toothbrush’s and toothpicks I wash the cylinder in the sink with flowing water and they look new in the bottom. No scale Ram rod with a bore brush to keep the rifling clear and clean Oil things up after it is dry. But not much in the chambers This always worked for me. |
"According to Argonne National Laboratory, it takes 100 pounds of battery in an EV to go a distance achieved by only one pound of gasoline in an ICE vehicle"
I use “MOOSE MILK” aka Ballistol and water in a spray bottle Disassembly and cleaning Colt Cap and Ball Revolvers Part 1.mov Attached File |
|
Originally Posted By Hanz: This is probably the article you have read. The man has others on his website. He seems to be a thorough and methodical man. I employ some of what he does in his other articles. When cleaning I use equal parts of Hydrogen peroxide, Isopropyl alcohol and Murphy's oil soap. Then I follow up with Ballistol. Yes. That is the one. You know people complain, a lot, about modern clickbait journalism blathering on and never getting to the point. Or youtube videos which spend 20 minutes meandering around trying to avoid getting to the point. And yes, the complaints are justified. But neither of those have *anything* on "old non-techie guy discovers the internet circa 1995". I'm gonna have to scribble out a summary of this just to be sure I have the actual info which is lost in the rambling. |
|
I have been using boiling water to clean extremely dirty guns for years with no negative results. It removes dried grease and debris faster than anything else I have tried, and does not harm the finish in any way. The water evaporates quickly and lubrication of cleaned parts follows soon after. It sure saves a lot of time when it comes to cleaning BP revolvers, IMHO. |
|
Okay, so I'm another old guy who is probably full of himself, but I have been shooting black powder arms including the '51 Navy since the early 1970s. 1) Yes, you must clean your black powder gun ASAP - ideally the same day. 2) Yes, you can use the various chemicals, but hot soapy water is the way it was done in Saml' Colt's day, and it still works wonderfully well, and is cheap. The only thing to know is that you must use very hot water which will flash off quickly, leaving no moisure to cause corrosion. Not boiling, but as hot as your tap will flow. By the way, with a percussion revolver, pull the nipples and wash them as well. Put oil or grease on the threads when you reassemble, or you will soon find them permenantly affixed. 3) Once clean, apply oil in bore, chambers and on external surfaces. 4) Swab the bore and chambers with oil the next day, and the day after that. You will frequently see a little rusty orange brown on the patch the second day. That's what you are getting rid of. The old timers who taught me grew up with mercuric primers, and if you wanted to have a functional gun next time you needed it, this was mandatory. Don't believe the notion that the old ones couldn't perform this type of maintenance. They did so because their firearm wasn't a diversion, it was a lifeline. Read the old texts, and you will see stories to support this. Hickok, for example, was said to carefully fire one of his brace of Navy Colts each morning, clean and load it, then repeat with the second revolver. I rather doubt that old "Duck Bill" did that EVERY morning, but I think it's safe to say he kept his guns clean and freshly loaded. |
Joined:
Apr 2024
Posts:
738
EE: 100% (4)
SD, USA
|
Originally Posted By QRB: Okay, so I'm another old guy who is probably full of himself, but I have been shooting black powder arms including the '51 Navy since the early 1970s. 1) Yes, you must clean your black powder gun ASAP - ideally the same day. 2) Yes, you can use the various chemicals, but hot soapy water is the way it was done in Saml' Colt's day, and it still works wonderfully well, and is cheap. The only thing to know is that you must use very hot water which will flash off quickly, leaving no moisure to cause corrosion. Not boiling, but as hot as your tap will flow. By the way, with a percussion revolver, pull the nipples and wash them as well. Put oil or grease on the threads when you reassemble, or you will soon find them permenantly affixed. 3) Once clean, apply oil in bore, chambers and on external surfaces. 4) Swab the bore and chambers with oil the next day, and the day after that. You will frequently see a little rusty orange brown on the patch the second day. That's what you are getting rid of. The old timers who taught me grew up with mercuric primers, and if you wanted to have a functional gun next time you needed it, this was mandatory. Don't believe the notion that the old ones couldn't perform this type of maintenance. They did so because their firearm wasn't a diversion, it was a lifeline. Read the old texts, and you will see stories to support this. Hickok, for example, was said to carefully fire one of his brace of Navy Colts each morning, clean and load it, then repeat with the second revolver. I rather doubt that old "Duck Bill" did that EVERY morning, but I think it's safe to say he kept his guns clean and freshly loaded. I don't think you gave bad advice, but I would like to share my feelings. Like all cleaning, there's a million ways to do the same job. If it works, it works. #1, This is good advice. The big unknown with any kind of fouling, blackpowder, or smokeless is the moisture. If you live in a dry area like Arizona, you could probably go 2 weeks without cleaning blackpowder and it may not have started corroding. If you are in a humid area like Minnesota, you had better get to it in a day or two, or it will start to rust fast. If you are in a really humid area like Alaska or Louisiana, you may not even get 24 hours. The salts in the blackpowder start corrosion faster, but it's the moisture in the powder that gets it going. #2, You can certainly use hot water, but it is incorrect to say that you MUST use very hot water. Using hot water does have the benefit of drying fast, but it also has the negative of flash rusting if you are not careful. You are just fine using cold water, which does not have nearly as much flash rusting problems, but does require some more thought to drying. You either need to patch until dry, or what I do is cheat and use alcohol if the sun is not available. What you describe is warm tap water, which is whatever a water heater does, 120F maybe? That temp water shouldn't cause any flash rusting problems, and it will work well. #3 Always good advice #4 it's a good idea to check, but if you are regularly finding that you still have rust a day or two after cleaning, then you need to re evaluate your cleaning. There's probably going to be some tiny bits that you can't get in the corners of the breech plug face, or in the flame channel, but those are inconsequential, and won't show up on a patch. If you are getting rust in your bore after cleaning and oiling a barrel, then I can only assume there was still fouling in the bore that now has moisture in it from cleaning. Everyone will have to make a judgement call on how they want to deal with that. This is one reason I like to use bore brushes, they often get into the groove corners that often get missed with just wet patches. #5 I'm sure there were plenty who meticulously maintained their firearms. There's also plenty of accounts of people who abused their firearms worse than makes any real sense. Even if we get into relatively modern times, how many pre WWII guns are out there with pitted bores due to corrosive primers? Even during the great depression when nobody had money to spare, people still abused firearms regularly, as can be seen by the racks of rifles with bores that you can't even tell if they are rifled or smooth. |
| That geojohn website is a trip! He writes with a confidence that is kind of convincing to people who are curious anyway . For a $300 dollar revolver that I can ship to my door, I’m tempted to try JoJoba oil as a solitary cleaner. Just to see if that actually works… |
|
Originally Posted By Colt653: You're missing out on the true black powder cap & ball experience. https://i.imgur.com/K6XcOPo.jpg https://i.imgur.com/5LIQc0C.jpg https://i.imgur.com/K3U6HKJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/I5XsRuD.jpg https://i.imgur.com/qt4KRVB.jpg https://i.imgur.com/NyuMxr1.jpg https://i.imgur.com/n7lkfHe.jpg https://i.imgur.com/skp8ttf.jpg Sweet! I will get one eventually, even though Im lazy about cleaning my guns. |
Doesn't mean that much to me to mean that much to you.
|
Originally Posted By swampvol: Sweet! I will get one eventually, even though Im lazy about cleaning my guns. I clean these as soon as I get home. Ballistol mixed with water. It's not difficult, but unlike modern smokeless guns, these need cleaned to prevent corrosion |
|
Thiose Slixshot nipples like Colt653 has on his are worth their weight in gold to me. A Remington #10 cap always fits with simple finger pressure and no more cap jams, ever, in my experience. As the thread shows, there is no "one way", although the admonition to do it within 24 hours if not the same day is a universally good admonition I think. I use cold to warm water in a bucket, or under the faucet in our utility sink with brushes followed by using the wife's hair dryer to remove the moisture, and then Balistol, no negative impacts to the guns in over a decade of shooting them almost every month. |
|
Anybody use an ultrasonic cleaner to clean BP revolvers? I have never thought of it until reading this thread. I use one for BCG and some other parts with Lucas cleaner and it makes short work of cleaning. Just curious about using one with something like Simple Green. |
|
Originally Posted By onesureshot: Anybody use an ultrasonic cleaner to clean BP revolvers? I have never thought of it until reading this thread. I use one for BCG and some other parts with Lucas cleaner and it makes short work of cleaning. Just curious about using one with something like Simple Green. black powder cleans off very easy and quick with warm soapy water It's not hard crust like the bolt tail of an AR |
Armory Sponsor