whats a good cleaner. Need to clean the furniture too.

Go to www.milsurpshooter.com they have a forum dealing with this and are very helpful. These guys are to old military rifles what the guys (and ladies sorry) here are to the AR15.

It's not difficult other than removing the barrel band (without scratching the wood). And you really need to remove all the wood because if you don't you'll have cosmoline dripping on your hand after the barrel heats up a little.

Pour LOTS and LOTS of boiling water on the totally disassembled gun. Watch that cosmo leach away, down the drain. Wear thick rubber gloves while doing it. Scrub out the cosmoline and other greases AND the barrel crud with stiff nylon brushes and a cleaning rod with CLP, respectively. Now- does it look clean? Not by a longshot- do it again, because Mr Cosmoline is EVERYWHERE....

Note: even with the best of cleaning methods, Cosmoline will still weep from the front of the hand guard, stock,,and around the rear sight base for a long time when the gun warms up from sunlight or from firing. Bring a rag with you when you shoot- you'll need it for a while.

In the meantime, use fine steel wool and boiled linseed oil, rubbed in, to bring life back to the stock wood. That wood will look beautiful, in time. CLP the clean metal, and clean the barrel often, as these guns were at least test-fired every few years with corrosive ammo, then re-dunked in cosmoline, w/o cleaning.

My 8 Pfennige worth...

Thankyou for the good answers.

I thought the idea was wack too, until it was suggested to me by a knowledgeable old-timer on the Lee-Enfield page at gunandknife.com. His reasoning was that the cosmoline was boiling when they immersed the entire firearm in it, so it couldn't be any worse. Like cures like, as the homeopathic physicians used to say.

I've tried it on an SMLE, a Mosin-Nagant and an M24/47 Yugo Mauser. I was amazed at the crap that came out of the wood, which, to be fair, dried out pretty quickly, due to the heat. Same with the metal- it dried so quickly, it didn't have time to rust. The wood didn't crack or split, but I had to repeat the process as the wood turned grey from the cosmoline, which wasn't all gone yet. Repeated applications of varying grades of steel wool and lots of BLO brought the wood back to life, by replacing the cosmo, which had in turn displaced the natural oils of the wood.

As always, YMMV, but it works for me. I'll never go back to using Easy Off oven cleaner to de-grease everything, (even outside, it was hell to be around, as are most other caustic or abrasive cleansers) and we don't have a dishwasher to put the stock pieces in, to wash.

Hell, just throw all the parts in your self cleaning oven and set the cycle to run about 4 hours -- that'll clean that Cosmoline right off, even from the stock! [:P]