Anybody that's ever been around military surplus firearms, fresh from the crate, knows that they are packed, soaked, filled and drizzled with an icky preservative known as cosmoline. Now cosmoline is really good stuff for preserving guns from evil corrosion and it sticks nice and tight to wood and metal alike and it penetrates into every little nook and cranny of whatever it is applied to.
Which means it is a real pain in the patoot to remove the same good stuff when its time to get the gun out and go shooting. Cleaning cosmoline from firearms is much more complicated than just wiping down the stock and running a bore brush and a couple patches through the barrel. This stuff takes scrubbing!
There's a grundle of ways espoused by every mil-surp owner and peddler to remove the cosmoline before the fun of shooting can take place. Most of them involve expensive and/or hazardous chemicals, some of them require strong detergents and hot water and many of them promote heating up the parts and getting the sticky, waxy stuff to soften and melt and run off into a pan.
As you might guess, heating up these sticky gun parts in the kitchen range is usually frowned upon by the typical spousal unit...
Bruce, over at mASS BACKWARDS, having finally escaped the evil clutches of Ted Kennedy's homeland for the freedom of New Hampshire, just went out and bought himself a freshly uncrated SKS rifle from the weekend gun show. And now he has built himself a cosmoline removal cooker of his very own design. Right now he's calling it the "grease gauntlet" though he is shopping for a better name for his invention.
He's been so busy building that I don't think he has actually has put it into work yet but the goal is for the all the gun parts to get warm enough, long enough to melt off the icky preservative and let it run out the drain holes.
Its a creative design and I hope it works. Bruce might have come up with a dandy solution to a sticky problem. Updates will follow as he gets further along.
And, Bruce- skip worrying about the wood and just buy the Tapco collapsible stock. I love my Tapco stock and just wish I had the ACU colored model instead of the tan version.
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