Hello,
1. Affix bayonet.
2. Pull bolt.
3. Stick rifle in ground by bayonet.
4. Use funnel to pour lukewarm to warm water down the barrel. (Hot water can cause flash rust when it dries.)
5. Clean and lube as you would any other rifle. Make sure you get the bolt face, though if you have proper chamber sealing, you'll not have any salts on the bolt. It's just a precaution.
Salts are not "neutralized" by any commonly available cleaning technique, and are in themselves not corrosive. They are hygroscopic; ie, they attract moisture and cause rust that way.
In a very dry environment, you could shoot surplus and let the rifle sit with no adverse effects. I don't recommend it but it is true.
Ammonia has no special effect on salts. Windex is a detergent so it does a decent job of cleaning.
What ammonia
does do is it removes copper fouling. Hoppes makes a cleaning solution with ammonia present and it does a wonderful job.
On the other hand, so does CLP on a boresnake.
After I stopped being paranoid about 'corrosive salts' and began cleaning normally after shooting, that's the exact method I used. Same as my target/long range hunting .22 rifle, in fact.
Precision as not suffered:
Why 60 yards? Because 50 yards is in a creek and 100 yards is further than I can see uncorrected, and I was shooting uncorrected the day I shot this. 20/60 vision in my shootin' eye you know.
I still have a few corrosively primed surplus rounds on hand even though I handload. Why? Because they light all the time.
Most of the rest of the world thinks we are odd for preferring primers without potassium chlorate -- which deflagrates into potassium chloride, the salt we're so concerned about.
Primers with it are just so much better. They are hotter and have a longer shelf life.
Is Mosin. Is shoots dirty ammo. Is cleaning kit. Clean!
It's fun to reload for precision, and for convenience. If the chips are down, though, likely I'll be grabbing surplus ammo after my current handloads are depleted. If it becomes a long-haul situation, my cleaning kit will be a shoestring knotted and dipped in oil. I flat don't approve of cleaning from the muzzle, especially with steel cleaning rods.
That said, I've done a lot of work to this Mosin of mine. A lot of it has to do with prototyping and R&D, but a lot more has to do with experimental archaeology and recreating what the Finns were doing in the '20s and '30s.
I have a stock that's pillar bedded, but that's mostly to support the shims I use as I have the rifle apart a lot and don't want to squish the wood.
I do not want the bore ruined as it's very good for a Soviet-era Mosin, slugging at 0.299" x 0.3095". My simple cleaning methods have not shown any degradation in accuracy and precision.
Regards,
Josh
