mystery garand ammo

[DE Shooter]

I cleaned up a CMP Garand for my nephew, who rcvd it just before he shipped out to his first duty station. I've shot a couple CMP shoots using supplied rack guns. Got it to the range first time yesterday to check function and sight in. A friend gave me some "Garand" ammo he had picked up years ago...not remembering where or any other specifics. He said maybe gunshow Greek, maybe CMP, maybe Cheaper Than Dirt whatever. Well, the old rifle is a real shooter...ended the day with a 5 shot, 1.5 inch group at 100yds. One dud out of ~40 rounds. I'll pull the bullet for a weight check. The bottom of the case is stamped L C 4 7; space equally around the base. I sure would like to get some more. Can any one shed light on what this ammo is and if more is available. Definately looks milsurp...some casings were dinged before I shot them.

[dewcrew8]

it is milsup (usa) lake city 1947 .

[willr]

Be careful. Mfd that early they might very well be corrosive. If so, some serious cleaning of the M1 is needed.
willr

[snuffy]

Be careful. Mfd that early they might very well be corrosive. If so, some serious cleaning of the M1 is needed.
willr

Good start for some good advice,,,--why did you stop there?

To continue Will's advice, you'd better clean using some sort of water based cleaner, G.I. bore cleaner in the little oval green cans,(smells terrible), or hot soapy water.

IF they're corrosive, and you don't follow our advice, you'll definitely ruin that good shooter. It'll most likely rush shut, the gas system will hold 'er closed. as well as other close fitting parts will rust together.

[DE Shooter]

I've cleaned the bore and bolt face with Hoppes and swabbed till dry. Will re-do with hot water....and clean gas cylinder and op rod gas block too. Thanks.

[Mike Irwin]

"I've cleaned the bore and bolt face with Hoppes and swabbed till dry. Will re-do with hot water....and clean gas cylinder and op rod gas block too. Thanks."

Unfortunately, that's not sufficient.

Hoppes has no water in it, so it is very poor at removing corrosive priming salts.

But, Hoppes does have oil in it, which can effectively cover up and protect corrosive priming salts.

At this point you need to use HOT soapy water (Dawn dish detergent works well) to wash your bore and all associated parts.

The Dawn and hot water will remove any traces of oil and dissolve and remove the priming salts.

[Ivan]

I recommend you do NOT use plain hot water or hot water with dish detergent. Both will pull all the oil off the part and it will rust VERY quickly (as in minutes).

Instead, do what black powder (ultimate in corrosive) shooters do: Use Murphy's Oil Soap and Warm water. I put a couple ounces in a quart or so of water. The exact ratio isn't important but you use more Murphy's Oil Soap than if you are cleaning your floor.

A Modern gun like a M1 Garand doesn't accumulate nearly the same amount of crud, so you might also consider disassembly and cleaning with patches instead of the bucket approach we use with black powder. In that case, I would mix up about 1/3 MOS and 2/3 water. Basically you need water to dissolve the corrosive potassium chloride residue from the potassium chlorate primers.

Don't forget to use regular bore cleaner or oil afterward!!!

BTW, the M1 Garand's gas cylinder and gas piston tip are stainless steel.

- Ivan.

[Mike Irwin]

"I recommend you do NOT use plain hot water or hot water with dish detergent. Both will pull all the oil off the part and it will rust VERY quickly (as in minutes)."


That is exactly what you want, something that will remove all traces of oil so that no potassium chloride can hide under residual oil and cause later rusting and pitting.

The idea of using hot water is to use water that is hot enough, and enough of it, that the bore flash dries. Normally I end up using a gallon or more of boiling water for the final rinse to make sure that I've got all of the corrosive salts out and that the metal is hot enough to flash dry.

I've used this process in my muzzleloaders for over 20 years and have never had a rusting problem, and use the same process for my Lee Enfield after I shoot South African corrosive surplus.

No rusting problems with any of them.

[Unclenick]

BTW, the M1 Garand's gas cylinder and gas piston tip are stainless steel.

True, but the op-rod steel behind the piston head is not, and it gets exposed to a lot of gas, as evidenced by the carbon that builds up back there. I would soak the tip of the op-rod and scrub it. After it dries is can be soaked a day or two in a carbon softening solvent, like Gunzilla, and the carbon and any rust under it (common in old op-rods, probably because of corrosive priming) can then be brushed off.

The Army didn't phase out corrosive primers until the early 50's. I seem to recall experimental use of non-corrosive primers was done with match ammo at one point in the 40's, but don't recall the year? In any event, it doesn't sound like you have match ammo there. It says "match" on the head. So this is likely just ball, and corrosively primed. If the tip is black, it is AP, which is a 168 grain bullet that was issued for combat. If the bullet is 152 grains, or close to it, that's M2 ball. M1 ball, which the issued Garand was designed for, was discontinued long before 1947.

OK. I just checked this useful document at the CMP web site. It indicates that the only pre-50's non-corrosive primed .30-06 ammo came from Frankford Arsenal and was marked FA. None of the LC .30-06 was non-corrosive before the 1950's. What you got is definitely corrosive primed.

The old saying about corrosive ammo was, clean the rifle immediately after using it, and again the next day. Otherwise you get rust.

I'd never heard of the Murphy's Oil Soap option. It sounds like a good idea if you can't keep the water hot enough. Folks used to pour boiling water down a bore in old times. If you pour boiling water over plain steel long enough to get the steel good an hot, you will notice the heat dries the water off very fast and a faint blue surface color appears. That is a thin lay of magnetite (blue oxide) and will actually protect the steel from corrosion for a brief period of time. Long enough to oil it, certainly. It used to be commonly recommended as the final step to take in cleaning a carbon steel kitchen knife; run your hottest water over it until the knife is hot, then shake or wipe off the excess and let the knife cool in air. Boiling in water is also what converts red rust to blue in the rust bluing process. What will cause rust to form in minutes are activated surfaces (from abrading or from chemical etching) and too little water temperature.

Don't forget you will likely have to seat the bullet in your dud round a thirty-second inch or so deeper to break the pitch seal before you can pull it successfully.

[snuffy]

Mike is 100% right! The secret is the extremely hot water-rinse. The stored heat in the metal drives off any lingering water instantly. Then while the metal is still hot, hit it with a good rust preventive oil. The pores of the steel will soak the oil up, insuring against any rusting.

Yeah, maybe the gas piston and cylinder are stainLESS steel. That by no means is a guarantee they won't corrode.

[Mike Irwin]

For my muzzle loaders I've always used Johnson's Paste Wax inside and out.

Does a great job of keeping the rust away and REALLY makes the plum brown I have on my TC Renegate pop.

[Ivan]

Quite a few years back, I did the following:

I had just gotten home from the range and in my new (at the time) residence there was a basement with a laundry sink. This was the perfect place to try out the clean your gun with boiling water idea that folks were suggesting.

I boiled a full tea kettle of water on the main level and took it downstairs where I used hot tap water and dish detergent to clean the gun (bronze brush) followed by brush and some boiled water followed by the rest of the boiled water followed by a couple dry patches. They were clean.

I set the rifle aside, washed my hands and put the pot back on the stove. I then took the rifle into the kitchen and broke out my cleaning kit to run a couple oiled patches through the bore. The first patch came through with brown specs. So did the next one. I eventually did a full conventional cleaning, but I believe the damage was done.

As usual, YMMV, but this did happen to me and I don't see how I could have gotten the water any hotter than I had it.

- Ivan.

[Mike Irwin]

So, in a few momnets, those brown specks were rust spots that had eaten through the barrel of your gun, rendering it a useless sewer pipe?

[Ivan]

No, Mr. Irwin, that isn't what I wrote.

I stated that in a few minutes there was enough brown rust in my barrel to be easily noticeable on the oiled patches I ran through. I don't imagine those rust specks that came from the rifle's bore improved the surface finish, do you?

Feel free to come to your own conclusions about what this means.

- Ivan.

[Ivan]

Many years ago, I was given a few rounds of French .30-06 ammunition which I ran through my M1 Garand. I did my standard cleaning afterward. A few weeks later, I checked the gun and found that the op rod behind the SS Piston tip had started to rust. The liner under the front handguard and I seem to remember that just off the chromed section of the barrel by the gas port there was also a slight bit of rust. I never looked inside the gas cylinder, but the piston tip DID look like it had etched in a few places. There wasn't any noticeable rust in the bore.

I guess the French ammunition was corrosive.

- Ivan.

[Uncle Buck]

Although I do not yet own an M-1, I read these threads about them so I will know what to expect from it and how to properly care for it (I wonder if new mothers do the same thing with gathering info on their babies? ).
I am amazed at how often Dawn Dish Soap comes up in any gun cleaning thread. We use it for washing the dogs, it is a great flea killer!

[Unclenick]

Uncle Buck,

Just avoid the corrosive ammo and you won't run into this particular issue. The exception would be getting carbon off the op-rod. I would do that regardless because the dry carbon can absorb and hold moisture against the steel. I usually squirt a little LPS 2 or Birchwood/Casey sheath into that area after shooting to help seal it off, if I'm not going to do a detail cleaning.


Ivan,

I don't recall seeing the boiling water method fail before except on fresh Parkerizing that had neither been acid neurtralized nor set into water-displacing oil, but left out after rinsing. The phosphoric acid in the Parkerizing solution leaves some surface activated free iron behind in the phosphated surface layer. That's why the military process adds a mild chromic acid post-Park dip to get some chromium oxide over that stuff.

I am wondering if the instant rust you seemed to get might not have been pre-existing, but that it took the presence of oil on a patch to loosen it? The fact you described them as specs rather than as patch coloring makes me think of that. Very fine fresh surface rust usually looks like coloring on a patch rather than particles. In working on a pitted bore, I've seen dry patches come out clean, but then using light oil afterward finds more rust, and that is often of particle form. Unfortunately, without a before and after borescope inspection, it's hard to determine exactly what happened for sure?

Another thing that comes out looking like rust is bluing in a bore. Very reddish. On a new blued barrel, I often run a few patches smeared with Iosso Bore Cleaner (mild abrasive, like JB) just to get that out and to polish the surface lightly.

[Ivan]

Hello UncleNick,

The barrel that suffered these effects was very well used and "frosty" in appearance before this started. I had shot it quite a lot and cleaned it pretty regularly and not noticed embedded rust (though there might have been some).

I believe the combination of degreased steel in the white, minor etching to start, and a lot of water vapor was sufficient to cause minor surface rust very quickly.

I believe I could see some of the fresh rust at the muzzle. I became convinced that this method doesn't work (at least for me). This was quite a few years ago, so once I saw this, I didn't try to analyze what went wrong. I found very shortly afterward that GI Bore Cleaner or Murphy's Oil Soap and water worked quite well so I didn't need another method.

- Ivan.

[Unclenick]

That's interesting. I have seen steel de-rusted by an acid, like Naval Jelly, get surface rust almost immediately. If the steel was somehow activated, it can form.

I don't know if my reference to rust bluing is something you are familiar with? The process is to use nitric acid fumes or a special liquid preparation (Pilkington Rust Blue, for example) that usually contains a little nitric acid to initiate fine red surface rust on steel. After the rust has a day to appear, you submerge the steel in boiling water, preferably distilled or deionized to avoid scale, for about fifteen minutes, and this turns that red rust black (most of it is done in the first five minutes). You then card the steel, meaning you rub all the loose black rust off, using either a very fine motorized stainless steel wire wheel, or using de-greased steel wool pad. What remains is spotty, like fine pepper sprinkled on the steel. Then you repeat. The coverage becomes more complete with each cycle. After five or six cycles, coverage is complete and you have a slightly satin dark blued piece of steel. Very good looking, IMHO. This is the traditional bluing for custom double barrel shotguns.

If you skip the boiling and just card the rust, you end up with the plum brown surface that was a traditional muzzle loader finish. With either the blue or the brown, immersion in a water displacing oil, followed by a wax is desirable. I apply LPS-2 or one of the Parkerizing surface sealants sprayed on and allow the carrier to evaporate and then rubbed before applying wax. The one in the link does both water displacing and surface sealing for Parkerized finishes, but is good on fresh blue or brown. That stuff is a good rust inhibitor and bonds to the metal to some extent.

Anyway, I'm guessing that if you'd boiled your barrel the rust would have gone, too, though your patch would have come out with some of the loose black rust on it. The only times I've seen the boiling water trick fail is with hard, deep rust, and oil contaminated rust.

[Ivan]

These days, I use Oxpho-Blue or Birchwood Casey cold blue. I believe it is the same stuff under different names. I once used a watery cold blue that put a nice black finish onto anything that didn't have the slightest film of oil on it. The problem was that the resulting finish was not protected from rust in the least. It seemed to rust even quicker than steel in the white. Perhaps my barrel was in that condition when the boiling water method didn't work. I have used naval jelly to de-rust parts, but never checked how quickly they rusted afterward.

I am fairly familiar with rust blued guns. I hung out with black powder shooters for a while. I didn't much like that kind of finish because it always seemed that you had to keep it oiled or it would get MORE red rust. My understanding of this process was that the carding had to be done with iron or carbon steel tools to avoid contaminating the surface with something that would not interfere with further rusting. It does look pretty, but always seemed to me to be an imprecise method. I have seen folks that left the steel unfinished and just let the surface rust form through use.

I'm not convinced that boiling would have saved this barrel. A couple thousandths of rust on the outside of a barrel may not make much of a difference, but it certainly would on the inside.

- Ivan.

[Unclenick]

A couple thousandths! Man, that would be awful deep awful fast. The rust bluing I've done can't be more than a couple of tenths thick, and that's after six applications.

I don't know what's in the Birchwood Casey, but the old 44-40 Gun Blue, still available from Brownells, uses some amount of Nitric Acid. It is by far the darkest cold blue I've tried, but because of the after-rust problem I used to wash anything touched with it using Formula 409 or Greased Lightning, either one of which are good penetrating acid neutralizers. That would be followed with a running water rinse followed by dribbling distilled water over the area to flush the tap water to prevent water marks. Then it got water displacing oil. WD-40 works well for that in a pinch, but you want to wipe it all off the surface and add regular gun oil to prevent the surface getting tacky over time.

The cold blue with the worst after-rust I've seen was the one Outers had their name on at one point; my sample is over 15 years old, so I don't know if it is their current formulation? It has hydrochloric acid in it, and there is nothing like a little chlorine to start steel rusting. It forms ferric chloride, the circuit board etchant, but it also attacks steel, activating the surface, drawing in water, and leaving rust in its wake.

Ten years ago or so I took a fist full of those little orange plastic flags on wire stems that you buy at Lowe's or Home Depot for marking off work areas outside. I cleaned and blued the ends with every cold blue formula I could lay my hands on and wrote which was which on the flags with a Sharpie. I recall I acid neutralized them and thoroughly rinsed them in running water. I dried them and then just left them sitting out. After three months all but the Oxpho-blue and Van's had broken out in rust, some worse than others. I wish I'd recorded the specifics, but my only real purpose had been to verify my suspicion that the phosphoric acid based types were the only truly safe types. Unfortunately, they just aren't the darkest types.

[Ozzieman]

Just a question to the experts.
I know about the problems with crossover primers, but some of you sound like if you shoot a clip of 1944 manufactured ammo through the gun within a couple of hours it’s a piece of crap.
The how do you explain the millions of rounds that were shot through the guns during the war and in many places the guns had little if any cleaning, yet the guns great reliability and accuracy, many considered the grand the finest rifle of WW2.
On a side note a story my father told me.
He was in the only maintenance battalion that landed on D day and the only in france for the first 30 days. His group worked on every thing from 1911 to small cannons.
He told me of the 55 gallon barrels that they cut in half and filled with gasoline that they used to clean gun parts then use motor oil since they didn’t have any thing else.
They would set in a circle and tear guns apart and throw the like parts in a pile.
Trigger groups in one, op handle in another.
Clean with gas then wipe down with motor oil.
Then back in the circle and assemble from the part piles.
He said the worst were the ones they got from a 6X6 that ran off an LST into 15 feet of water and sat there for several days and was filled with Grands. I don’t know if they were in boxes or what ever.

[Unclenick]

No, they won't die that fast, but cleaning was pretty regular in the field to keep on top of the corrosion issue. If you go poking through Garands on the racks at the CMP stores, or through racks of Mausers or any other commonly muzzle-cleaned military rifle of that day, the amount of muzzle funneling is pretty bad in a lot of them. I've seen a couple of Columbian Mausers where the rifling was completely gone from the muzzle back for a good half an inch or so. The problem is caused by the cleaning rods running in and out of the muzzle while bearing against the crown. It's so common there is even a special gauge made for measuring muzzle wear in the Garand and '03. So, they were cleaned a lot.

The saying to clean immediately after shooting and again the next day was for match shooters who wanted no pitting at all, and for hunters who might not shoot again for a season. If you keep shooting, as in combat, the corrosive residue won't have much opportunity get hold of water or to build up thick rust.

[Ivan]

Hi UncleNick,

I believe the very dark and not very protective cold blue I was using was 44/40. Perhaps I exaggerate with "a couple thousandths". I have never tried measuring the depth. I don't believe it would help accuracy though.

Ozzieman,
Shooting a couple clips through won't really mess things up for a few days unless it is really damp. The issue with MY rifle is that I made it VERY damp. If you come across high-power competitors, you might find that although the guns may be mechanically sound, often there is a little bit of rust in corners if the guns have been rained on and not thoroughly cleaned.

- Ivan.

[Mike Irwin]

"No, Mr. Irwin, that isn't what I wrote.

I stated that in a few minutes there was enough brown rust in my barrel to be easily noticeable on the oiled patches I ran through. I don't imagine those rust specks that came from the rifle's bore improved the surface finish, do you?"

Well, here is what you wrote, Ivan.

"I eventually did a full conventional cleaning, but I believe the damage was done."

My query was an attempt to determine exactly WHAT damage was done.

I sincerely doubt that any damage was done in that short a period of time, other than a little discoloration of the steel, resulting in what you saw on the patch. And especially not to the apparently dramatic degree which you seem to think.

My opinion is that the bore was not harmed. You saw the same kind of rust I see occasionally if I don't dry the knives that my Grandfather made from Model T leaf springs quickly enough - surface rust, of which all traces are easily removed by scrubbing it with something as minimally abrasive as a cellulose sponge.


Ozzieman covers it nicely with this statement:

"but some of you sound like if you shoot a clip of 1944 manufactured ammo through the gun within a couple of hours it’s a piece of crap."