to hold flat pieces of steel immobile. If you squeeze the receiver of a shotgun, you can bend or dent it enough to keep it from working. You'll need light to work by. A fluorescent fixture over the bench gives you a lot of light. As an addition, a desktop light with a flexible arm allows you to put a spot of light into the inner recesses of a receiver. For security, a bench with drawers or doors that can be locked will keep prying hands and mouths from your solvents and lubricants. You want to store your cleaning supplies separately from the shotguns themselves.
A common cleaning procedure is scrubbing spots of rust off a gun. Rust in and of itself is not an indication of neglect. I once spent a Sunday shooting in a match that featured 4 inches of rain. By the time I got home there was rust forming, even with an oiling after the day's shooting.
Hose some oil onto the rusted area.
Don't be bashful, the oil provides protection for the steel from the particles of rust when you start scrubbing.
Use 0000 steel wool to scrub the rust. The lifted rust will float in the oil and not scratch the surface.
Once scrubbed, wipe with a paper towel.
The surface is now clean. Repeat over all affected areas.
This doable not only has a knarfed screw, but someone tried to remove the sideplate by prying its edge. The screw can be repaired, but the mar on the frame is forever.
If you are going to properly clean your shotgun, at home or at the range, you need a cleaning cradle.
A good sturdy bench with a cleaning that helps in keeping the parts collected.
Whether your shotgun is a century old, or was made yesterday, the cleaning methods remain the same.
Cleaning the shotgun bore, and maintaining the stocks are the same regardless of what type of action you have. Whether you are cleaning the bore of your Purdey after shooting some sporting clays, your Remington 1100 after an afternoon of bowling pin shooting, or your nephew's singleshot after saving the world from squirrels, the tools and methods are the same. Wood on a shotgun gets treated according to the finish it has, not the action it is attached to. First, I will cover bore cleaning, then the various action types, then wood maintenance.
Cleaning The Bore
Cleaning the bore is the easiest part of cleaning, it is the same for all shotguns, regardless of their action type. At first glance down many shotgun bores, you would think they were clean. After all, the bore is shiny, right? Too bad plastic and newly-burnished lead are shiny too. Bore cleaning involves the bore being in one of two conditions: either the bore was clean and you are simply cleaning as a precaution, or it has been fired. An example of the first case would be taking your clean shotgun out for hunting, and not firing a shot. Yes, the bore was clean, but while you had it out, moisture could condense in the bore, dust, leaves, twigs and insects could have landed there and lint from the gun case probably collected near the muzzle. To clean those out all you need is your cleaning rod and a swab or patches. Run a dry patch down the bore, followed by a patch damp with synthetic lubricant. Check the rest of the shotgun over to make sure you haven't dented or nicked it, wipe the steel with an oily cloth, the wood with a dry cloth, and put your shotgun away. Then, try to figure out why you didn't get any shots, and make corrections for your future hunting trips.
To clean or degrease, nothing is faster than the aerosol cleaners.
You need solvents and lubricants to clean. Always buy a bigger bottle than you think you'll need, there is no point in being cheap with cleaning solvents.
A sign of hard use and heavy loads, the gap between the barrels and standing breech of this shotgun are an indication its time has passed.
A fired shotgun is different. The bore will have plastic in it from the shot cup. Some lead-pellet loads with cheap wads will have lead streaks where the shot flowed between the petals of the cup and contacted the bore. You had better hope your steel-shot shells don't feature cheap wads, because steel shot flowing between petals of the cup will score your bore. The plastic build-up will be heaviest at the forcing cone and choke, where the stresses on the wad are greatest. Your action may have powder residue and unburned powder in it, but action cleaning will be covered later with each type of shotgun.
Check to make sure the shotgun isn't loaded. Remove the barrel or barrels from the receiver. (Skip ahead to find your action type, or consult the owner's manual.) Clamp the barrel in your padded vise. With your cleaning rod, run a dry patch down the bore to wipe out the loose gunk. With a brush on your rod, brush the bore, and then swab with the dry patch again. Take a clean patch and place some cleaning solvent on it, and swab the patch through your bore several times. Clean the bore brush. Brush the bore and swab it with a dry patch. Repeal this process until the dry patches come out clean.
This is the traditional process, and it works. But it is a bit time-consuming. For some reason I have always been drawn to the high-volume shooting sports. While a skeet or trap shooter may go through 25 shells in 20 minutes shooting clay pigeons, a bowling pin shooter or practical shooting competitor could go through that many in five minutes. And then do it again 10 minutes later. My practice routine for bowling pin shooting takes 96 rounds and just under half an hour. With that kind of shooting, bores get packed with lead and plastic. No one wants to spend more time cleaning than shooting, so I worked out a few tricks to speed things up.
A plain old copper scrubby such as this one is perfect for cleaning your bore.
First, get a bore swab. The kind that looks like a fuzzy caterpillar on a stick. Go to the grocery store and buy a copper scouring pad for cleaning pots and pans. The pad should be one of the copper mesh type. Cut the pad
