I was over at some friends the other day and the husband asked me to look at a couple of old guns. His wife had inherited them from an uncle recently. We went up to the attic of their garage and there were a couple of old SxS shotguns. One was cartridge gun (W. Richards Belgian knockoff), the other a twist barreled percussion. I opened the cartridge shotgun to check that it wasn't loaded, and then I took them both home for a little oiling and research.
As soon as I got home I thought, "well, I'd better," and dropped a cleaning rod down the barrels of the percussion gun. Thud...thud. Stopped an inch and a quarter from the bottom both sides. My friends' 10-year old had gotten his hands on it earlier and his mother had rightly yelled at him. No caps on it, but still.
So, the old cliche situation of the 19th century gun found loaded still happens.
Now I have the problem of unloading. I tried using a ball puller on the over-shot wads, but it just pulled out some crumbly bits. The rest seems impacted. I tried soaking it with light oil overnight, but it's still a solid mass down there. Any recommendations on how to safely remove 100 year old shot and powder from a barrel?
Also, there is quite a bit of surface rust and light pitting on the barrels. I rubbed them down with oil just to stop it, but what is the appropriate method for bringing them back to some kind of decent finish? I don't think the piece is worth a lot of work, but I'd like to give them back a wall hanger.
Just for interest, I looked at the proof marks and found that it was proofed in Liege, Belgium, between 1853 and 1877. One of hundreds of thousands of twist steel shotguns made there.
