Cosmoline

[Bob_The_Student]

Since nobody has posted anything in a day, which seems weird, I decided to ask this question that has been in my head for a week or so.

I have bought rifles that were "cleaned" free enough of cosmoline to shoot. My thought is IF you are shooting corrosive ammo and you have the sticky cosmoline catching the residue of the salts wouldn't that be detrimental to your firearm? My assumption is that people leave some cosmoline as a "protectant" and then never clean the areas. But if corrosive ammo is used than what?

[carls sks]

i do the best i can to remove all cosmoline (mineral spirits and heat gun does a great job ). i will always clean after every shooting too.

[Greasemonkey]

Most leave it, simply because they are lazy and it's usually in a spot or places it won't affect function. As for protection from the salts, in the critical areas it would probably be burnt away of blown away by the gases exposing straight bare metal like the action or gas system. The salts while detrimental, take time and humidity to do their magic, it probably won't have an issue after firing if the humidity is low for a while. It's a salt, salt is hygroscopic, it slowly absorbs water from the atmosphere over time, the salt, absorbed moisture and metal is what causes rust.  I have thousands of corrosive rounds and keep buying them, and shoot them all the time in various rifles and have gone a few days or much as 2 weeks... and never found rust while cleaning, and the weapon didn't turn to dust because I shot corrosive ammo and didn't clean it on the spot, and I live in the humid mid-atlantic area. 

The biggest thing, regardless if it has storage grease in places or not, is just clean it and clean it correctly... the simple field conscripts that toted, carried and trained with most of these weapons before we got all this stuff as surplus managed to clean correctly after corrosive ammo with crap they found laying around and basic stuff, they didn't have Toad Lube, Ballistol, Remjob lube, Synthtic oils, and all the other high dollar snake oils.... so cleaning after corrosive is not that difficult. They probably used water, maybe regular soap, diesel and or engine oil... 

And a mass majority of the weapons survived just fine..