1911 barrel, circa 1918 help

[Steelharp]

I have on layaway an original 1918 Colt M1911. The fella was nice enough to let me field strip it and bring the barrel home so I could work on cleaning it. I need some advice. I first soaked a patch with Blue Wonder and coated the inside of the barrel. I let it sit for about 10 minutes, then started running patches through it. Man, talk about black! I did this till they were clean, then applied more BW and used a brush to scrub. More patches, more black. After a few patches, they start looking cleaner, but if I wet one again with BW, I'm still getting serious black on the wet patches only. The barrel isn't pitted, and there is no rust. Is there a way to get this barrel clean, or am I just ignorant of the way an old barrel is going to be?

Thanks, Mikey D...

 

[1911Tuner]

Black Bore Blues

Howdy Mikey,

What you are probably seeing is the accumulation of years of fouling coming out of the pores. Back in the day when that pistol was likely used the most, all ammo was corrosive. You could very well eventually get to bare metal and find a badly pitted bore...Copper fouling has a way of
embedding into the pitting and making the barrel look clean and shiny
until you get it out. If the pitting isn't too deep, it will likely take on a
brushed satin appearance. As long as the pitting isn't very deep and the
rifling is good, the barrel will probably shoot okay, but it will foul with copper quickly.

If there's a lot of copper fouling in the pits, moisture could have been laying underneath it for decades, doing its evil work...hard to say until you get it all out...and getting it all out may require a copper-dissolving chemical
or even an electrical process such as an Outer's Foul-Out kit.

In the meantime, try some J&B non-embedding bore cleaner with tight patches and an aggressive copper solvent. Sweet's 7.62 is about as aggressive as they come, but it will corrode the bore if left in for more than about 30 minutes.

Good luck!

Tuner

 

[Steelharp]

Tuner, thank you. I actually have clean patches coming out now. They went from black to a really odd looking blue (?) then kind of grayish to clear. All in all, it looks to be in pretty good shape. Looks like there's one tiny pit mark about halfway in, really small. I appreciate the advice!

Mikey D...

 

[Jim Watson]

The black was the years of powder fouling, house dust, and dried out lube.
The blue was copper fouling, complexed by the little bit of ammonia in most "nitro" solvents. The gray after that was likely some more powder soot under the copper coat, laid down when the gun was shot and cleaned without copper removal.

Sounds like you have a winner.

I hate to hear about pores in gun barrels. I have looked at steel under my agency's metallurgists' microscope and seen dang few pores. Pits from neglect and tool marks from hasty manufacture, but not pores. The way people write about pores holding fouling or pores holding lubricants, you get an image of a gun made out of angel food cake. There just isn't much void space there.

 

[Dave Sample]

Heres a 1914 top end with a similar barrel that I am playing with The barrel is similar to yours and is just fine.



These were throw away $14.00 guns back then and no one cared about the corrosive ammo that destroyed them if they were not cleaned with soap amd water. The lower end is an old 1990 Caspian part that I aquired some time back.

 

[stans]

Just about all surfaces are porous to some degree, even glass. The pores are microscopic in size and would best be seen by something like an electron microscope.

I used to worry about getting my barrels clean down to a microscopic level, but now I worry much more about concentrating on that danged front sight. More barrels are likely ruined by overzealous cleaning than anything else.