US Property Savage Enfield Questions

[Skofnung]

Here’s a few questions for the great hive-mind that is THR Rifle Country. I’ve got an old Enfield No4-Mk1 that was given to me by my father years ago. It is a Savage, marked US Property and has obviously seen action or at least was in the hands of some ham handed soldiers.

Overall, the metal is in very good shape, all but the muzzle. The birch stock is dinged up pretty bad. There’s a crudely carved heart on the left side of the stock just over the magazine, and there are some faint letters scratched (again, quite crudely) into the butt. The letters look Greek, but they are so faint that I can’t make them out. Also, the gun has a beaten patch 7” behind the muzzle and at the heel of the stock, signs of being put into a rack over and over again.

I’ve fired the gun a few times long ago. I don’t even remember if it is a good shooter or not.

My question is what cleaner would you use to clean the dirt and grime off of the stock? I don’t want to strip the finish or be too aggressive; I just want the old warhorse to be a little cleaner.

Also, the rifling is strong, but I may need to re-crown the muzzle to make it shoot. It is quite dinged up. Is there a way to do this without taking too much metal off the snout?

I want this to be a good shooter, but I don’t want to destroy history in the process

Oh PS:
I know the Greeks used guns chambered in .303B as I have a few bandos of HXP. What is the likelihood of this gun being in the hands of the Greek army? What time frame were they issued?

 

[M.E.Eldridge]

I've always used mineral spirits to clean up a dirty bore. My brother reccomended it to me as a barrel claner and it worked good. Clean off the bore before recrowning, I've heard that occaisonaly dirty bores casue accuracy problems similar to those of the crowning. You might want to buy a replacement stock, if so you might be able to find them at Boyd's. If you want to try to cleaning the original stock, try window cleaner. It's worked for me. I'm not sure if the Greeks used Enfields, but I believe they used M1s after WWII.

 

[DMK]

Mineral Spirits will clean up both the metal and the stock. It it's really cruddy use a toothbrush or a vegetable brush. Make sure you let it dry good, then re-oil the metal with gun oil and you might want to use something like lemon oil on the stock if you don't want to refinish it.

If you want to get more aggressive on the wood, you can use a clothes iron and a wet washcloth to steam out the dents and indentations from the rack (just repair the damage, don't steam out any markings in the stock). Then use either Real Tung Oil or Boiled Linseed oil to refinish. I'm pretty sure BLO was the original finish (remember, these were built in the U.S. so they'd use the same techniques as U.S. issue rifles).

I'm not so sure those rifles came from the Greeks. I may be wrong, but I believe a big batch of Enfields came from Turkey.

And yes, recrowning can usually be done by just shaving the muzzle down a little bit. That is unless the rifling is damaged so far down the bore that it needs to be counterbored. However, if it's just the muzzle that's dinged up, then you won't even notice the little bit that gets shaved off.

 

[Chipperman]

I like to use Simple Green to clean stocks.

Take off stock, put Simple Green in hot water. Rub down stock. You can vary what you use to rub down depending on how grimy it is (soft cloth, Scotch Brite pad, 220 grit wet sand paper) and how willing you are to take off a little wood.

When done apply several coats of Tung oil.