What better way to spend July 4th than to finish restoring an M1?
After the initial EZ Off treatment last month, I was planning to make use of the hot sun to complete the cosmo & old finish removal, but we went into that long period of cool wet weather, so this whole project got put on the shelf.
When the hot weather returned, I let the stock sit out in the sun several times, and I was amazed at how much cosmoline continued to ooze out of the wood. I gave it another EZ Off treatment, and eventually got the wood where I wanted it:
Tried fixing the cracks with thin CA. Seems to have worked mechanically, but I wouldn't do this with a collectible stock. I also tried ironing out the dings, but it didn't seem to work well and it left the wood looking uneven where the steam had hit it. I also ran the risk of marital discord using the iron for this purpose, so I decided that dings give the stock "character" and moved on.
Then: 0000 steel wool; Minwax natural stain; 0000 steel wool; and finished up with Formby's Tung Oil Finish. I know the Formby's isn't real tung oil, and again, I wouldn't have done this with a collectible, but I couldn't find any real tung oil and I was anxious to get this project finished. I also didn't bother to try to match the handguards with the buttstock. I just wanted them to look decent. So here's the end result:
A couple of other notes: I tried boiling water to remove cosmo from the metal parts, but I don't think I'd try that again. Although it's effective, you've got to dry absolutely everything, absolutely completely, and absolutely immediately, and then lube, or else rust appears incredibly fast. Think I'll stick with kerosene or brake cleaner in the future.
The reassembly was a bigger pain than I expected. The things that I expected to take a long time went quickly, but things that I budgeted 5 minutes for ended up taking hours. For example, most of the re-assembly of detail-stripped components (like the rear sight) went smoothly, but the field-strip reassembly of the trigger group exposed a major problem: the stock appears to have swelled so that the trigger guard just would not close and latch in on the receiver. I finally decided to scrape off a bit of wood where the receiver goes into the stock to allow the receiver and trigger group to mate a hair closer. This worked, but once again, I would never have attempted this on a collectible stock (and I did it in this case only after researching the issue and being 100% sure of the problem).
Oh. Also experienced my first case of "M1 thumb.' Now I know what everybody's been talking about. OWWWWWW!
Thanks to all for the many suggestions and pointers in this thread.