Handy Tints & Hips

[tacfoley]

Since I seem to be the most prolific poster here where BP stuff is concerned, it occurred to me that I might from time to time post the odd Tint and Hip from my more than half a century experience of burning the black smelly stuff.

Many of us here, myself excluded, have one or more examples made by the Italian makers - the now-defunct Armi San Marco [ASM], Pietta, Uberti, Pedersoli, Chiappa or Euroarms, Navy Arms CVA and so on. There are others, of course, but that'll do for a start. Apart from the usual proof marks - GVT - Gardone Val Trompia [GVT], there are often a scad of other marks too. PV means Black powder - Pulvero Nero - and BLACK POWDER ONLY means waht it says. There is also a cryptic date code, and that is the subject of this morning's 'Handy Tint & Hip'.

As our guns will have been made for export, the date code will ve enclosed in a little square outline, and the codes conssit of Roman numerals [what else?] and capital letters of the alphabet.

I won't bother you with date codes from before 1975, though, as you are unlikely to find anything that old, sooooooooooooooo, here we go -

AA - 1975
AB - 1976
AC -1977
AD - 1978
AE - 1979
AF - 1980
AH - 1981
AI - 1982
AL - 1983
AM - 1984
AN - 1985
AP - 1986
AS - 1987
AT - 1988
AU - 1989
AZ - 1990
BA - 1991
BB - 1992
BC - 1993
BD - 1994
BF - 1995
BH - 1996
BI - 1997
BL - 1998
BM - 1999
BN - 2000
BP - 2001
BS - 2002
BT - 2003
BU - 2004
BZ - 2005
CA - 2006
CB - 2007
CC - 2008 etc.

tac

[edmund]

Thanks for that, very useful! My Navy Arms is now more familiar!!!

[TA6319]

thanks tac, I am off now to check my Armisport smoothbore

[tacfoley]

I'm sure that more than a few of us have gone to one or other of our gun safes over the years, picked out an old favourite that has somehow been overlooked for a while, and recoiled as we see that it has acquired a very thin layer of the dreaded oxidisation - RUST - on one or other parts of the formerly pristine metalwork.

Well, it happened to me, but not to any gun I ever owned [he noted smugly]. A few years back, the cub secretary asked me to undertake an evaluation of the contents of our safes at the club, with a view to selling off the less worthy to fund something new. I agreed, and lantern in hand, toiled down the steps of the dank old armoury and opened up the safes, including one I'd never noticed huddled in the corner.

Only one rifle in that one, but what a rifle! It was a very old Anschutz Model 1409 - thumbhole stock and complex alloy butt-plate, Anschutz sights...al there. Made in 1967, it was still a mighty impressive shooting implement by any standards, even in the sorry state it was in. It was covered on every exposed part with a microscopic layer of rust, as though it had been oversprayed light brown by a careless paint-sprayer. Add to that that the stock had the appearance of a railway sleeper, cut and gouged where it had been carelessly caught in the heavy door, and as for that complex butt-plate, well, it looked as though it metallic leprosy...

However, it was hopelessly out-dated for the needs of the club, and I offered a stupefyingly low amount of money for it, which was accepted.

First, to see if it actually shot. Dropping some oil down the barrel, I left if for the next range visit, and then carefully pushing a cleaning rod up the bore, pushed out a ten-inch long dust bunny. The bore looked sparkling, and proved it by putting ten shots into a hole at 20 yards in our indoor range. Yup, this thing still shot.

What to do about the rust, and other damage? Well, borrowing the Anschutz torque wrench from our .22 prone club captain, I carefully made a note of the setting, so that I could put it back the same way, and took the action out of the stock - needless to say, where the wood had been around the action, it still looked like new, but the rest......

I then recalled, as the owner of a number of stainless steel guns, that Birchwood-Casey made a handy impregnated cloth - yellow in colour, and strange in odour - specifically intended to remove lead burn marks on the fronts of revolver cylinders and so on, and that the warning on the packaging advised strongly agin more than passing use on blued finishes, which it would remove in the eye of a batlash.

With nothing to lose, I carefull cut a small piece off, and veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery gently started on a the micro-rust.

It worked.

It took me three weeks and three cloths, but the finish is now 99.9& as good as new, as anybody here who has seen it will testicate.

Refurbishing the stock and the buttplate took a while, too, but the way that was done is so commonplace that I'm not going to bother insulting your collective intelligence by reminding you about that.

Since I cleaned up that rifle using the expesnsive [here in UK] Birchwood-Casey lead-away cloth, I've found that KleeneeZe homecare products also produce the same item on sale here in UK, but twice the size for the same amount of money. Called 'miracle cloth' it has the manufacturer's code #56472528.

USE IT VERY CAREFULLY WITH VERY LITTLE APPLIED PRESSURE.

tac

'If you are reading this, thank a teacher. If you are reading this in English, thank a soldier.'