The mosin I just sold was cleaned up in two ways:maverick2076 wrote:They aren't that bad, but they will let you know they are there.
There are a lot of different ways to get the cosmoline out. You can take the stock, wrap it in a black trash bag, and set it on the dash of your car for an afternoon in the Texas sun, and that will get a lot of it to bleed out. I used a clothes steamer on my Mosin, and that worked really well, along with mineral spirits and elbow grease.
Stock: Dawn Power Disolver from Walmart. Spray it on the wood, wait 10 minutes, and it'll strip EVERYTHING off the stock. You'll have to sand it down, stain, and oil it (very easy to do), but it'll be void of 90% of the cosmoline and it'll look/feel fantastic.
Metal: Mineral spirits. Get a PVC tube (I think 3" diameter) and toss the rifle in there, then fill it up with mineral sprits and leave it for the day. Give it a shake every hour or so if you can. It'll eat and melt away any and all cosmoline. When you pull it out, hose 'er down with clean water and then with your favorite oil/CLP. If you do it this way, you don't have to pull any part of the action apart.
Bore: scrub, scrub, scrub. Get yourself a bottle of Kroil and soak the innards for a few hours, then scrub again! Repeat. I also did a home made electrolosys system on mine ($5 parts from ACE hardware and a $15 DC power supply). Google that and you'll get your bore as clean as it can be.
I did all this work over the run of 3 weekends. 1 cleaning up, 1 redoing the metal, and 1 doing the stock. All of this turned my mosin from a 6" group @50 yds shooter to about a 2" group shooter using the nasty surplus ammo. I managed to get about a 1" 5 shot group using some S&B 180 grain ammo and about 1.5" groups using Wolf.
Good luck and enjoy the pounding!