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I inherited a Winchester 1894 that looks about the same as the one you inherited. Has quite a few pits in the reciever.

Yours cleaned up very nice. Mind telling me how you did it.

Thanks,

sensei

I wish I had some great method I used, however, it was the first gun I had cleaned up and I probably did things that would make people cringe. I definitely wouldn't have done what I did to it had it had more sentimental value or collector's value. My view at the time was it was a free gun and if I could make it look a little more respectable and be able to shoot it, that was good enough for me.

The pitting was pretty bad and so it took a lot of steel wool and even some sandpaper to get the metal down smooth. Once I did that, I needed to reblue it which was not as easy as I had expected. It seems that the metal Winchester used was not very easy to blue so they plated the receivers with another material so they would take the blue. The bottom line is the gun is more brown than blue. Anyway, it looks tons better than it did before and at least its not rusting away in an attic like before.

Sorry I really don't have any secrets to give. It took a lot of work to get it where it is today.

I really enjoy shooting it although it does beat up my shoulder quite a bit. I just got a limbsavers slip on pad for Christmas that I'm looking forward to trying out.