I spent 15 seasons hunting big game with a 1927 vintage Griffin and Howe built on an 1903 Springfield barreled action. The previous owner bought the rifle new and hunted with it on five continents. Nothing he or I exposed the rifle to seemed to phase it much. Aside from some minor bluing wear from a lifetime of being shot and slid in and out of saddle scabbards and gun cases, it presented as new.
I took it caribou hunting in Canada and used it in California while guiding pig hunters in plain sight of the Pacific Ocean, where the rifle was exposed to salt air and misty fog. I had no trouble keeping the rifle in good condition.
Because I hadn't seen a need for stainless steel and plastic in my sporting rifles, I improperly used emperical evidence to assume that no one else really needed these materials in their sporting arms, either. I vowed to the moon and stars that no matter how hard traditional blued steel and wood stocked sporting rifles might be to find in a world filled with stainless and plastic but totally devoid of soul, I would not succumb. There was the look of the thing that had to be considered and aesthetics were not to be sacraficed.
Then I moved to Oklahoma.
There are summer days here where the temperature exceeds 90 degrees and the relative humidity seems to exceed 90 percent. I've had the fore-end on an A-5 absorb so much moisture that I couldn't disassemble the gun for cleaning without resorting to the use of a mag cap spanner to get the mag cap and fore-end off. I noted springs in the trigger group of my 10/22 developing rust from exposure to hot, humid air. I also noted a dramatic difference in the point of impact of my CZ 550 from the last day of target shooting with it to the opening day of the modern gun deer season -a difference I attributed to firing the last target shot on a hot and humid day and firing at a deer on a very cold and very dry one.
When Savage came out with the Model 14 Classic in .250-3000, I almost succumbed. Practicality triumphed over pretty, however, and I decided to buy a stainless / synthetic Savage, instead. Ultimately, I bought a gently used Savage Model 10 in blued steel mated to a synthetic stock with the idea of having the action "Black T'd" and the blued steel .243 barrel re-fitted with a stainless .250 Savage tube.
I own two guns that I've kept for over thirty years primarily because they were gifts from my parents that I received as a teen. One is a New Haven (Mossberg 500) 20 bore pump action gun and the other is a Ruger 10/22. Moving out here made me fully appreciate the "modular" design of these arms. They're both designed to be "slapped together" by relatively unskilled workers and thus they are very easy to detail strip down to the smallest part and equally easy to reassemble after inspection, cleaning, drying, and oiling of those small parts.
This has proven a big deal to me because hot, moist air doesn't just work its magic on the plainly visible outside of a firearm exposed to it, but the inner workings, too. Having an arm that is easy to take apart, clean, dry, and properly re-oil is a godsend in this climate.
That is what led me to give a Savage bolt gun a try. It is easy to strip to the smallest components to inspect them, clean them, dry them, and re-oil them.
Under harsh climatic conditions, it isn't just the outside that is potentially adversely affected, but the little springs and whatnot inside the mechanism, too. In light of this, the three most "unrefined" arms in my collection are now the ones that get the most use, week in and week out, simply because they're so easy for me to do a thorough job of upkeep on them on my dining room table. In other words, it ain't just what its made out of that matters, but how its made may well be a factor in one's ability to keep arms running proberly and looking good in the face of climatic adversity.
-JP
