I got a butt chewing for degreasing me new garand..
here is a reply i got at another forum..
This is one of the hazards of jumping in and starting in on a project using methods you're unfamiliar with. Some inquiries here first would have made the job a little smoother.
My initial impulse is to point the nasty finger and exclaim "jackass" and "bufoon" then go on to make fun of your drivers' license photo, choice of women, and maybe even come over in person & kick your dog ... BUT, since it's Mother's Day, I've promised heroic efforts to behave. And a promise made to MOM is sacrosanct
Why my insane outrage? The sole purpose of Easy Off or any Lye cleaners is to chemically break down stubborn organic material, such as that bonded to your oven innards. It does the job well. However, wood is also an organic material, and sodium hydroxide (lye) does a super job of breaking down the lignin that binds wood fibers together. Add in the old age condition of an oil soaked stock, & you have the recipe for weakening a less than 100% sound chunk of wood; maybe to the point of actually shattering wood when fired.
Not all damage is readily visible, but milsurp collectors are becoming increasingly adept at identifying an oven-cleaner mistreated piece of gun-lumber. A faint tell-tale greenish cast is the signature of lye damage to stock wood. A shooting aquaintance bought a plain-looking Turkish Mauser and was wondering why it began developing flaking surface cracks along woodgrain in the wrist - the telltale greenish cast in the wood was the answer.
Now that you've realized that a major screw-up has occured right in your very kitchen, what must you do to neutralize any remaining lye in your wood? First, dilute some white vinegar to about 2% acidity and brush it onto the stock (do it now, you can read the rest of this later). You want it to soak into the wood, just as the oven cleaner did, so use a lot, and apply it often so it soaks into the wood. Any stamps or cartrouches in the wood may have already been damaged by oven cleaner & water rinsing, so at this point the goal is to kill any remaining lye now quietly breaking down your organic stock.
Heat is the best method of removing cosmoline adsorbed into a stock. Often, a stock leaned against the wall next to my garage will sweat grease like a fat lady in a sauna - it comes to the surface, collects in tiny drops, and eventually runs like a river and pools up in little puddles all over the newspaper the butt is resting on.
Patience is the key. Good results won't happen using shortcuts, so take your time. Wrap the stock in several tight layers of cheap, stiff, tough toilet paper from the 99ยข store. Be sure to stuff the barrel channel and all cutouts tight with TP. Roll up the mummy-wrapped stock in a black plastic trash bag & place it on the dash of your car when it's parked out in the sun all day at work. Rewrap the stock when the TP gets soaked and repeat.
Occasionally stubborn cosmoline will persist, and require severe treatment. This isn't recommended except as a last resort, but a tank-dip in MEK furniture strippers may be necessary to get out deeply embedded cosmoline. I've done it to some stocks, and you need to decide if the expense is worth the results for your particular rifle. Considering the ultimate worth of a Garand with a nice stock $20 for commercial stripping is a drop in the bucket; OTOH for a $50 marginal condition Mosin Nagant, it's 40% of the cost of the gun...
Once the stock is cosmo-free to your satisfaction, rub it down first with a medium 3M pad to knock down the wood grain whiskers raised during the water-abuse phase of the stock treatment. You will want the deepest penetrating stock finish you can obtain. At this moment, Behr #600 Tung Oil Finish can't be beat. It contains Tung Oil, Boiled Linseed Oil and enough 'petroleum distillates' to lower the oils viscosity to permit rapid & deep penetration. Put on a heavy coat with a sponge or lint free rag and lit it sit. Recoat any areas that look dry, since they're the places absorbing the fastest. After a 1/2 hour, wipe off the excess. Unlike BLO, a 2nd application of TOF can be applied in a couple of hours. The first 2-3 applications are important, because they will penetrate deepest into the wood. After about 24 hours, the absorbed Tung & Linseed Oils will have polymerized into an impervious varnish-like material that won't allow further deep penetration. Several additional applications can be added to seal the wood surface, then afterward, either BLO mixtures or continuing with the TOF are recommended about once a month to maintain the finish.
A BLO mix of 1/2 BLO & 1/2 Turpentine with a dash of Japan Drier had been my favorite finish, until recently when I tried the Behr's Tung Oil Finish - it will even penetrate thru old BLO finishes to better seal the wood. Avoid Pure Linseed or Tung oils, as they may eventually polymerize to form a proper finish, but don't penetrate very deeply & can also gum and further delay returning he rifle to active use. Also, avoid steel wool, small shreds of the finest steel wool can embed in open woodgrain and are difficult to remove. 3M pads work extremely well, & when you soak them in oil, they can be rinsed out with detergent cleaners or even turpentine to clean them up. In normal use, they can be simply rinsed in soapy water to remove the fine wood dust clogging them.
Now, once the job has been completed, your job, should you accept it, is to jump all over the next guy you even suspect of thinking about using oven cleaner & patiently lead him to the true path of wooden milsurp stock enlightenmennt.
And, BTW, there is a website that gives superb information regarding disassembly of a variety of milsurps, and even has pictures & diagrams for disassembling your Mauser Bolt. He has the best 'fix it' explaination on recocking your Mauser bolt when you disassemble it without the safety lever in the vertical position. This as an excellent resource, save for the one Major Flaw - he advocates the use of oven cleaner. Heed his disassembly advice, and be satisfied with the knowledge that even the best out there screw up big time when they improperly advocate oven cleaner for cleaning off cosmoline and afterward polyurethane for refinishing them.
Sounds like he got too wound up.. after letting the garand stock dry since
sat. i see nothing wrong with it.. several of the old timers here say
that using oven cleaners to get the ground in grim out of the wood
worked for them for years..will start the linseed oil application this weekend..
