Safe stock cleaning?|Restoration, Repair and Maintenance|Forum|Winchester Collector

Just brought home an old ’94 Takedown rifle.  The stocks need to be cleaned.  They are nearly black in places and are covered in a sticky film.  What cleaning method and material would safely remove the aged grease and grime?

I worked as a busboy and later as a bartender when young.  Chinese restaurant during the era when people smoked wherever.  A few times each year, one of my duties was to turn up the lights in the lounge (revealing an alien environment!) and clean the lampshades and fixtures.  The film on this rifle is quite like the fried-shrimp grease, cigarette smoke, and people exhaust scunge which lurked in the darkness of that lounge–brownish-yellowish, sticky, stubborn scunge.  Perhaps this rifle hung for decades in a restaurant, tavern, bar?

The rifle is nearly covered on the stocks and on the receiver with the film.  The barrel, magazine, and hammer are intermittently crusted.  A test this evening revealed that Hoppe’s 9 and elbow-grease will do a good job of cleaning the metal.  Mama Wong swore by “409” for cleaning pretty much everything.  It surely did work well in the lounge, but I’m hesitant to hit my rifle with it.

Some things take a while to soak through–While typing this, questions came to me, “If my job as a busboy from 14 to 17 years of age included cleaning the lounge fixtures, why was I the one cleaning them when I tended bar there in my early 20’s?  Where the heck were the busboys who should have been polishing everything!?”  I guess after forty years, it is a bit late to argue the point.  Plus, they bulldozed the restaurant decades ago–built a NAPA parts store there.  The only thing left are the Spirits of the good people I worked with.  I feel them when I buy parts for my truck, but the folks who now work there don’t feel the ghosts who are about the place.  Would be nice to have the old people stop aging and give us a chance to catch up to them while they are still alive.  Would be good to go back to those younger times and live them, knowing how precious those days would become.  –A tad off track.

What is good to use to get a century of dirt and grease off a Winchester’s wood?