Wax On, Oil Off: Keeping Firearms Rust Free

I'm only a few pages into The Essential M1 Garand: A Practical and Historical Guide for Shooters and Collectors by Jim Thompson and I've already come across a tip that is probably worth the price of the book: using wax to preserve firearms from rust, particularly over the long term.

    Thompson, mentioning a 2006 article in the The Garand Collector's Association Journal, writes:

    ... Dealing mainly with museum specimens never to be fired, the real KEY findings were that thin oils as preservatives are almost useless. Greases work much better, and WAXES are especially more viable than most firearms buffs ever imagine or discuss. Some look at the article and summarize, “Well, I shoot mine, and I carry them, so this is useless.” WRONG!

     A sharps carbine hung upon a friend’s fireplace mantle many years ago by its owner and “oiled every few days” had rusted pretty much solid after a decade or so. It should’ve been treated with car wax or Johnson’s paste wax. Oil migrates with gravity and also diffuses and disperses. Wax, rubbed and buffed a little, does not. An only slightly younger Winchester 1886 in worse cosmetic but better mechanical condition when emplaced on its mantle at about the same time, in the 1980s, waxed and wiped and buffed but never once oiled, remained in such fine condition when I returned to Wisconsin from Arizona in 2003, after digging some rather uncommon ammo out of the ether of the Internet, we were shooting it—and rather well, I might add!—for the first time in at least four decades.

    Lesson: thin oils are not usable preservatives over the long run. Grease is, but it’s very inconvenient. Waxes don’t migrate after drying/ buffing, and their patina directly resists better than watery liquids.