Was the slush a wax based or oil based coating?

I just a week ago had the once-in-a-lifetime experience of cleaning a FULLY cosmoline rifle. It was soooo much fun I’ll never do it again!

Cosmoline is the gift that keeps on giving every time you shoot

The guy putting the receiver on doesn't look like he is over tightening it, but if you ever have to take one off, it's one of the hardest to remove.

@@2011woodlands yeah I was thinking to myself "THATS the guy to blame for all the hardships..."

That's really cool! What an awesome piece of family history!

It's entirely possible that you great grandfathers fingerprints were once on something in my safe that has been in my family since new and I am the third generation owner of that I absolutely cherish.

Then I have a rifle he made and it still shoots great. be proud

I wonder if he made part of my rifle

I also have a 1917 Eddystone and live about 10 minutes from the original plant location

same for my Father, but, he bought his in the late fifties-early sixties....looked & shot like yours aswell, except some prick stole his from our home & he always missed that rifle till the day he died.

Nice gun. I regret a swede mauser myself

Never sell your guns!😫

😱

Many of these rifles were arsenal refurbished prior to and during WWII and then never issued. You can find old ads selling them post-war for just a few dollars. My Eddystone is the same. Mirror bore and accurate as all get out. Short of having to feed my kids, I'm never selling it, or my Winchester version.

The history really is quite impressive, isn't it?

@@HighCaliberHistoryLLC indeed it is.

They truly don't make them like they used to.

as nice as that would be, theres "enough" surplus to not have as big a demand as one would wish, and even if they did they wouldn't hold up like originals,, and they'd be retardedly expensive

Got a 1918 Winchester myself. Barrel stamp shows 7-18 on it. Production number 120369

Thanks for watching!

I was just thinking about Andy Capp yesterday.

They sure did!

I have a Winchester 1917 made in 1918. It’s in excellent condition. 107 years old and going strong!

@@wyomarine6341 The ol' boy who did the sporterization on mine didn't do a very good job and as such, it did not group well for him. All my dad and I did was pour a glass bedding in the stock for a floating barrel and bam, a decent shooting rifle!

These rifles shoot very well and vintage rifle matches are often won by the 1917 shooter. My 1918 winchester has the original barrel and will clean the target at 200 yards all 10's and x's. Ps; we share same last name.

I've got a sporterised one here in Australia I built as a target rifle. Single taper Shilen barrel etc. I built bluing tanks and polished the rifle before bluing, you can shave in the blue finish, it looks like black chrome. The actions are high in nickel, so in the right light the action actually looks plum in colour, it looks great.

Never sell it.

@@wyomarine6341 Greetings sir. Just found this video in my feed and was scrolling through the comments section to read peoples stories about their personal rifles and your comment struck me and decided to reply to you. I too have a very early sporterized Winchester all around that you would appreciate. Very well done wood work on it. Someone shaved off the top and bottom of the butt stock and added wood by dovetailing it to the original wood and turned it into a Monte Carlo. Amazing work sir. Was thinking of restoring it but whoever sporterized it did a fantastic job at it. I’ll keep it this way.

Glad you've still got it! Thanks for watching!

I have the same rifle barrel date May 1918

Have one too. 308 norma magnum. Fine weapon.

I believe the Winchester manufactured rifles are especially rare.

@@splean75 they made about 500,000 I believe, I have a Winchester.....U.S. Model of 1917

Some of them use necktie when operting lathe

I was thinking the same thing the entire time.

Steve Lewis, you forget…THIS IS WAR! 😎

What are you talking about, they've even put a chain over the pit of stock finishing oil

Responsible and aware workers .

They're definitely great guns! Thanks for watching!

With just the origional Iron peep's Mine will put all 5 shot's in the black at 250 yard's with the elevation adjustment down!👍😳It is Stamped Winchester on almost every part.

I have an eddy stone too. Great gun.

Another eddystone here too. P14 in tree oh tree though.

Have Eddystone too, love to shoot and handle it. Had a Winchester 17 about 50 years ago.. miss it! Best from DK.

Yeah, you expect them to be fired as a function check, but not to be tested out to 500 yards!

No, only a general sighting in so the soldier can hit paper. Every gun needs to be sighted in by the individual soldier. That’s why soldiers are issued the same weapon once they have it sighted in.

Was slushing done instead of packing them in cosmoline? (Or had it not been invented yet?)

@@christopherharmon2433 that's a good question I wonder if maybe slushing is just the what they call the process of putting the cosmoline on?

@@ricktaylor5744 Slushing appears to be some sort of preservative alright but I had no luck googling it. I have two M17's both customized and both great shooters.

Thanks for watching!

Good taste, sir. Next to the Lee-Enfield #3, one of the best military rifles ever. Absolutely the best .3006 Springfield rifles. And we got the design handed to us by the Brits.

It's the same procedure like today. 🤷‍♂️

I've seen a German news segment filmed at HK, and they had a guy straighten 416 barrels with an almost identical machine.

@@norwegianwiking That guy will be called the Laufrichter, it's a verified profession in Germany. 😉

Yep, and this causes a lot of confusion when people read about how a barrel maker checks their barrel blanks for "straightness" after they cut the rifling in one, that procedure is done with a tool called an Air Guage, and a better term to use for what they do at that point would be to say they're checking the bore for uniformity down it's length, ie the bore is the same diameter from one end to the other and doesn't have any points in it where it gets narrower or wider. The way an Air Guage wirks is there's an insert that is put in the barrel that's a steel rod that goes down it's entire length that has a sleeve that you pull down it, an air hose hooks up to it that has a guage on it that's clear plastic that has a vertical hole in it with a little ball bearing inside the hole that floats up and down in it, when you pull the sleeve of the Air Guage down it's length and the bore of the gun barrel gets wider at any point down it let's more air past the sleeve of the Air Guage and the ball bearing in the the indicator rises, likewise if the bore of the barrel gets narrower at any point the ball bearing drops in the indicator. These Air Guage's are incredibly accurate, they can measure a .0001" (one ten thousandths, that's one tenth of one thousands) variation in bore diameter. A "Match Grade" barrel has no more than .0005" (one half of a thousandths) variation in it's diameter anywhere down it's length. My friends dad who was a gunsmith and a very smart guy made his own barrel guage, what he did was make a steel rod to put down the length of a barrel with a sleeve to pull down it but he had it hooked up to the natural gas inside the house, when he turned a valve on the gas would come out the muzzle end of the barrel and he'd light it on fire, he had an adjustable regulator on it so he could adjust it so there was just a little flame at the end of the barrel when he pulled the sleeve through the barrel and it came to a wider point in the bore diameter the flame would get bigger, if the sleeve passed through a tighter point of the bore the flame would get smaller, it was very accurate.

There is more to it than they show. There is a small paint brush that moves along the path of the barrel, and when the barrel billet is bent (!!!Alliteration!!!) the brush leaves a mark on the billet where it is bent. Each successive hammer-blow results in a slight deformation that will collectively allow the barrel billet to be declared basically completed. It won’t be perfectly straight, but it is straight-enough that drilling the bore and chamber won’t produce an uncentered hole at one end. Now the process is similar, but we have machines that automate the process much more quickly. And, we have processes like the Cold-forging of Barrel and Bore simultaneously that eliminates the need for boring a barrel billet and banging on it with a hammer to straighten.

Absolutely!

The Danes actually still have it in limited service with their arctic "Sirius patrol" The metallurgy is so good that it's still the best choice for shooting polar bears.

@@dennisp.2147 If I recall right the load they use is in the 180-220 grain weight range for polar bears.

I'd love to have one too!

@@HighCaliberHistoryLLC I’d rather have one (and do) that has seen some use. Been in the hands of a soldier, has some character.

I love seeing the history of it all!

I suspect there may have been a bit of fudging involved. Propaganda.

@@craigcooper8593 No propaganda; these rifles are still very accurate today even after being around for 120+ years. There's a video on the Forgotten Weapons channel of them taking a 1917 Enfield out to 1000 yards with hand loads.

Very true BUT at least with mine that process shows its self, doesn't close on a field guage but its not far off probably in the 80-85% range of a bolt throw or more, also at least with the current bolt in it the action isn't true due to bulges at the case head. Rifle will be seeing a gunsmith within the next few months. Bolt is eddystone as well as the rifle and im currently looking at bolts to try closing up the headspace a little. Sights, trigger are awesome! And interestingly I have a weird follower in mine that acts like a single feed, its just a round follower versus the more traditional style followers you see in almost every other military bolt action rifle out there. Best way to describe how it works is instead of feeding a round into the box magazine where ya hear the click when its in, this follower you just place the round on it and push the bolt home, as a result you won't know your rifle is empty either till you hear a click since the follower won't hold the bolt back when empty.

Those hand straighteners sure were cool.

Nice to have that original barrel! Thanks for watching!

Mine does too! 11-17! 4 digit serial number, bluing is still fantastic! Mine is a Remington.

Very nice. Mine was rebarreled in ‘32.

Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching!

This was at Winchester.

@@HighCaliberHistoryLLC that's where mine is from! Has a barrel date of 2-18

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for watching!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Nice! There were 202,376 made that month.

That is when my Winchester was made too.

Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching!

Yeah, definitely a tough place to work, despite the factory being state of the art for its day.

they also used soda water, kerosene, and other wild things, I have machinists books from the era with recommendations on different coolant/lubricants....

@@ypaulbrown that would be pretty a interesting book to take a look at

I've setup and ran quite a few #3 Warner Swazie turret lathes in my day....kinda fun actually.

Absolutely! Thanks for watching!

That's awesome that you now have the family heirloom! Thanks for watching!

After the reaming operation

The world was a very different place in 1918.

Right there with ya!

I'd imagine the shouting matches in your cabinet would be epic. German and English while the Austrian and French ones glare at each other.

Very cool!

To hell with OSHA, a man's gotta look good!

@@HighCaliberHistoryLLC Right, times have changed. I have three 1917s all of them were chopped when I got them. However, I have one intact Winchester P14, and it shoots great. This design is one of the best to ever come along.

Found one at a gun show in 2015 for 400, it’s one of my favorite rifles

Me too!

Nice!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks very much, Robert!

Yes, most likely!

If you were one of Bidens asylum seekers you could 😂😂😂

Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it!

They're great guns!

I've never encountered footage of Mauser or Enfield in my searches, but it definitely would be cool! Thanks for watching!

Glad you enjoyed the glimpse into the past!

Some companies still use the same straightening techniques . It works , similar system used to align lenses in optical systems .

Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it!

Me too!

That would have been an interesting part of the tour itself- the crating woodshop.

Totally agree! If I had the ability to do the cleaning and coloring I would, but alas, I don't. Thanks for watching!

@@HighCaliberHistoryLLC I can’t remember the name he channel. I will look up all the channels I am subscribed to. But he is the one that cleans up films from 1890’s-1920’s puts very good color on them and corrects the speed. Again, I will try to find him. Wonder who has the rights to this video, if anyone by now?

@@Flatline74 It's in the public domain.

Slush is a liquid corrosion preventive compound applied hot which provides a barrier against atmospheric corrosion. It actually still exists today.

In that year, I'd rather be there in a hot factory than in France. But that work does looks entirely mindless and soul crushing

The slushing crew were the only blacks I noticed in the film.

@@dabisnit Yep - I'll take a hot factory over a muddy trench any day!

@@thadrobinson8343 They also did the oil treating on the stocks, loading into crates, and moving crates off to be shipped.

Thanks for watching!

This was filmed at Winchester.

@@HighCaliberHistoryLLC Thank you. I knew where it wasn't just not where it was!

I picked up a mint Eddystone for about $275 15 years ago. Obviously those days are gone, but you can still find them for sub $500.

Nothing inherently inaccurate about belt-driven machines. A buddy has one that still gets use in his shop.

Also Dermatitis from hands covered in oil all day.Dust from the sanding etc.

No wonder they drank so much. Right?

@@ChallisVenstra reminds me of talk I heard among the older machinists at Wagner Mining winter of 1988 - mention of after-work “Long Island Teas” and such. Was working Swing, then - 3:30 -12:00 midnight. Bars closed at 2:30 AM, I think. I never went to those places. I was usually too tired at the end of my shift - far more disabled than I knew at the time. Would stop at a grocery store on the way home, quart of buttermilk, loaf of French bread. It seemed to help.

It looked like the indoor range test firing guys had ear plugs but other than that, yeah, the lack of protective equipment is striking. In Hatcher's Notebook, Gen. Hatcher (who was heavily involved in small arms procurement and development for the US Army around the time this was filmed) highly recommends eye protection when firing rifles. He was writing in 1946, though, so I don't know if he recommended it in 1918 yet.

They were wearing the greatest protection of the time, the leather apron.

Yeah, they were tough SOBs.

Or women, anywhere.

OSHA wasn't even the horizon back then.

Thanks for watching!