New old gun—labor of love

Some months ago a neighbor mentioned that they had an old rifle fir home defense but that it didn’t work. Helpful person that I am, I offered to take a look at it and get it running again. When I got to her house, she handed me a rusted, pitted old Marlin Glenfield Model 60 .22 rifle. One look at it told me that it was probably a lost cause but I like projects so I told her I’d take a look at it and fix it for the cost of the parts. I asked her how it got to be in that shape and she told me that when she moved into her house five years ago, her roommate found it buried under piles of junk and debris. She also said that they were the first ones back in that house since Hurricane Katrina ten years before that and that the rifle had probably been left behind during the storm. She’d never shot it but she used to take it outside and “scare people away with it.” Hoo boy.

Well I took it home and beat it apart and it was worse than I thought. The magazine tube was split, a corroded and bent live shell was stuck in the lifter (yikes!) and the bolt was all pitted and the extractors were frozen. The screws holding the sideplate assembly in were frozen and the heads were buggered, and when I finally got them off with curses, prayers and pliers the whole assembly fell apart in my hands. Junk.

Still, I shopped some used parts for this vintage 1976 rifle and called her up of course the used parts alone were more than a new used gun could be bought for and she told me to just throw it away.

But I like projects, and a Katrina salvage gun kind of appealed to me. I traded her a bottle of whiskey for the parts and then I began to clean up what was left of it. I spent hours on my porch with it steel-wooling the rust off as best I could and working the extractors loose. I cleaned the barrel up and the inside turned out ok thanks to Marlins micro-groove rifling that wasn’t deep enough to keep me from getting all the junk inside. I cleaned what I could and replaced what I couldn’t and I finished it today. For about $120 in parts and a lot of elbow grease and fitting, I now have a complete rifle that I could have bought in any pawn shop for about a hundred bucks. And of course mine looks like dogshit.

But mine’s got history. Mine is a Katrina survivor. And having rebuilt it piece by piece I’m kind of attached to it now. The wood will get some oil but the metal will stay as-is with all of its putting and corrosion evident and the scratches and scraped left intact. With so much metal damage I could never clean it up 100% (and swapping the barrels on these rifles is a machine shop job according to YouTubers who’ve tried it) so I’m leaving the metal as-is. Besides, that’s part of this gun’s history now. It survived Hurricane Katrina and it earned these “battle scars”. And now it waits for a range day to see if I got it right. It function checks ok and it feeds and ejects cartridges. It just remains to see if it’ll actually fire again after all these years.