20 Oct 2023 Garand Picture of the Day

[Mark in Rochester]

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[browningautorifle]

Cans of guns...nice.

[Bob Womack]

Better than spam!

Bob

[Bob Seijas]

Many of them were badly done... CMP got a lot in it's early shipment of Army M1s and too many were balls of rust when opened.

[browningautorifle]

many were balls of rust when opened

I wondered about that. Not really a good substitute for cosmoline after all.

[Flying10uk]

Some people have hands that cause steel to rust more than others when they handle steel. A chap that I use to work with years ago in the metalworking industry called it "Jammy-Hands".

If the guns were handled by such person prior to being "canned" one shouldn't be surprised if they are rusty when removed.

[browningautorifle]

Some people have hands that cause steel to rust

I have acidy hands, for one. I learned that years back. He's talking about the rifles coming out as balls of rust, completely consumed. Not a scale, but unrecoverable.

[fjruple]

I believe the program of canning firearms was an outgrow of the pre-war experience of long term storage of firearms by the US Ordnance Department. The previous storage involved dripping the weapons into cosmoline and then placing them into wooden crates for long term storage. First problem in many cases the cosmoline was not properly placed in barrels which were rusted upon opening the crate of weapons. The other problem was the crate itself. In many cases unseasoned wood was used in the fabrication of the wooden crate which contained a large amount of water. Bad news for the weapons stored within. The main problem of the old system of storage is the weapons are not available for immediate use. All of weapons would have to be removed from the crate and start a program of deep cleaning. Not something you want to do if the weapons crates just arrived from America and you have an imminent threat of the Wehrmacht landing on your beaches. Thus was born the idea of immediate use and the early canning program.