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Frankie Raffaele

Need help on how to properly store my firearms

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So since I started collecting firearms in February, I've had the same storage setup: a locked walk-in closet with firearms on display, and a small gun safe, fits 24 guns but i only keep room for a few and hold most of my ammo in there. The closet and the safe are both in my bedroom. The closet shares a wall with my bathroom - in particular, my shower. Due to some small cracks in the tiles of the shower, water has been getting inside the wall, slowly creating mold on the other side (in my gun closet.) It took a while for me to notice because i had an ammo bag and a few boxes of shotgun shells stacked exactly where the mold was forming, I only noticed when I picked up a box of shells and noticed it was wet. Upon further investigation, my firearms are damaged and I'm gonna guess it's from moisture. Here are some pics of the damage to just a few of the guns so you get the idea:

https://ibb.co/mnU9gU

https://ibb.co/nNcJap

https://ibb.co/n8jyap

https://ibb.co/fxBdap

There is similar (but not as bad) small blue spots and rust on my desert eagle, walther p99 and two other ARs

I'm getting the wall fixed and redone obviously, in the meantime I have a bunch of guns laying around my bedroom, and i'm looking for proper storage solutions. I bought 5 packs of 50-gram silica packs from amazon, as well as 2 eva-dry dehumidifiers. Here are my questions:

1: what should I do about the firearms? I ordered all the cleaning supplies I could possibly find, but I don't really know what to do with them. I have mpro copper cleaner, hoppes rust & lead remover, and a bunch of different cleaning solvents and gun oils. Not sure if any of that is useful in this situation, but if it is, what should I do with it? I'm a novice at this

2: From now on (after getting the leak and wall fixed) if i keep a dehumidifier in the gun closet, another dehumidifier somewhere near the safe, plus one silica pack inside of the safe, will that suffice?

3: from 1-10 how fucked are my guns? i'm really neurotic about taking care of them, but like I said I'm also a novice at all the maintenance and storage stuff. Are they still in good enough condition? or am i looking at bad performance issues down the road?

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Hard for me to tell from the pictures, but it looks to be more fouling than rust. Get on them with some CLP and a nylon brush.

Depending on what type of finish your guns have, it may take quite a bit of humidity to cause any damage. As long as the bore and internals have some oil, you should be fine.

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Any blue that you find is corrosion of Copper, that should clean off with the copper cleaner. Other rust may be superficial surface rust that will somewhat disappear with a good coating of oil and cleaning, most of all guns have anti rust coatings. I wouldn't worry so much about cleaning them right now, as I would just get them soaked in a protective agent. 

If there is active moisture in the room, then I wouldn't bother with silica or small space dehumidifiers. My firearms are stored in a basement, and I keep a large dehumidifier running 24/7 down there with a water pump to discharge waste outside. During the summer, it is pumping moisture out of the basement  constantly... and its not a very humid basement. It just takes a lot to keep moisture below 55%. This summer has been killer humid unfortunately, and humidity tends to fall out in stagnant air. 

Remember, most protective oils evaporate and migrate down and off firearms over time, I use hornadys HD extreme coating on firearms i haven't used in a while. Takes a couple seconds to spray down each firearm. There are more labor intesive products that will stay on firearms like frog lube?

But I would say the firearms you showed looked fine. If it REALLY bothers you, get the cerakoted or something down the line. 

 

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