MG42 Maintnance

[Daniele C]

for firing a full german mg42, what s the maintnance like?

do you have to grease it where and how often?

thanks

[DARIVS]

MG-42 care

Being a former MG-42 owner, I think I can help you out. If you want to keep the gun running reliably with little wear, lightly oil the rollers and other moving parts within the bolt, and apply a fair amount of oil to the rails. Do NOT use grease, since dirt sticks to it far to much AND you want those parts to move as freely as possible. Just keep the running parts wet with oil. You MAY want to spray the loaded ammo belts with a LIGHT coating of RemOil JUST PRIOR to shooting them, to help with extraction, especially if you plan on running 10-20 belts in your shooting session. Oiled full belts attract DIRT, and all you want to do is make the system run a tad smoother, so do NOT get oil on the cartridges THEN store them. A primer or two may get oil in it and not fire.

A soldier would keep the gun oiled and clean at ready at all times, and clean the heck out of the inside as far as he could reach. I flushed the heck out of the internal crud traps with lots of RemOil or CLP and made sure all residue was removed, which took me up to 4 hours (when you have a $30,000 gun, you baby it). If you strip the bolt, buttstock, barrel, charging handle assembly, and all other parts that make up the internals, you can soak the entire receiver in a PVC tube (almost) full of parts cleaner, then scrub it as best you can with small brushes, rinse, and RemOil the entire thing before reassembly for storage. The MG-42 is a very robust gun if well oiled and taken care of. It can run well dirty, but you don't want to wear the bluing completely off your rails, and give rust a chance to attack your precious. Keep ALL petroleum oils off of the wood of the buttstock or it will ruin the wood over time. Use some Minwax or better yet carnuba wax to keep the wood from dryinjg out and splitting at the neck around the buffer assembly.

[Frank De Smedt]

Daniele,

If you store the gun for a longer period don't forget to clean the barrel with copper solvent.
The remains of copper will create electrolytical corrosion after a while.


For lubricating and storage I use Swiss Automatenfett.

regards,

FRANK

[Daniele C]

thanks a lot guys i really appreciate it!

[pitfighter]

Darivs's comments are dead on!

Nothing to add, just watch that the rails (rail) inside the top cover, make sure they (it is) are always lubed well before firing.
They are the backbone, they go, the gun goes.

Pit.