ken10road
#1I am new to collecting old handcuffs. Ian has been very helpful. More than helpful. Thank you.
He suggested I look at this group. But I had nothing to say to all you experts.
But today, maybe I do. I got a bunch of handcuffs and leg irons in an army surplus store in Calgary for cheap because they had no keys. Ian supplied some keys to get me going. However one set of old Towers was so seized up I used a hammer on one of Ian's keys to drive it home. It broke. Apparently Ian does not guarantee against hammers.
However, I put the batch in WD40 and things progressed nicely. Then I went to my local gun shop for gun oil. I had researched the gunk factor, the evaporation factor, the rust removal factor, the friction between metal parts factors etc. So I went with an old gun cleaning product. It is new here in Canada and I think the US army recently switched to it. It is Otis , Complete Gun Cleaner. There are other Otis products. I soaked an RCMP bottleneck (Marlin Daley), an FBI H&R Super, and a pair of Mattatuck cuffs. OMG, one step up from WD40 alone. None of them are
"fussy" any more. Now they are draining. I keep changing their positions. The Otis product is not supposed to dry sticky. It is supposed to evaporate. I asked the expert at the gun shop if I needed to then apply a Teflon coating to reduce friction between the metal on metal and he said no. We'll see.
Mike
He suggested I look at this group. But I had nothing to say to all you experts.
But today, maybe I do. I got a bunch of handcuffs and leg irons in an army surplus store in Calgary for cheap because they had no keys. Ian supplied some keys to get me going. However one set of old Towers was so seized up I used a hammer on one of Ian's keys to drive it home. It broke. Apparently Ian does not guarantee against hammers.
However, I put the batch in WD40 and things progressed nicely. Then I went to my local gun shop for gun oil. I had researched the gunk factor, the evaporation factor, the rust removal factor, the friction between metal parts factors etc. So I went with an old gun cleaning product. It is new here in Canada and I think the US army recently switched to it. It is Otis , Complete Gun Cleaner. There are other Otis products. I soaked an RCMP bottleneck (Marlin Daley), an FBI H&R Super, and a pair of Mattatuck cuffs. OMG, one step up from WD40 alone. None of them are
"fussy" any more. Now they are draining. I keep changing their positions. The Otis product is not supposed to dry sticky. It is supposed to evaporate. I asked the expert at the gun shop if I needed to then apply a Teflon coating to reduce friction between the metal on metal and he said no. We'll see.
Mike