What do you guys use to prevent rifles from rusting?
I live 500 metres from the ocean and must by law store my rifles in a steel cabinet. Combine the salty air with high humidity in summer and rifles stored in a steel cabinet with minimal airflow and you get a recipe for disaster.I now run an oiled patch through my rifles once a week to prevent "surpises". I also noticed that the bore of my 30/30 has some slight surface rust. Whats the best way to tackle this problem?
rz

For long term storage I've used our military's "weapon grease" in a *thick* layer on a bone-dry rifle. This has worked well for me. But it's difficult to get it off completely!

RIG has worked very well for me, but check the archives here. Saeed has run some tests on exactly this subject.

Go to the local discount store and get yourself a big jar of white petroleum jelly. The stuff is sold here by tradenames such as "Vaseline." If you buy a big enough jar and have your hair combed right, maybe one of the clerks will flirt with you on the way out....

Anyway, white petroleum jelly is an easily-applied, tenacious, and very effective coating which needs not be very thick in order to work. Rub some into a swatch of cloth until the cloth is saturated, and then store this in either a lidded glass jar or a "ziplock" plastic bag --and keep this in your kit for occasional use when you think best.

A cleaning patch can be filled, but not to saturation, and used to rub the grease into a bore. Although one can shoot over this (which doesn't hurt with cast bullets), things go better with jacketed bullets if a dry patch removes most of the coating before shooting. It always is best to use the thinnest reasonable coating in a bore, just in case one forgets and shoots without dry-patching first.

I've used white petroleum jelly since 1953 and NEVER had a problem of any kind with it. It is cheap, plentiful, and useful for other shop needs as well.

Paladin

Put a light bulb in your cabinet.

Seal the cabinet tight.

I use a product called LPS #3. Is is a spray that dries like cosmoline. Comes in a turquoise colored can. They have #1,2 and 3. The #1 is light WD-40 kind of stuff, the #2 is more viscious and the #3 is quite waxy. Best I have ever found and was reccomended by an arms and armor musuem curator.

Birchwood/Casey's SHEATH did good for me in coastal Alaska, and RIG is great for long-term storage, a bit thick for guns you use all the time. Also, try Shooter's Choice RUST-PREVENT. It is also good.

I'm with Eldeguello--I like the Birchwood Casey Sheath and Rig. I wipe down the exterior with Sheath and run a RIG plastered patch through the bore a couple of times. I am sure that other greases would work also. Although I am not that close to the ocean, the humidity is pretty high in Houston year round and I have had guns show some rust even though they were stored in a gunsafe with a heat element.

I'm sure that you have already thought about this, but you might want to wax the metal that is in contact with the stock. Rust doesn't just go after the metal you can see.