For those of you that are interested. I spent about 4 hours last night working on the Snow Goose with Monday night football on the radio for companionship. I did a complete disassembly, inspection and a thorough cleaning, lub and reassembly. This task is one of the drawbacks of a semi auto shotgun. It only takes about 30 minutes to clean my O/U. I’ve attached some pics below.
My comments and observations are:
1. The shotgun was filthy. I cleaned the barrel and gas cylinder 4 times to get it back to an acceptable state. I pulled out the choke tube and cleaned it up as well. The build up on the magazine tube in the gas piston area was thick enough to make it hard to pull the gas piston spacer tube, pusher assembly, forearm retainer off.
2. I pulled the gas piston assembly apart and cleaned it up with a nylon brush and some elbow grease.
3. Mechanically there where 2 areas that needed to be addressed. Believe it or not the magazine tube had worked itself loose. I could unscrew it by hand. This is good since I didn’t want to apply heat to the area to protect the beautiful finish. The other area was the bolt that holds the butt stock to the receiver was on its way to loosening up. I could not unscrew it by hand but it was easy to turn with a socket.
4. The magazine tube cleaned up nicely and there were no scratches. I used scotch-brite to help remove the powder build up. I brushed off the factory loctite on the male threads on the tube and female threads in the receiver.
5. The inside of the receiver was in good shape. No scratches abnormal wear or burrs.
6. The return spring plunger has some minor scratches from the action return spring.
7. The bolt and trigger assemblies all looked good and cleaned up nicely. Some normal wear marks.
8. Other than a thorough cleaning all parts looked to be in good shape.
Once everything was cleaned and wiped down it was time to reassemble the gun. I change out 4 parts. I removed the MCARBO magazine follower and went back to the standard factory follower. This is to address the “hard to load” issue that I was having. I also installed the OR3GUN gas piston spacer tube, return spring plunger and return spring retainer. I’m not sure I need the OR3GUN parts since the OEM parts functioned fine but I’ll give them a try to see if they make a noticeable contribution to performance. I hand tighten the magazine tube and applied some good torque to the bolt that holds butt stock in place.
The Snow Goose is good to go for another 300 plus rounds!