Monday Gunday: Following Up on Last Week's Post

I am pleased to report that the many hours spent scrubbing with a blue bristle brush and CLP have paid off; all of the rust spots I talked about in last week's post have been eradicated with extreme prejudice and show no signs of returning.

You may all breathe a sigh of relief.

Now let me show you something interesting:

These are pictures of my car dashboard, where I put the rain-soaked targets to dry. Notice anything unusual about that picture?  Like maybe  a suspiciously white substance outlining where the targets were?

Now I'm no chemist, so I had to rely on the old "lick my finger and taste it" test, but you know what I tasted when I did that?

Salt.

I honestly didn't think it was possible to have salt rain, due to the rain cycle being nature's own distillation, but it turns out that "In open ocean and coastal areas [rainwater compositions] have a salt content essentially like that of sea water (same ionic proportions but much more dilute) plus CO2 as bicarbonate anion (acidic pH)."

So look... not just salt rain, not just acid rain, but goddamn salty acid rain. I am simultaneously horrified and vindicated.

Horrified, because I didn't realize such a thing was possible. However, a friend of mine (also a Floridian) said

I used to do auto glass for a living. Had a customer in Cocoa Beach that wanted me to put a windshield back on his car. It was a new car, but the windshield had been replaced a couple months before. The metal was not primed correctly, so in those few months the whole bottom of the windshield rusted out. Long story short: metal in that area rusts if you look at it wrong.

Fortunately I live further north, and further inland, than Cocoa Beach... but this has disturbing implications for my prepping plans. I clearly need to investigate rust-proofing solutions.

Did I mention it rained a lot?

I also feel vindicated because now I feel like less of an idiot for allowing my guns to get rusty in the first place. I have a suspicion that by the time I got home (which was several hours after shooting, due to eating dinner with Oleg & Rin and then driving back to Daytona) the guns had already started t rust and there was nothing I could have done to prevent that.

Sure, if I had taken them out earlier I would have had to do less work cleaning them up; I don't deny that. and it's lesson I'll never forget. But I'm pretty sure I can forgive myself now.