Blue Loctite

     Before I started my shooting school a coworker came to me saying he needed a place to shoot.  I had access to land, and he convinced me to take him shooting.  He had lead a pretty amazing life.  As Sargent in Vietnam, he had been through brutal battles and seen horrible things.  One day a RPG hit the Sheridan tank he was driving killing everyone but him.  Over the years he had bought several guns but never shot any of them.
     Being from that era, where jungle warfare and poor weapon maintenance had gotten many soldiers killed, gun cleaning was something he took very seriously.  So much so that touching one of his guns was like holding a grease coated axle bearing.  I am not sure what he used to prevent rust and maintain excessive lubrication, but firing one of them lead to a cloud of smoking petroleum products that burned ones eyes like pepper spray.  The lube did not stop at the action, and found its way into every screw holding the gun together.
     One of his rifles was a scoped Springfield M1A.  Most gun guys love the M1A.  The shape of the inviting walnut stock, the bombproof action, and the weight all inspire confidence in this proven battle rifle.  One of the drawbacks to the design is that it does not lend itself to convenient scope mounting.   The mount he was using involved a dozen screws and was a very poor design.  Every time we went shooting things would start out OK, then slowly shots would drift off target.  Eventually I would shake his scope and feel that it had come loose.  After this happened three times, I finally insisted that every screw had to come out, be cleaned of all lubricant, and coat the threads with threadlocker. 
     That experience taught me a lesson that would prove useful when I started teaching new students at my shooting school, and also working on customers guns.  Every screw of whatever optic or sighing system added to any firearm needs to have blue loctite on the threads.  Easily 80% of the shooters that came to me had their optic come loose at some point from firing.  Customers often came to me in the fall asking me to sight in their deer rifle.  I would tell them that I would do it, but I was going to do it my way.  That meant removing every screw and starting from the base up with threadlocker. 

     Guns lend themselves to be easily upgraded at the user level.  They are made to be taken apart to clean and it is all to easy to want a new grip, a better trigger, or an optic to make shooting easier.  As I have moved through the stages of gun ownership, the urge to modify and upgrade every aspect of them is a strong one.  I will go into the contents of my gun toolbox in a later post, but one of the most important items is blue loctite. 
     I was once told by a boat mechanic that "It is one thing when your car breaks down on the way to work.  It is another level of pissed when your boat breaks down on the lake."  The same goes for a fun day at the range.  It goes beyond that when the firearm is one that could be called on to save you or your family.  That gun must perform, and watching parts loosen or fall off while training causes a loss of confidence that is not easy to replace. 
     The rate at which aftermarket parts fail this way in training is very high; to the point I came to expect it.  Most people do not shoot enough to bring make these problems apparent.  As a general rule, small screws that have very short threads are the worst offenders.  Larger screws like the ones used to join the stock to the action typically have enough grip to stay in place given enough torque. 
     In conclusion, loctite is a simple and inexpensive solution to a commonly overlooked problem in the gun world.