I have my grandfathers 30-30. Just a Glenfield 30a, nothing special about it. It has a scratch where he went to sleep sitting on the tailgate of the truck and dropped it. It has a ding on the ejection port where my uncle dropped it from a deer stand (bent the scope pretty bad and broke the scope mounting bolts). It has a superficial crack on the forearm where a distant cousin slapped it against a tree when he stepped on a snake and dropped everything and ran like a startled chihuahua (per his brother). To top all of that off it has tiny white latex paint droplets on the top of the gun where grandaddy painted the house for the last time. He could barely paint let alone move stuff out of the way to paint behind stuff that hadn’t moved in 20 years. The gun was stolen and sold the day grandaddy died by the one cousin who wasn’t bedside, and it has a pawnshop sticker on it from that event. It was bought back from the pawnshop 1 week after we buried grandaddy and the handwritten receipt is in the safe with it. I could easily fix every bit of that, but it would erase all of that history. Yeah it would still be THAT gun, but it wouldn’t be the same. When I hold that rifle I feel like I’m with grandaddy again and he has been gone for 20 years now. No way I would do any refinish work to mine, and I would advise to take stock of exactly how the wear got put on the OPs rifle, how it got treated, what it meant to the men who used it, and how it came to be in the possession of its current curator. Johnson’s Paste Wax will protect it in its current state. I would start with a detail clean and intentionally protect it from there.
