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Gunshop owners offer advice for safe hunting season
The homes of hunters start to smell of gun oil about this time every year.
A successful hunt -- one that ends with a hunter's broad smile before a camera, one arm cradling his favorite shotgun and the other slung around his faithful dog, dead birds fanned out on ground before them -- depends greatly upon the care and maintenance given to a shotgun before ever firing that first shot in the field.
The pheasant and quail hunting season in Nebraska begins Saturday in Nebraska. In Kansas, the pheasant season begins Saturday, Nov. 3; the quail season on Saturday, Nov. 10.
Greg Hepp of McCook, a gunsmith since 1978, offers gun maintenance tips to prepare for pheasant season:
Check that the chamber is empty. Cycle the action, without pulling the trigger, to make sure that a shell does not feed up from the magazine, he said.
Clean the barrel of a shotgun with a standard solvent, he said. (Use a lead and copper solvent on the barrel of a rifle, he said.)
Allow the bore to dry, and then run a light oil patch through it. (Unless a hunter has previous experience, Hepp said, the action should not be disassembled.)
Now, let the gun sit for half-an-hour.
With a dry patch, clean the oil out of the bore.
With a light oil, Hepp said, oil all the exterior metal and even the wood, and then wipe off as much as possible.
"Don't spray oil down the barrel. That leaves a residue that will trap dirt," Hepp said. "Don't over-oil. That's the key."
If a gun is used frequently, repeat the process about half-way through the season. If it's used occasionally, repeat the process at the end of the season, Hepp said.
“If something is loose, out-of-place or broken, seek professional advice,” Hepp said.
Hepp said that he and John Havens, co-owners of Outdoor Sports in McCook, have seen horrors as they prepare for hunting season each year.
“We’ve seen guns so dirty they won't even open,” Greg said.
“Someone brings it in loaded, with a shell jammed in it."
Others have brought in guns that they've taken apart to determine a problem, and then they can't get them back together. "Which doesn't save them any money," Greg chuckled, "because we have to reassemble it to see what's wrong, and then we have to disassemble it again to fix the problem."
Hepp and Havens don't mind working on those guns -- they'd rather do that than have someone get hurt.
The worst situation, Hepp said, is when someone brings in a gun in which the chamber is empty, but a live shell feeds out of the magazine.
Hepp and Havens, who are avid hunters themselves, emphasize gun safety at all times. Hepp says, "Guns never go off accidentally. People accidentally pull the triggers."