Found Machineguns, cleaned them.

During a relic hunting trip in the Dutch city called Nijmegen I stumbled across the remnants of an old airstrip served during World War 2 as a Hawker Typhoon base and in the last year of the war a base for the Gloster Meteor jets. Now it's all just forest, not seeing any landing strips or signs it been an airbase. The only way you could tell it was a former airstrip was that the area around the strip. Old farms/buildings used metal runway plates for fencing off their property. In the forest it self had some runway laying around. Lucky I managed to find an old map on the internet about the runway and taxi lanes so I place it over a Google Maps screenshot. I had my treasure map. So my best guess was to start looking on the taxi lanes since the original runway has been turned into a several soccer fields and 60's/70's housing. Had a buddy of mine with me which is basically my relic hunting partner. So we started to look around with our metal detectors. Found some small stuff like bullet casings, parts of ammo crates and fuse covers for Typhoon rockets. Suddenly my partner came up on me and showed me some handcuffs he found. Looked very old, seen them in war movies, looked ww2 dated. so we were getting near the right spot. My detector made a big beep sound and upon digging we saw the clothing of a .30 cal US browning ammo belt popping up. was in a bad condition and was falling apart in my hands. But 2 meters next to it we had another big beep aprox 50 cm wide and a meter or so long. What could this have been? we started digging and around 30 cm digging it started to show something rusty in all kinds weird shapes. I knew it was a weapon. Maybe a aircraft weapon since it was a airbase and we were digging near one of the taxi lanes. centimeter by centimeter I carefully removed dirt and roots. saw leather getting visible. Then I knew it. This must be a mg42. And yes it was one, in a super condition aswell. but to my surprise there was another gun laying next to it. When I got that one out I saw it was a beautiful preserved mg15. It's inner works still showing shiny blueish metal. Me and my partner were so happy that day. WOW find of a life time.

The next day we went back to the location with great expectations. So we started around the location we found the machine guns and not 5 meters further we had a similar sized beep emitting from the metal detector. Could this be? We started digging and yup we as the same shape showing up as the last time. NO WAY! Yes way! We found another mg42 and again it had an other machine gun laying next to it. It was a Browning but not your standard .30 cal. This was a Browning made to fire .303 British, designed for the British Bomber turrets like the Lancaster/Halifax Bomber or for attack fighters like the Hurricane. And last not least the godly earth yielded a spare MG42 barrel still in it's casing. I just couldn't believe my eyes what we dug up in those 2 days.

Found some spare weapon parts of a 20MM Hispano Suiza cannon which was standard armament for the Hawker Typhoons.

Cleaned them with just water and a soft brush.

Well preserved inner workings of the mg15.

Aim sight of the mg42, note the little eagle near the number 20.

Belt feeding mechanism of the mg42.

Here I had them cleaned more but this time with a metal brush. Looks much cleaner.

Still has it's serial on it.

Had a mg drum laying around and decided to add it to the mg42. Looks nice.

Time made a big root grew through the bipod.

Time to clean it. Like I did with pistols. I used electrolysis to clean the machineguns. When they came out they still had rust inside of the inner parts like screws and such so I grabbed WD40, a rubber hammer and a heating torch and started to loosen up the screws by expanding the metal around the screws with heat and then spraying the screws with WD40. The lose parts went back into the bucket for another round of electrolysis treatment and then came out brand new.

Almost brand new firing mechanism of the mg15.

The result was amazing. With the electrolysis reaction turning some of the rust into carbon filling most of the gaps and giving the weapon and black look. I used WD40 again and burned it into the metal with a heating torch. I can still use everything on this one only since it's missing a big part of the handle of the bolt so cocking it is very hard do.

Still haven't cleaned one part of the inner mechanism but I might keep it that way. Reminds me of in what condition I found it.