Wow!!! Awesome! I am just glad that you made it home safe and sound... but this is pretty nice icing on the cake. Awesome karma and may it come back to you 100 times. Will touch base! And seriously... welcome, home, my friend!!
Per Yellowsled's request, here are the results of the clean-up project.
It needed a good bit of elbow-grease (and a full can of Ballistol), but it cleaned up fairly well. There are a few areas of pitting on it but after getting the rust off, she looks respectable. The bolt polished up nicely, but I was pretty conservative on the rest of the gun wanting to keep as much of the remaining bluing as possible. The barrel needed some attention and I wound up putting a cleaning rod on the end of a power drill and slowly going up and down the barrel at low RPM to get decades of caked on crud out.
Cosmoline of course was pretty well soaked into the wood, but a little time with a heat gun on very low setting helped sweat it out. She's got a new front site, a new ramrod, and a new sling, but other than that, everything else is the same. All said and done, probably 12 or 13 hours of project time into it. Am pretty happy with the results.
Thanks again to Yellowsled for this awesome Karma!!! Kept me out of trouble for a few weekends and if feels REALLY GOOD to bring an old soldier back to life.
Oh and for the real results.... I was pleasantly surprised at the grouping I got with this. With the original condition of the barrel, I had my expectations set pretty low, but it is hard to argue with this. I still need to drift the sight over another tap or two, but this wasn't too bad for just putting the sight on and guessing at center.
5 rounds at 65 yards sitting. Jerked the trigger on one shot, but still not bad. The 4 shot group is 1" on the dot. With the bad shot in the mix, it is still a 2.25" group and pretty respectable for a gun that probably hasn't been fired in 70 years.