Rusted Shut? Maintain Your EDC Pistol

I recently attended Dustin Salomon’s 2-day class titled Understanding the Terrain: An Overview of Brain-Based Tactical Training Design. A good class by the way; however, this note is not about the class although I do intend to write an after-class review. This note is about maintaining your everyday carry (EDC) pistol.

This was not a shooting class, and our shooting performance was not graded beyond what you might expect from a group of type-A instructors. We fired a couple of hundred rounds during the class and I used one of my EDC pistols, a SIG P365 9mm and it performed flawlessly.

A busy week followed and I planned to clean the pistol the next week. I carried the pistol concealed during the class (it was very hot outside) and traveling home afterward. I also carried it several times when I was outside the next week including for a couple of hours setting up steel targets for a Steel Challenge match.

One thing south-central Texas does not lack in the summer is high humidity and heat. It is not unusual to literally be soaked in perspiration when working outside. My EDC holster is a made from Kydex and it has a sweat guard. I normally carry outside the waistband with a closed-front shirt.

When I got around to cleaning the pistol, I removed the magazine and started to pull the slide back to eject the live round. The slide would not budge; it was completely frozen in place. After a bit of tapping with a rawhide mallet, I was finally able to retract it and eject the live round. I was surprised to discover that the slide interior rails and frame rails were very rusted—particularly since the slide and the frame rails are made of stainless steel (see below).

I researched the SIG website and from what I saw, all P365 slides are made from stainless steel. My P365 pistol also has a SIG NITRON finish on the slide and barrel. The SIG NITRON finish is a proprietary surface treatment using the Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) process that is supposed to enhance corrosion and wear resistance. Clearly “enhance” corrosion resistance does not mean preclude corrosion resistance.

My father once pointed out the fact that “stainless” does not mean stain free. The stainless that SIG uses for their modular P365 fire control unit and slide is clearly not stain free and, in my case, did rust to an extent even though I use protective lubricant on my firearms. I normally use thin film of high temperature grease to lubricate my EDC firearms since it tends to stay where you put it. This precludes staining your clothing with firearms lubricant. However, in this instance it was not enough.

So how do we prevent this? Obviously disassembling and cleaning your EDC pistol every time you carry it would become tedious. Probably the most straight forward way to prevent corrosion/rust from forming is to ensure that you (at a minimum) wipe down the pistol and remove the slide and quickly relubricate the slide and rails anytime the firearm has been exposed to high levels of perspiration.

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