A difficult lesson is that sometimes you have to fail in order to learn.
I had cleaned the axle by hand with the 'tried and tested' twisted wire brush on the angle grinder - A slow process but it achieves good results.
The trail and saddle were not going to be suitable for this process, so I purchased a pressurised sand blaster and garnet. Ended up being a slow process without a big air compressor, kept blowing out the nozzles and used up all the garnet.
Decided that getting covered in garnet, filling the driveway up with garnet and generally getting garnet everywhere was not suited to my temperament and took the whole lot to the sand blasters.
Received back both both items, freshly stripped of all paint for less than the cost of the pressure plaster and garnet. Lesson learnt.
Despite 30 years of being in the weather, the steel of the breech, block and barrel was surprising in good condition and cleaned back to bare steel however the breech was firmly stuck into the block.
I tried a 30t press to no avail but, before resorting to the sledge hammer
I found a sympathetic engineering firm with a 150t press and hey presto, out it popped. Lesson learnt.
I cleaned the barrel with the wire brush method as I find this gives a smoother finish than sand blasting.
With all the big bits cleaned, it was time to start on the small bits, many hours were spent cleaning and polishing and bluing various metal bits.....