I just recently figured out that I should be greasing my slide rails on this gun. I probably put 500+ Rounds through this gun and all I was using was light gun oil. Do these pictures show galling? If so is there anything I can do?

Id suggest you've just worn some of the coating off not actually the metal.. somewhere on this forum they suggest grease and I use it now but am not totally sold on it being any better than good gun oil.

Also, can't believe you are still using photo#ucket.... how much is that costing you?

Read the Flork thread.

Grease is great on the slide rails.

Whether an alloy or stainless steel frame, it is typical to see a wear pattern in the finish on classic P series SIGs in the rail area pictured.

There isn't enough detail in the photo currently pictured to be completely certain whether any galling has occurred. The appropriate photograph should include the edges (angles) of the frame rails, and a more detailed close-up shot of the area...not a distant overhead view.

Using your finger tip or finger nail, can you feel any roughness or sharp edges from the wear pattern in the area of visible wear?

Try this, take a cotton ball, Q-Tip, or cotton swab (even the cotton swab from a medicine bottle), and run it lightly down the rail and see if any of the cotton fibers are snagged...and if so, how many...one or two vs. quite a few?

I'm guessing you won't find much in the way of galling, but it can't hurt to check and determine that now. Luckily you probably found the lubrication thread and at least learned about galling before running more rounds through the gun and possibly incurring more damage.

If you do find evidence of serious galling, again I doubt it, then you can always send the gun off to have the frame rails lapped.

Welcome to the forum!

Welcome to the Forum.

I do not see any galling.

Use grease. I use Slide Glide. Put it on, rack the slide a few times and wipe excess

The pic needs to include the underside of the top part of the rail (if that makes sense).

When I started shooting, I would clean and oil a gun, then sometimes go months w/o shooting it again. All the oil was gone when I went to go shooting again. I've wear marks to show for it because by then the gun would be mostly dry.
Grease sticks around and now, I'll often not clean right after shooting but rather before going to the range or at least re-grease right before going.

I rather have a greased dirty gun than a clean "dried oil" gun when I go to the range.

And if it's a range trip, nothing will hurt the gun if you "over grease" it. I fill my sig rails up to the rim. Never had a problem except one failure to go fully into battery in the winter after 30+ min. of the gun being fired and sitting in the open on the bench in 30* degree snowfall.

You can read more about grease here:
https://sigforum.com/eve/forums...30601935/m/908103701

I would upload some better pictures but I can’t upload files to the website and photobucket is making my otherwise clear pictures blurry as shit.

quote:

Originally posted by maliveline:
I would upload some better pictures but I can’t upload files to the website and photobucket is making my otherwise clear pictures blurry as shit.

Photobucket blurs pictures when you have exceeded your bandwidth allotment. Most of us dumped PB after the big hi-jacking attempt a few years ago.

Honestly, unless your camera has macro capabilities and you either have image stabilization or a tripod, you are better off just following some of the checks recommended and reporting back.

So I ran some cotton over it I really only had cotton snagging on one little dent in the frame rail area but I did feel a slight burr on the edge on the corner of the frame rail but it’s kind of long and sharp and it’s not really snagging cotton but if you feel it with the tip of your finger it kind of feels like and edge of a knife. If I had to guess it’s probably only sticking up like maybe .005-.010. Honestly you can barely even feel it with your finger tip but if you scratch it with your nail you can kind of feel it catch in a few spots but it’s honestly pretty minimal.

Welcome aboard. Many of my Sigs look exactly like yours and some of mine date back to the late 70s and have what I consider to be high round counts through them.
Use a good quality grease and rock on.

After looking over your second set of photos, I checked over my JJ code (made 1988) 226. Mine does not show any deformity around the pin hole at all and it has been to The Sig Armorer for a tune.
I would guess it may be the result of of a little carelessness during factory assembly. If you are not the original owner, some ham handed gun plumbing has been going on.
Regardless, shoot the gun and if there is no issue, live long and prosper!

quote:

Originally posted by maliveline:
So I ran some cotton over it I really only had cotton snagging on one little dent in the frame rail area but I did feel a slight burr on the edge on the corner of the frame rail but it’s kind of long and sharp and it’s not really snagging cotton but if you feel it with the tip of your finger it kind of feels like and edge of a knife. If I had to guess it’s probably only sticking up like maybe .005-.010. Honestly you can barely even feel it with your finger tip but if you scratch it with your nail you can kind of feel it catch in a few spots but it’s honestly pretty minimal.

Based on your description, and after seeing the second set of pics posted (no lube, decent lighting, good job with the pics!! ), you definitely have some frame rail defects... but they are not examples of galling. You might want to inspect the slide rails for corresponding wear, but I'm betting you won't find any.

I've owned Classic P series SIGs, especially P226, that exhibited almost identical frame rail defects, including some that were straight from the factory unfired (factory test-fired only). While these tiny defects (divots, peening/ burrs) "bothered" me, I didn't take any corrective action and the guns ran fine and I didn't notice any undue wear.

The majority of gun owners never inspect their guns at the level of detail required to pick up these defects and are blissfully ignorant of them...and the ones that do detect them tend to over-emphasize their significance. In a perfect world these defects wouldn't occur, but manufacturing, no matter how precise and modern, is not perfect...especially on production level guns.

In my experience, the classic line of SIGs tends to go through a "break-in" or "wear-in" phase in which you may notice some wear early on, but as the parts burnish together the wear tends to level out and not progress, or progress more slowly over the thousands of rounds fired.

I might be tempted to dress a couple of the defects with the correct file(s), not eliminate them, just dress them, or if the defects truly bother you you could send the gun out to have frame rails lapped ...but my advice would be to lube the frame rails with grease and be diligent in cleaning and inspecting the gun to see if the wear continues and just monitor it before deciding on a course of action.

Love me some P226 ST!

I am the original owner and believe it or not I have done pretty much next to nothing to this gun other than shoot it and remove the grip panels a few times. All of those defects either happened at the factory or maybe from shooting but nothing is affecting the functionality of the pistol. I just kind of had an oh shit moment because I haphazardly stumbled on the fact that I should be greasing the rails on this gun even though I’ve had it for over 2 years and have pumped close to 500 rounds through it but for the most part I would say the gun has seen somewhat light use aside from an occasional hot round here and there honestly I really kind of wish I had this gun in 229 but I’m probably not going to spend money on it seeing as how they are discontinued and I’m not dying to buy a used gun. But all the obsessing is what caused me to stumble onto all this grease non-sense and actually read my owners manual which somehow I still had amazingly. I’m using white lithium grease because it’s what I have laying around but if it’s good enough for my silencerco booster assembly I don’t see why it’s not good enough for a pistol slide.

Many years ago SIG used to include tubes of Mil-Tec TW-25B with their new guns and seemed to be the factory recommended grease. Then they quit including the Mil-Tec and started supplying a gun-specific lube from an automotive racing lubrication company but I can't recall the brand at the moment. Then they left that brand and switched to yet another grease supplier, but I can't recall that one either.

Years ago, like you, I used oil to lubricate my handguns, and it was only after I started reading discussions of gun lubes that I had the same "oh shit" moment that you had and scrambled to start trying greases on my SIGs and other select handguns. As the Mil-Tec TW25B was what SIG recommended I used that for many years and it was perfectly fine. I later tried the Tetra grease and it too was fine, but was just a tad thinner and seemed to separate just the least little bit over time...and then when I read about some of the health hazards related to the ingredients I stopped using the Tetra. When Slide-Glide hit the market, after a few years of reviews, I decided to try that (medium flavor for me) and I've been perfectly happy with Slide-Glide. I still have a stash of the previous greases, and there are a couple other greases that interest me that I might try sometime, but I've come to the conclusion that just finding a decent gun-specific lube that works in my guns in the conditions they are exposed to works well enough and Slide-Glide seems to do what I need it to.

I've used Lithium grease on some old mil-surp rifles and it works just fine, and I think I may have even tried it on a handgun or two as well.

Others may disagree but I've come to the conclusion that oil worked well enough on the old (early) SIG alloy framed guns with the carbon steel stamped formed slides but that good grease is more of a necessity on the SIG frames when coupled with the stainless steel milled slides...and as the grease doesn't seem to negatively impact the function of stamped steel slides and can only help them, I've just "standardized" on grease for all my SIGs.

In the current owner’s manual, Sig does not distinguish between oil vs grease for the usual alloy-framed 226, etc. And the Sig Academy video on maintaining classic Sigs uses oil when illustrating the needed lubrication. And, lastly, my old W German 226 was returned with oiled rails when Sig shipped it back to me in June after performing their service plan. Long story short, Sig doesn’t explicitly recommend grease (over oil) within its published materials. And, I don’t think we should assign any great emphasis to the inclusion of a free sample in a new gun case.

BUT, the manual does include a brief comment that grease should be used for you stainless-framed guys. And, of course, we have the volume of advice within this forum as to grease. I use grease for my alloy 226’s mostly due to the above-mentioned endurance during storage. But, I do miss the greater ease of oil.

Don’t fret that you didn’t use grease for that brief period. Enjoy the gun. As noted above, those imperfections are not unusual and you’ll quickly forget them.

I will probably get some slide glide or some thing equivalent eventually after my head starts to annoy me enough to get off my ass to go order something. I just dump 270$ on a factory upper on a Kriss vector last night that should have come with the gun anyway so my wallet is still hurting but that’s a whole other can of worms. I’ve spent enough on this Kriss vector to finance a small country for a year.

Ps my slide rails pretty much have no wear I haven’t even been stressing them it was mostly my frame. Also I do have that little pack of silly automotive grease that came with the gun. I never opened it and kind of always wondered what the big deal was with that stuff lol.