Beware of over cleaning
I admit that I have been called a perfectionist. I have several years experience in working in the music industry and in that line of work, only the best work gets noticed. When it comes to maintaining a car, you can waste a lot of time working on things that aren’t going to increase your mileage or prevent it from getting hit by another car. Although many of us like to take our favorite firearms out of the safe from time to time, and wipe them down and look everything over, there can be a point where shoving a cleaning rod down a barrel too often will cause excessive wear and tear.
In a Carbine course, we got a good lecture on some of the BS that people are claiming about the amount of maintenance the AR15 direct impingement guns need. The reality is that they sure as heck do need to be cleaned more than any other semi-auto military rifle, but not as much as some people claim. The reasons the military makes soldiers do this so often is to basically just keep them occupied. Keeping the gun lubricated and putting a few drops where it’s needed is all we had to do while running a Carbine course and not a single one of us had an issue. Be careful about how much you use your gun cleaning supplies on your firearms, but also, make sure you have the right tools for the firearm. There are some neat cleaning brushes and tools that you can get from Otis gun cleaning kits and they will help you get into the areas that are hard to reach.
I’ve had this argument with friends when they were arguing that direct impingement guns weren’t really hard to maintain and that spending another $500 on a piston driven AR15 wasn’t worth the money because you could basically buy another gun for that money. I’d like to see people use the same argument if someone came out with a car that only needed an oil change every 15,000 miles instead of every 3000 miles. How many times are you going to have to pull over and drop the car off and wait for a mechanic or waste an hour on a Saturday doing an oil change? Keep that in mind the next time you go shooting and bring 3 or more rifles with you and then spend all Sunday night cleaning them. If you could cut your cleaning time by 2/3s and reduce the need for brushes and cleaning patches for $20 would it be worth it?
One pass loosens large particles, scrubs out the remaining residue with a bronze brush, then swabs it all spotless with a cleaning area 160X larger than a standard patch. Add a few drops your favorite gun or Hoppes Elite and your guns ready for storage. The bore snake is caliber specific so make sure you get the correct one for your pistol, rifle or shotgun. You will also notice your gun cleaning time will be cut in half or more. I’ve cleaned more than 4 firearms in an hour, from AKs, FALs, M1A, Mini 14s and AR15 rifles all will accept the use of the Hoppes boresnake.
The Hoppes bore snake is available for rifles, shotguns and pistols. Brass weight on the pull cord marks the. The bore snake is machine washable. It is the worlds quickets 3 step bore shine.