Keep Your Gun Clean! A thorough cleaning can solve many issues with accuracy, shooting, and feeding. Cleaning is more than just a few passes with a brush through the bore, a few patches, and a light WD-40 spraying of the action. It is the deliberate, protracted demise of a significant investment. You get out of it what you put into it, just like everything else in life. Keep Your Gun Clean! At the target range, you want to enjoy yourself, not feel frustrated. You’re hoping to get that prize buck. When, God forbid, you need to defend your home from an intruder, you surely want that pistol to function.
You probably won’t live to regret it anyhow if the rifle doesn’t discharge in that circumstance. No one in your family will. (Of course, you can remain hidden in your room while you wait for help from your community’s overworked and underfunded police force. But that’s a different topic.) Keep Your Gun Clean!
Gun Cleaning Tips
For routine bore cleaning, use a bronze wire brush. Use a nylon brush and Shooters Choice or another bore cleaning to remove copper, heavy lead fouling, or plastic shotgun wad fouling. (Shooters Choice will consume bronze brushes; it is a potent bore cleaner.)
For each round fired, pass the bronze brush once through the bore. (For minor cleaning, I like Hoppes #9 solvent.)
Invest in a brass or coated steel cleaning rod if you are serious about maintaining the condition of your firearm. Aluminium rods are flexible. They gather dirt and debris that might scuff the bore.
After every passage through the bore, wipe the rod clean.
Patches can be forced through the bore with a brass jag. Cleaning is not what I mean when I drag a soiled patch in a slotted tip back through the bore.
Use a brass “bumper” or bore guide to prevent damage to the chamber or muzzle crown.
With a burst of pressurized solvent like Gun Scrubber by Birchwood Casey, clean the action. It removes dirt without leaving a trace.
Lightly oil! Dirt is drawn to oil! You probably greased too much if oil is visible!
Try storing your gun with the barrel down if you’re worried you greased it too much. By doing this, the wooden stock won’t become contaminated with oil or solvent.
Related: Hunting Season: Getting Ready For The Goose Hunting Season
About every 800 rounds, you should shower. Take the firearm to a gunsmith if you don’t know how to do something or don’t have an owners handbook. It isn’t that expensive. (It’s less expensive than having him change the spring that flew into the cracks of your immaculate garage or basement workshop.)
Although there is much more to know about gun care, having this knowledge should give you an advantage. Check out a hobby gunsmith course, like the one here at The Fish Creek House and Gun Club in Southwest Montana, if you want to learn more. We provide firearms training, repair, rebluing, nickel, chrome plating, teflon, and custom work ranging from installing recoil pads to creating whole unique rifles and handguns that are made to your specifications.