Whether you carry it with you or use it to enjoy shot after shot, guns get dirty just like everything else. Gun cleaning is an important process because it affects the lifespan of the gun even more than its appearance. Just as motor vehicles undergo mileage maintenance, firearms require a check-up and cleaning process called gun maintenance. This not only gives the user necessary information about the general condition of the gun but also prevents a gun with a clean moving mechanism from jamming. In other words, gun maintenance is not a weekly procedure or a ritual, but a process that must be performed on the mechanics and parts of the weapon to which we entrust our lives.
There are two main reasons for dirt accumulation in a gun:
- Carrying conditions
- Shooting
Carrying conditions can be summarized as the gun changing mostly cosmetically, getting light scratches, and collecting dust. Shooting, on the other hand, causes residues to remain on the gun in many ways due to ignition. Copper fouling inside the barrel, burnt powder soot accumulating in the mechanism, and oil residues with more powder accumulated on top are the most common examples. Sometimes, depending on the use of the gun, mud, cotton, or thread residues may also be found. Cleaning these should not be classified as technical cleaning; gun cleaning does not cover the removal of this type of dirt from the gun. Since all the issues we mentioned above will affect the operating mechanism of the gun before its aesthetics, gun maintenance is of vital importance.
What does gun maintenance mean?
Gun maintenance means taking the necessary measures so that all mechanisms inside the gun can work perfectly. The most important measure for this is the cleanliness of the gun. Gun cleaning not only affects the operating mechanism of the weapon but also affects the terminal ballistics of the bullet, that is, the path the bullet will travel.
First of all, it must be said: gun cleaning is never, ever applying oil to the gun until it squirts out. In fact, the oil you use accumulates with burnt powder residues and slows down the operation of the gun. So, gun cleaning is not done with oil. You can forget about topics like cleaning guns with kerosene, gun cleaning oil, or cleaning guns with machine oil. Performing a gun cleaning process with chemicals such as brake cleaner or diesel without knowing how they interact with the gun’s steel damages the steel of the gun. When cleaning a gun, a solution that does not damage aluminum, plastic, and other parts should be used. Performing a process that actually shortens the life of our guns while doing gun cleaning or maintenance can turn the material we entrust our lives to from a weapon into a hand grenade. Therefore, instead of ready-made gun cleaning kits, we recommend that you research and learn the features of the gun components and assemble your own gun cleaning kit. For this, a good gun cleaning solvent, a gun maintenance set, or separately purchased tips suitable for cloth use, a suitable brush, and the gun cleaning apparatus you will generally use will be the gun cleaning kit for you.
If guns aren’t cleaned with gun oil, what should they be cleaned with?
When addressing the gun for cleaning, we will evaluate it in two parts:
- The Barrel
- All other parts
Since the barrel of the gun has a very different structure, especially in rifled guns, the inside of the barrel needs to be evaluated separately from the general components of the gun. There is one more strict rule here; gun barrels are never cleaned with oil. Oil is applied inside the barrel only for protection purposes if the gun will not be fired, and before firing, the oil residues must be removed. Otherwise, oil entering the gun barrel means disrupting the rotational aerodynamics of the bullet as it exits the barrel. Although its effect is seen less in guns with shorter barrels, the most widely known misconception about guns in the world is spraying oil into the gun barrel. If gun cleaning is done by spraying oil into the barrel, that gun counts as not cleaned. Because the sprayed oil does not contain a solution sufficient to clean even powder residue. In this case, oil application can actually be done only to prevent the gun from combining with oxygen or to control friction between surfaces touching each other. In cases where we do not use them, we also apply oil to some parts of our guns, including the inside of the barrel, but this application is done to protect, not to clean the parts.
How is gun cleaning done?
For this, you must take safety precautions before anything else. When we hear how many people kill themselves or their relatives every year while intending to clean their guns, we can see that this is still the most important rule in the world.
- First, remove your gun’s magazine and make sure there is no ammunition in the chamber.
- Field strip your gun. Disassemble the mechanism, the charging handle (if any), the barrel, springs, and rods, paying attention to their settings so you can reassemble them.
- As these parts are used, they contain gunpowder explosion residues. Therefore, make sure you use a solution capable of dissolving gunpowder.
- Pour a generous amount of general cleaner onto a cloth and rub the cloth on the dirty parts until the powder residues on the gun are dissolved, and wait a while for it to dissolve the caked-on residues.
- Clean the main body of your gun with a cloth sprayed with general cleaner and repeat the process according to the dirt left on the cloth by the dissolved powder residue.
- You can also use a general cleaner to clean the exterior finish of the gun.
- You can include the firing pin, charging handle, and internal component rods in the cleaning procedure.
- When the gun cleaning process is finished, identify the moving parts and parts that touch each other, and apply enough oil to the surfaces of those metal parts so that it does not accumulate. While doing this, our preference is to apply it to a cloth and work the oil in the cloth into the metal parts instead of applying a drop from a dropper. Sometimes drops can flow down with gravity and cause accumulation in different places.
How is the inside of the barrel cleaned?
Since the bullet travels inside the barrel, the way you clean the inside of the barrel should be slightly different from general gun cleaning. The solution to be used inside the barrel needs to dissolve copper in addition to powder residues because copper plasters onto the rifling grooves, especially with the heat increasing during the firing explosion, affecting the shooting dynamics of the gun and shortening the gun’s life. Therefore, barrel cleaning is as important as gun cleaning.
- When cleaning the inside of the barrel, you first need a cleaning rod. Here, contrary to what is said, the process of “breaking the soot” is not that important because the process you will do correctly using the right solvent will not actually damage steel as hard as barrel steel. Or, as taught in military schools, doing soot breaking before anything else will not save you because the solution you use will already react with the soot and soften the soot residues inside the barrel.
- Apply the product you will use for cleaning inside the barrel and wait for the reaction time. This time will usually not exceed a few minutes. The method mentioned above regarding general gun cleaning, measuring the dirt accumulating on the cloth, is a method that can also be used for this situation. Therefore, we mostly use light colors for the cloth so that the accumulated dirt shows itself. Let us inform you here; copper reacting with the cleaning solution takes on a blue color.
- After the dirt inside the barrel softens, pass a clean cloth (patch) through the barrel and remove the dirt coming out. After repeating this process, apply solution inside the barrel again and continue with the solution-cloth duo until no dirt remains inside the barrel. As the barrel gets cleaned, the cloth passing through the barrel will come out clean.
- After purifying the barrel from copper, lead, powder residue, and dirt, you can make the barrel ready for storage by passing a piece of cloth with a small amount of protective oil poured on it through the barrel so that scratches formed in the barrel do not contact the air and penetrate the barrel steel. The thing you need to pay attention to here is the necessity of removing the oil from the barrel before shooting. For this, you can pass a piece of cloth sprayed with cleaning solution or alcohol through the barrel.
This is gun cleaning and maintenance as we have conveyed in general terms. The most important information you will gain here is the necessity for the mechanism to be clean, not the outside of the gun.