Like I’m sure many of you did, I grew up learning my gun cleaning habits from my dad. He was a Marine and spent three decades in law enforcement so he has always been religious about taking care of our guns — cleaning them top to bottom if they leave the safe and always a thorough wipe down with Hoppes. As more of the guns we are using are synthetics and cerakoted/nitrided instead of wood and blued steel, we have started to butt heads on how and when to clean them.
I know at this point that many choose to not clean their barrels until accuracy suffers and I’ve adopted that. Beyond that what products and practices are best with these modern rifles? Are any of the old solvents and methods doing more harm than good on modern finishes?
- Many of the old military cleaning norms and cultural severity around it began in the days of corrosive propellants and primers. Many militaries were manufacturing corrosive-primer ammo through the 1980s. It is important to clean as soon after shooting as you can if shooting corrosive ammo. But that ammo is increasingly rare, and almost non-existent anywhere outside of milsurp ammo. But those cultural norms persist in the military, get transmitted father-to-son, and across the broader civilian shooting world, very similar to what you described you experienced personally.
- There's really only two situations that require regular cleaning: the environment itself is causing corrosion (jungle, saltwater, etc) or stoppages (desert sand); or you've got an
inherently finicky semi-auto and you're using crap lube (the thinner or lighter, the worse it is for gun reliability).
- Otherwise reliable semi-autos generally just need more lube, rather than cleaning. The better the lube, the longer the gun will fire before needing to add more. Most modern, unsuppressed guns will get up into the mid to high 4 figures of shooting before fouling starts mechanically impeding parts to cause malfunctions, like extractors. Some will go many more, as long as you keep adding lube. And again, the better the lube, the longer you can go between needing to add more.
- For manually powered actions, there really isn't much need to clean them unless their cycling is just starting to be rough or problematic. The colder the environment, the more advisable it is to run the gun dry, unless there's excessive metal-to-metal wear or galling, in which case you need to hunt down a legitimate ultra cold-weather lube. Very few gun lubes of any kind are reliable below -20F if outside more than a few hours, despite their advertising claims. There's just little benefit for lubing the moving parts of most modern bolt actions that aren't seeing high volumes of cycling, especially when they're nitrided or have a high-quality coating. The first parts to shut a gun down from crap lube in cold weather are firing pins and triggers. Always, always run those dry for hunting and other low-volume shooting. Especially if in the cold.
- I've seen gun scrubber and carb cleaner soften and eat up some cerakote types of finishes, and dipped finishes. But most polymer parts are fine with solvents.
