Smyth Busters: Can You "Over-Clean" a Gun?

Brownells Gun Techs™ Caleb and Steve are like superheroes, using the immense power of their knowledge and experience to dispel misinformation for the benefit of gun owners everywhere. Today, they take on the notion that "You cannot over-clean your gun." You can't wear out a gun with excessive cleaning it, but you'll hit a point where it's as clean as it's ever going to be. Trouble comes from taking the gun apart beyond field-stripping it. If you shoot a gun a whole LOT, you should completely disassemble it and clean it ONCE a year, but....

Disassembling a gun too often will shorten its service life by putting unnecessary wear on parts of it. Any time you remove a pin or a screw from a gun, you will put a little wear on the hole it goes into. Over time the pin or screw will get loose, and that can adversely affect the gun's functioning. On modern polymer-frame pistols, says Steve, most of the parts in the frame are exposed, and you can clean it just by hosing it down with some polymer-safe aerosol gun cleaner.

Older service-type firearms like the Colt 1911 or M1 Garand or the AR-15 are designed for regular disassembly. But be careful not to lose a small part when you take your Forty-Five apart. If you don’t notice it's missing, you may wonder why your gun stopped functioning after you cleaned it!

When your groups start opening up, your barrel needs to be cleaned. A lot of precision shooters actually prefer a slightly "dirty" barrel and purposely shoot some "fouling" shots before they shoot the ones that count for points in the match!

Good-quality modern .22 Long Rifle rimfire ammo burns very cleanly, so the bore rarely needs cleaning. But the receiver does get gunked up with the waxy bullet lubricant. Clean up that area regularly.

So the myth is BUSTED. You CAN "over-clean" a gun by disassembling it too often.

The myth of cleaning your gun EVERY time you shoot it might go back to the black powder days, when the black powder and corrosive primer residue had to be cleaned off the gun before they rusted the steel.

Видео Smyth Busters: Can You "Over-Clean" a Gun? канала Brownells, Inc.