Cleaning Until You're Tired, Not Clean

You might run a couple of patches of that yellow impregnated cloth that is called something like, "lead out". I find it picks up a lot of nastiness that cotton patches don't.

Otherwise, pretty clean is clean enough. Didn't Gale McMillan warn people not to overclean their bores?
 
Perfect cleanliness of a rifle bore is an unachievable goal, and fortunately an unnecessary one except maybe for benchrest shooters.

I often use the USMC approach; Clean one day, come back next day and clean again, finally do it one more time on day 3.
Each time, more crud will come out of the bore. Each time takes only a few minutes.

After three days, though, I stop. No sense being a slave to rifle cleanliness!

For regular cleaning, I run 2-5 patches soaked with Butch's Bore Shine through the bore, followed by dry patches, then an oil-soaked patch, then one more dry patch.

If the bore is really dirty, I'll start with Sweet's 7.62 bore solvent. I'll even run a bronze brush through (breech-to-muzzle only) a few times if the bore hasn't been cleaned for quite awhile.

In reference to some of the recommendations from others, above;
M-Pro 7 is a good powder/fouling solvent, but a poor copper solvent. You need ammonia for that!
CLP is a crummy all-round bore cleaner. It's OK in the field as a general purpose "do it all" substance, but in reality it doesn't clean very well at all. You can do lots better.

The easiest (military) rifle to clean is an AK!
 
Bogie may be on to something about the brush. Is the "dirt" a very dark green? I suspect a lot of bronze (copper and tin) brushes on the market are are really brass (copper and zinc), and not very good brass at that. Hoppes 9 can do a number on either, but eats the cheap brass brushes the fastest.

Tom
 
Perfect cleanliness of a rifle bore is an unachievable goal, and fortunately an unnecessary one except maybe for benchrest shooters.
Click to expand...

Not true, you just have to use the USMC method you failed to mention - standing in the shower with your AR-15 and a bottle of Tide. Its not a particularly recommended method or anything you would probably want to do to a rifle that you own but it does get those government-owned rifles sparkly, inspection clean in short order.

Personally, I haven't found the AR-15 to be the maintenance hound that so many people claim it is. I started out cleaning mine to perfection and doing it over a several day period as described. After a while, it gets old to spend three days cleaning a rifle you only used for three hours.

I've started out on a new program of minimal maintenance just to see what the AR-15 will suffer and so far, the only negative effect is that the bolt carrier stuck when the lube on the rails wore off.

I'm now engaging in little more than bore snaking the barrel, applying a light coat of CLP to the bolt, and keeping the rails of the bolt carrier well lubed (no scraping carbon off the bolt, no cleaning out the gas tube, no messing with the chamber crud, no cleaning crud out of the extractor) and so far the rifle functions as well or better than it did previously.

My idea is to just keep shooting it until something fails, note where the failure was and what can be done to prevent it in the future and add that to my cleaning regimen.
 
Bartholomew, you realize, of course, that your insistence upon empirical evidence will automatically exclude you from membership in the Democrat party ... ;)

Glad to hear of your experiment, and I'll be interested to hear how it progresses. Are you keeping some track of accuracy as well?

Regards from AZ
 
You really do need to get an AK-47 varient. Here is my AK cleaning list:

1.)
-Remove dust cover, remove bolt carrier and bolt.
-Remove gas tube.

2.)
-Run a patch with #9 down the bore, then a boresnake, then one of oil, then a dry patch.
-wipe down the bolt, bolt carrier, and piston with CLP then wipe dry.
-run a brush through the gastube, then some CLP, then wipe dry.

3.)
-reassemble.


This whole deal takes less than 15 minutes, and that is going slow. If need, be you could clean a dirty AK47 in 5-10 minutes. I often shoot 3 different AKs on a trip to the range, and cleaning them all has never taken more than 1 hour, even with a couple hundred rounds through them.
 
Yes, I'm keeping loose track of round count between cleanings, what the current cleaning regimen is and how accuracy is. If I notice accuracy is affected, I'll note the round count and give the barrel a good scrub down with some Shooter's Choice and a brush.

It's a chrome lined Bushmaster barrel, so I'm not expecting to see anything soon.
 
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