My method is probably over kill. Now my range is the backyard or the gun club is only 4 miles down the road. So after shooting (my pistols) i swab the chambers and barrel out with ballistol and a quick wipe down of the whole gun. Then I completely disassemble the revolver and wash all the steel parts with HOT soapy water (Dawn) then rinse in hot water, dry and wipe it all down with ballistol again and reassemble. Works good. I have been using straight ballistol but after reading Driftwoods comments I will start dilluting it.
Howdy Again
Yes, your method is overkill. I stopped completely disassembling Black Powder firearms and cleaning all the parts separately a long time ago.
Think about what I said about oils soaking BP fouling like a sponge, so the fouling cannot absorb any more water. On top of that, everybody who cleans their BP guns with water, hot or cold, must then drive the water out again or the water will cause rust. That's why they take them apart, so they can dry off all the parts before putting everything together again. If you use scalding hot water, or put the parts in the oven, you still have to get all the water out.
Don't take the gun apart. Coat the BP fouling down inside the gun with Ballistol or Murphy's Mix. Don't try to get it out again, just leave it in there. The Ballistol or the Murphy's Mix will saturate the fouling, preventing it from absorbing any more water from the atmosphere. Just leave it down in there. Every once in a blue moon I will completely tear down one of these firearms to remove all the black, oily guck down inside. There is always lots of black, oily guck. There is never any rust.
If you have the ghost of an old Drill Instructor, or the ghost of your Great Grandfather whispering in your ear that you are a bad person for putting away a gun that is not completely devoid of any fouling down inside, tell them to be quiet. The DI was just trying to keep you busy, Great Grandad was probably shooting corrosive primers.
By the way, I do this with antique firearms with badly pitted bores too. I stopped trying to scrub every last molecule of fouling out of the thousands of tiny pits in a pitted old barrel a long time ago too. I make a good faith effort to remove as much fouling as possible, then I coat the thousands of pits in the bore with a light coating of Ballistol and don't worry any more about it.
If you have not figured it out yet, I am extremely lazy. Stripping two revolvers, a shotgun, and a rifle down completely after a CAS match is way more work than I wanted to do. That is what keeps so many shooters from trying Black Powder. Cleaning with M Mix, making sure to work some into the lockwork with Q-Tips, then squirting a bit of some full strength Ballistol down inside is good insurance against allowing rust to form down inside.
Not to mention good insurance against cross threading screws or buggering up screw threads from repeated disassembly and reassembly.
