Beware of over cleaning
I admit that I have been called a perfectionist. I have several years experience in working in the music industry and in that line of work, only the best work gets noticed. When it comes to maintaining a car, you can waste a lot of time working on things that aren’t going to increase your mileage or prevent it from getting hit by another car. Although many of us like to take our favorite firearms out of the safe from time to time, and wipe them down and look everything over, there can be a point where shoving a cleaning rod down a barrel too often will cause excessive wear and tear.
In a Carbine course, we got a good lecture on some of the BS that people are claiming about the amount of maintenance the AR15 direct impingement guns need. The reality is that they sure as heck do need to be cleaned more than any other semi-auto military rifle, but not as much as some people claim. The reasons the military makes soldiers do this so often is to basically just keep them occupied. Keeping the gun lubricated and putting a few drops where it’s needed is all we had to do while running a Carbine course and not a single one of us had an issue. Be careful about how much you use your gun cleaning supplies on your firearms, but also, make sure you have the right tools for the firearm. There are some neat cleaning brushes and tools that you can get from Otis gun cleaning kits and they will help you get into the areas that are hard to reach.