All posts tagged Hoppes boresnakes

Keeping your guns clean and preventing rust

There has  been much improvement in synthetic lubrication in recent years and I’m hoping that the older toxic gun cleaning materials that I have in my home will eventually get used up and cleaned out.  I’m not going to push Green Energy or some environmental issues on  you, but I have often wondered if I should have been more cautious in the way I cleaned some of my guns and my exposure to some of it.   I’m aware that good ventilation is important, but there are many times when I have attempted to use gloves while cleaning, but it’s very hard to get some parts back into place when you are  using them.

There was a time when I had large containers of Hoppes gun cleaning liquids and those were some of the harshest.  I’ve moved towards using Break Free CLP for most of my gun cleaning, but in recent years I have been using Mobil One synthetic oil for most of my lubrication.  Gun cleaning supplies are becoming easier to use and the old cleaning rods of the past can become your newest rack queen.   I use pistol cleaning rods fairly often, but I rarely use my one piece cleaning rod and mostly use Otis gun cleaning kits or boresnakes for my semi-auto rifles.   The less you have to touch your firearms or the dirty gun patches or cleaning brushes the better you’ll be.   Long exposures to toxic materials does catch up to you.

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Cleaning revolvers is easier with a boresnake

I remember the first firearm I ever cleaned was a Marlin bolt action 22LR rifle.  To clean the gun, all you had to do was pull the bolt out the back by depressing a button and pulling it back.   You could look down the chamber and see all of the fouling and know how dirty it was.   Using Hoppes cleaning solvent on a wet patch would produce a dark black gun patch on the other end when pushed through with a cleaning rod.   After you did that a few times, I’d run a cleaning brush a few times and then run a dry patch until it ran clean.

Revolvers and some semi-auto guns like the M1 Garand or the M14 and Mini 14 can be tricky and need to be cleaned from the muzzle if you are using a cleaning rod, well a few decades ago a new innovative way of cleaning these firearms was invented.   The Hoppes boresnakes are the simplist way to speed up the process and to put dangerous wear on your barrel by using a cleaning rod.   The Hoppes Boresnake is caliber specific so you may want to pick up a few for various calibers.  There are also rifle and pistol versions.

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How much time are you going to waste on cleaning?

Hoppes boresnakesI’ve had this argument with friends when they were arguing that direct impingement guns weren’t really hard to maintain and that spending another $500 on a piston driven AR15 wasn’t worth the money because you could basically buy another gun for that money.    I’d like to see people use the same argument if someone came out with a car that only needed an oil change every 15,000 miles instead of every 3000 miles.   How many times are you going to have to pull over and drop the car off and wait for a mechanic or waste an hour on a Saturday doing an oil change?  Keep that in mind the next time you go shooting and bring 3 or more rifles with you and then spend all Sunday night cleaning them.   If you could cut your cleaning time by 2/3s and reduce the need for brushes and cleaning patches for $20 would it be worth it?

Even though Hoppes boresnakes have been around for awhile, I still know an awful lot of  people that never used them.   I can guarantee you that these are not a gimmick and Hoppes boresnakes  do an excellent job of cleaning your barrels.   Another thing I often see is people jamming cleaning rods down rifles and unknowingly scratching up the inside of the barrel.   A boresnake takes of less room than traditional guide rods and they are easy to clean.    They are caliber specific so you have to consider picking them up for each caliber.    I really appreciated having mine after cleaning 3 rifles that were all 5.56 chambered and just went from one barrel to then next in seconds.   As long as you take good care of your guns, the brushes on the boresnake will clean your rifle as good as any rod driven brush.

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