Highest maintanence firearm

Calico Liberty 9mm.
Has to be disassembled, cleaned, and lubed after every use. I don't mean day at the range, I mean every 50 rounds. Also about every other use I have to disassemble the magazine(s) and clean them also. I have replaced several springs, and some of the roll pins just started falling out (probably from so many removals) and had to be replaced. Now that you mention it, I haven't fired it in about 4 years just because it's such a pain.

Black powder cap and ball revolvers. They need to be cleaned with black power residue solvents or soapy water. Total disassembly of the action is required on some models to get at all of the corrosive residue.

My black power musket loaders, of course.

Besides black powder guns a Walther P22 comes to mind. It needed to be cleaned after every 100 rounds or else everything would come to a screeching halt. Had to practically disassemble the gun, clean it, and lube it to get it going again.

I should add I did have a Colt Gold Cup that was very choosy about what particular ammo it liked but really didn't require all that much more in the way of extra maintenance.

For proper function, long range precision rifles.

bannockburn said:

Besides black powder guns a Walther P22 comes to mind. It needed to be cleaned after every 100 rounds or else everything would come to a screeching halt. Had to practically disassemble the gun, clean it, and lube it to get it going again.

I should add I did have a Colt Gold Cup that was very choosy about what particular ammo it liked but really didn't require all that much more in the way of extra maintenance.

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Mine does a little better than this and we generally only shoot it suppressed, but I've found spraying every nook and cranny with brake-parts cleaner (!$2/can at Walmart) followed by re-lube with Break-Free has worked well to minimize the number of times I have to unscrew the barrel-nut/suppressor adapter.

Any of my muzzleloaders!

Marlin Model 60. Through cleaning every 50 rounds or it stops functioning. After a couple decades and probably ten thousand rounds, I had to replace the entire side plate assembly. (The one broken spring was unavailable to repair the original assembly, and the replacement assembly was about a 6 month wait time.) I have dismantled that gun SOOOOO many times over the years, that I had to drill, tap, and helicoil the threads in the receiver and replace the two screws that hold the metal into the stock.

Come to think of it, worse than the Model 60 was a Remington Nylon 10C Mohawk. I never got it to shoot more than 4 times in a row.

Shouldn’t be, but my 38sw SH S&W lemonsqueezer. I bought it in pieces and reassembled it to find out that the cylinder stop was broken. It’s a hand fitted part and mine must require the longest arm ever because the ones I have bought are all too short, so I made one. Mild steel isn’t optimal but it’s easy to work, and sadly it fails quickly, and I don’t have the equipment to HT hardened steels.

That’s a whole lot of work for a couple hundred rounds before the arm twists and the gun goes out of time.

bannockburn said:

Besides black powder guns a Walther P22 comes to mind. It needed to be cleaned after every 100 rounds or else everything would come to a screeching halt. Had to practically disassemble the gun, clean it, and lube it to get it going again.

I should add I did have a Colt Gold Cup that was very choosy about what particular ammo it liked but really didn't require all that much more in the way of extra maintenance.

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I had a P-22 that would eat several thousand rounds between cleanings....once it was 'lightly modified'. First thing was to remove the magazine safety which placed a drag on the slide...which is the last thing a .22 needs. Then...at about maybe 3-400 rounds in, a burr developed that also started dragging on the slide movement. Took it off with a file then watched it as the rounds accumulated and it didn't return. They're actually a pretty neat little pistol, just a shame that as delivered the first version was saddled with the mag safety that made them unreliable.

My old Mossberg 377 Plinkster: requires a complete strip and clean every 3-500 rounds to stay reasonably reliable. I keep it because Ive had it since I was a kid, and for its laser-beam accuracy.

My AR-15s. My AR-7 overheats and has reliability problems after a couple of magazines, but that's not a maintenance issue. As far as maintenance, everything else I own has been happy for decades with having the bore swabbed out with a little Hoppe's #9 followed by an oily patch and having the stripped action rubbed down with an oily cloth. Just disassembling the ARs to the point where I can clean the bolt and piston rings takes longer than fully attending to anything else I own.

I agree about BP guns, but I may be one of the few that find it enjoyable after a day's shooting to set at the table and clean them. Kinda therapeutic and takes me back in time.

hdwhit said:

Just disassembling the ARs to the point where I can clean the bolt and piston rings takes longer than fully attending to anything else I own.

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Getting a bolt out to clean on an AR takes less than a minute if you know what your doing a minute and a half to pull up youtube and follow directions...am I missing something?

1. Remove BCG
2. Remove firing pin cotter pin and firing pin
3. Rotate Bolt and remove cam key
4. Pull bolt out of Carrier
Done

My Ruger 22/45 Lite is my most difficult one to clean, but in reality it doesn't need cleaned all that often and it's not that bad once one gets the disassembly/reassembly down.

The M16A1.

+1 on BP rifles. Hopefully my wife never finds out what caused the scratches in the guest bathtub...

Cleaning Blackpowder guns is a privilege, not a chore!

Saddlebag Preacher said:

...takes me back in time.

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Yep. That's how I feel about disassembling and cleaning my M1 Rifle. I play a CD of WWII era era music, and I'm immersed in the past.

In terms of cleaning: black powder. Nothing I have ever shot takes as much time and is as messy as cleaning a blackpowder firearm. The revolvers, I have complete disassembled the things to remove all the crud that got into the smallest locations within the frame and lockworks. I guess like everyone, I have filled cake pans with the screws, back frame, cylinder, nipples, springs, trigger parts and washed them all, before drying and reassembling. Black powder also gums up any mechanism.

The first machine guns were developed with blackpowder as the propellant. I have to wonder how long they could fire before the BP gummed them up.

While the M1911 has been developed into a reliable pistol, it takes a minimum of 20 minutes to clean the thing, and if I decide to remove the trigger, sear, disconnect, it takes me at least that long to get those trigger parts back in the frame. But at least I can do that, I don't know how to, and don't want to learn, how to completely dissemble a M92 Beretta or my SIG P220.

You know, I completely dissembled a Ruger MKII 22 lr, and had to find a UTube video to learn the trick of getting the trigger parts assembled.

There has to be firearms that were finicky about cleanliness and required constant oiling and wiping to continue functioning. We are however, about 165 years into cartridge firearms. Mechanisms have under gone a Darwinian selection process where maintenance heavy, expensive, unreliable mechanisms have been weeded out, and I am going to claim, there is a lot of design convergence. We see that on the semi auto pistol side, and in bolt actions. You look at the locking mechanisms for semi auto pistols, the swinging link of the 1911 is gone, instead most pistols use the Browning Hi Power arrangement. Virtually every new bolt action uses the same bolt as the Rem 700, a spring loader plunger, maybe a different extractor, locking lugs the same, cocking mechanism the same. What I see for receivers appears to be a design convergence on the Savage 110 barrel attachment. A barrel collar has to be the easiest method to screw a barrel and receiver together and set headspace.

Saddlebag Preacher said:

I agree about BP guns, but I may be one of the few that find it enjoyable after a day's shooting to set at the table and clean them. Kinda therapeutic and takes me back in time.

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I completely agree. I don't mind sitting in the shed with a bucket of hot soapy water cleaning my front stuffers. In my opinion they were the most beautiful firearms ever built, anywhere.

http://www.allenmartinrifles.net/gallery-of-guns/herman-rupp-rifle-lehigh-valley/

I clean my guns and I clean anything mechanical I work on whether that item is at home or at my job. Nothing about it is therapeutic to me. Kinda like a receptionist doesn't like to take phone calls when they get home, well I'd rather not repair or clean mechanical things when I get home.

My therapeutic activity is actually shooting guns or drinking a whiskey or a cold beer after a long day at work.

I'm on board with the people that brought up black powder revolvers. The fact I own exactly one is because of the lengths I go to when cleaning it.

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Have to say for me it was the one and only, 10/22 I owned. Wouldn't feed and after half a box you had to stop and clean the thing. Stove-piped about once every two mags. Was offered 2/3 what I paid for it and down the road it went.

I got so tired of taking the extractor out of 1911s to adjust the tension that I finally switched to models that use an external one. I've had more trouble with 1911s than with anything else. Seems there's always something that needs tweaking somewhere. That's okay, I kinda like taking them apart and fiddling with this or that, but they can sure be a lot of trouble.