.22 Cleaning

[White Stallion]

Is cleaning a .22 neccesary to maintain acuracy and velocisty? If so how do I do it?

 

['Card]

Any gun cleaning kit they sell at Wal-Mart will do just fine for most things. Just make sure it has a barrel/bore brush small enough to fit the .22 - and most kits do.

Get a little bit of gun oil on a lint-free cloth and wipe down the metal on the outside of the gun, then take a dry cloth and wipe off most of the oil. You only want to leave a very light coat of oil on exposed surfaces. A heavy coat of oil just attracts dirt and dust without offering any added protection.

You should also dribble (or spray) a little bit of oil into any moving parts (like the bolt action, if that's what the gun is) and move them back and forth to work the oil in and keep things lubricated. Once every few months (or more, depending on how often you use the gun) you'll want to field strip the gun and give it a good cleaning in there. If you don't know how to do that, there should be instructions in your owner's manual. If you don't have the owner's manual, you should contact the manufacturer of your gun and get one. (most have websites now, and most will be happy to send you an owner's manual if you e-mail them and ask)

Then, you take the cleaning rod (from the kit you got at Wal-mart) and put a little bit of oil on one of those white cotton squares and run that through the barrel once or twice. Then you take the copper brush and run it through, then a clean white cloth square (with no oil) and keep running that through until it comes out without any gunk on it.

There are a lot of high-tech nifty new oils/lubricants/protectors/cleaners on the market now, and most of them do a pretty good job - but you don't really need any of them to keep a gun clean if you maintain it on a regular basis. Our grandfathers took great care of their guns with some 3-in-1 Oil or WD-40, and it works fine for us too.

 

[R.W.Dale]

OK all things being equal and you will likely do more harm to an accurate 22 by cleaning the bore than leaving it alone. My target CZ has never seen a cleaning patch and 2000 rounds later it still shoots the tiny little groups it always did.

BUT

If your shooting a semiauto odviously the action is gonna require cleaning or if your worried about moisture causing corrosion some oil would be in order.

 

['Card]

That's probably a good point about target rifles. The original poster has asked a couple of questions recently about small-game hunting and camo, so I was working under the assumption that he's probably just varmint hunting.