>If you shoot corrosive milsurp ammo make sure the cleaner you use has ammonia in it. That's the only thing that stops the corrosive salts in the primers that will destroy a barrel in days.<
Ammonia will not affect the residual corrosiveness of ammo, even one little bit. It is the water base in some of them, especially the old GI cleaner, that removed the salt. Ammonia remains a copper remover.
Now...
The boasting about ammonia has to do with its supposed deleterious effects on barrel stee. At one time there was a group of shooters that claimed that ammonia in bore cleaners would lead to premature demise of a barrel. This was quoted mostly by people with no chemistry background and people who based their statements on one barrel samples. The supposed mechanism was a proposed one, made up of ammonia reacting with the sulfur added to the stainless to make the stainless free-machining. The chemistry of this reaction sequence is very suspect. Since chrome-moly barrels do not contain sulfur, there were supposed to be fewer problem, it was claimed.
I have never seen any studies, with large enough sample sizes to make them valid, stainless or no, moly or no, and done by someone with enough chemistry background to make them convincing, that I would even give it more than passing note.
Go ahead and use whatever bore cleaner that you wish, just be reasonable and don't let is stay in the barrel for long periods of time. Read the directions on the bottles.
