Ultrasonic Gun Cleaning

Ultrasonic Gun Cleaning

I’ve been out shooting today, and this is the aftermath, I’ve got to go home and clean up the rifle and I’m going to show you a nifty, rather economical, and quick way that I use to clean on the bolt carrier group.

The first thing to do is clamp your AR15 in a fixture that holds the lower receiver. Hyskore www.hyskore.com makes the perfect gun servicing vise. That  would be their 30182 Master Armorers Vise https://hyskore.com/products/30182-portable-armorers-vise/.

I got my rifle taken apart and I told you I was going to show you a neat way to clean your AR 15 bolt carrier. What I’m talking about is new ultrasonic clean. Now you can go into Brownell’s and you can pay $300-$400 for one of these or you can go to Harbor Freight and pick one up for $30-$40 bucks, or you’ll be lucky like me and pick it up for a few dollars at the Goodwill store. Yeah. Goodwill store has been a repository of all things good for me. Lately I’ve been finding a lot of neat projects. I’ve always wanted one and I always want to try one, and I don’t want to spend 40 bucks on it.

I figured you know if it works it works. But a friend of mine told me that all you’ll get out of it is wet oily dirty guns and filthy water, but I’m not using water and I’m not using any kind of water-based solvents or anything like that. What I’m using is a mix of automatic transmission fluid. You can buy ATF at the store. By the way it’s an excellent gun cleaner it’s the base ingredient of a homemade gun cleaner called Ed’s red and some Hoppe’s number nine. It’s worked pretty well so far but I’ve only used it once before to clean a handgun.

I’m gonna plug it in first and I’m going to take the bolt apart and I’m sure you know how that works. So that’s not a big mystery. We’re going to pull it apart real quick. Some parts I will not put in like the firing pin. There’s no need to put that in there. I can wipe that off and be done. Now it’s got a little basket you can drop your small items in.

I want you to see how much carbon is on the bolt and carrier. I probably shot about now 400 rounds so there’s a good deal of carbon on there, and the neat part about this is while you’re doing this you can do other stuff like I can wipe out the lower receiver or clean the barrel. This can do all the work for me and all I really have to do in the end is dry it off. Now it’s kind of like this, you’ve got certain modes on it so you could do the normal intense and fast there’s yeah there’s faster right and there’s fast normal 100-200 cycles and 340 to do it in like four minutes.

All right. So we got about 44 seconds left and I’m going to start taking a look and seeing how well we did. Probably should be wearing gloves. So far it’s a win. You know it’s basically ready to oil up and stick back in the gun. I took the firing pin out a little early and that’s all nice and clean. Let’s try the bolt carrier, that’s usually something that gets pretty dirty. Absolutely nothing is coming off but the ATF fluid.

Some people you know don’t like cleaning their guns. They like shooting them and they don’t like cleaning them. It’s just not fun for them. For me personally it’s relaxing. I sit down. I just enjoy myself. You know when I relax and enjoy cleaning them.

The receiver is usually the worst part and you can imagine how crusty it is. If I really wanted to be lazy and not do any work I could throw it back in for another four minutes. Let’s go look at the extractor. Hardly anything underneath the extractor, a little bit of dirt. Not much I suspect that’s more just from the fluid being dirty itself.

Don’t let this cleaning solution soak in this plastic. A plastic device like this will eventually degrade. It’ll break it down over time. I put it in a bell jar and that’s basically an old spaghetti sauce jar, I wipe most of the dirt out and all the crud and sediment settles to the bottom. Now you still have to wipe that out a little bit. So you basically get clean clear nice fluid ready to go for your next cleaning job.

So I mean an ultrasonic cleaner is an option if you hate cleaning guns and you’re really not a detail cleaner. Wipe it off put some oil on it stick it back in the gun and you’re good to go. This is the tool for you. It’ll save you hours of cleaning and scrubbing and I even brought the brush just to make sure I didn’t even need it. You know that’s just absolutely clean inside and out and a nice part about the ultrasonic is it gets underneath your extractor and inside areas where you couldn’t possibly reach.

If an ultrasonic cleaner is not for you Hyskore www.hyskore.com makes a great little gun and small parts cleaning fixture called the 30293 Degreezer https://hyskore.com/products/30293-degreezer-small-parts-cleaning-system/  that permits the extended soaking of bolts, trigger groups, etc. and even has a solvent well that’s perfect for Hoppe’s Number 9 and a strainer basket.