Ive heard that after shooting the current supply of milsurp 5.45 ammo, you need to clean with an amonia based cleaner or at the very least soapy water, then clean as usual with oil or solvent based cleaner.  Im wondering if someone only had a small amount of oil for cleaning, what would the rifle look like after a few weeks left unattended?

What is the big idiotic fail at chemistry that keeps this topic going?
Use water or water based solutions to dissolve and flush corrosive salts.

Let me say that again.
Use water or water based solutions to dissolve and flush corrosive salts.

Use oils and oil based solutions to repel water and protect metal from oxidation.

It is not a debate.

If you are just looking for representative photos of corrosion then I apologize for my tone.
Around here somewhere is a nice pic of a corroded flash hider from a less than thorough cleaning.

Seriously, water.
Plain ole' water.
Hot water is better.

It doesn't need to have any ammonia in it.

that's sooooooooooo NOT what I heard!




(sarcasm!)

If you don't clean after shooting corrosive ammo, or only clean with oil, it will only be a matter of time before your rifle rusts.  The amount of time will mainly depend upon how humid your climate is; less humidity = longer time until corrosion sets in.  Either way, use water to flush out the salts or your rifle will rust; it'll just be a matter of time...

What happens if right after shooting corrosive ammo you clean the barrel with Hoppes #9, &  the rest of the gun you clean with brake cleaner & then lube the whole gun with Rem oil? Is the water really necessary in this case?  GARY  N4KVE

The corrosive element is a form of salt produced when the primer fires.
Oil will not dissolve salt so oil is totally ineffective as a cleaner for corrosive residue.
Ammonia is only effective because almost all commercially available ammonia is mostly water.

If you clean only with oil or most any other petroleum or synthetic lubricant the rifle will rust sooner or later.
This was discovered the hard way in the 1920's.
After WWI the military coated rifles with thick layers of cosmoline and stored them.
In the 20's they unpacked some and were shocked to find rifles heavily corroded UNDER a layer of grease.
They discovered that the cleaning solvent in use didn't dissolve the salts.  They developed a bore solvent that did, and the problem was solved.

Bottom line: use a lubricant as a corrosive residue cleaner and your rifle WILL rust, sooner or later.

hoppes #9 will work.  it was just in one of the magazine tests.  



personally, i pour hot water down the bore and a little down the gas block.  then i wipe the boltface and pison down with a rag, i blow it all off and out with the compressor.  then clean as normal.  no rust, ever.  



for cleaning i run a hoppes soaked bore snake down the bore a few times, then just wipe everything down with an oily rag (except the piston).  every once in a while i'll powder blast the bottom of the receiver out and sparingly lube the fcg, but not too often.  as far as lubing goes, i put a tiny bit of high temp bearing grease on the rails and just a smidge on the bolt stem.



thousands and thousands of rounds later on several guns, they are all still functioning 100% with no signs of letting up.

use WATER, just plain ol' H2O, or windex or ballistol which mixes with WATER.

Sorry guys but I've gotta weigh in here on this one, once again.  The myth about sooner or later is still a little unclear to me.  I have an Arsenal Bulgaria SLR-105 (which is not a cheap-o in and of itself) and also have some extra change thrown into in the form of traingle folder and some other accessories (namely Russian Kobra red-dot, Russian NSPU night vision, and solid folder backstock).  So all together I'm looking at more than $2000 worth of gun here.  I've never shot anything but mil-surp ammo through that gun, both Bulgarian and Russian ammo.  While the whole argument about using something water based makes sense to me I've still yet to find a single spot of rust on that gun anywhere amd I've never once given that gun the water treatment.  I usually use Break-Free but have also used other solvents on the gun.  The bore is still bright, the flash hider looks fine, and nowhere on the rifle have I ever found a spot of rust.  

Now I should mention nay a month has gone by in the past few years I've had that piece where I haven't shot the gun at least once.  It's a pain in the ass to clean but, then again, so are all rifles.  I clean a Glock in about 10-15 minutes.  I'm 45 minutes to an hour on any rifle I own.  But regular bore brush, cleaning patches and Break-Free seems to have always worked just fine for me.  I shot it the last Sunday of last month.  I waited two whole days to clean it, which is rare for me, but I still never found any rust.  Inside or out.  And if anyone challenges me by saying I obviously live in the Sahara Desert where there's absolutely no humidity at all I assure you I don't: as referenced under my screen name I live in Florida which is surrounded by water on three sides.  With the exception of January (and sometimes at that) it's humid as hell here!

I have got my Arsenal SLR107FR to start rusting within 45 minutes of stopping shooting. It was raining at the time but the rifle was under cover. I clean with soapy water and follow up with oil and have no problems.

Pics of my early chicom SKS. All the pitting was there when I got it. I think it adds 'character'. Bore is mirror shiny, function is 100%, and on a good day it'll do 2MOA. BSW

Many small pits in the chamber.


Pitting on the gas piston. Notice how the chrome has kept the piston head from pitting.


Pitting inside the gas tube. (I had to crank the exposure up so that the inside is visible. It's not nearly as worn as the pic makes it look.)

Guy's, we're not talking about some expensive, exotic super hi-tech miracle juice.

Water. That's it. Water.

Rinse out your gun with some water, warm if you can, and then clean and lube as usual.

This has all been thought out for you in advance.
Look at the pictures. That's your gun if you don't.

Yeah.  Too bad that doesn't work.  At least it didn't work the slightest bit on my romanian AK-74.

Only thing I've found to work is elbow grease and lots of scrubbing with CLP and a nylon brush.  Maybe quik scrub would work?

I only use Corrosion-X and i'm a big fan of the bore snake.  Hell, a shot of Cx then 2 pulls of the bore snake and im good for at least 10 days.  Oh yeah, i have never used water and do not use oil.

 Bring it on haters

Pix after 7k surplus 5.45 b/t the 2 in 14 months

I believed the Amonia fallacy and shot a bunch of corrosive E.German 76239 a few years ago. I sprayed it with Windex real quick and put it back in the safe because I had to leave real quick.

Got back to it a few days later and it was covered in rust.

Same here with a 1919A4 which sometimes I run 400+ rds through and have never had a problem. It run on 8mm ammo with some of is very old.

Forgive my ignorance. What is the corrosive ammo? I use steel cased Monarch in my WASR.

Corrosive ammunition has primers which deposit hydroscopic salts on the rifle. All of that ammunition that I'm aware of is military surplus. As long as you shoot commercial ammunition, you don't need to worry about corrosive primers.

commercial? does this include wolf? isn't wolf what the russian military uses? what about brown bear, silver bear?

Im pretty sure in the US no corrosive ammo has been made since like the 50's and in the former Com-bloc none since the 80's.

This is a rough ballpark or dates, check to make sure before shooting any ammo that it isnt corrosive.

Wolf is not made in the US and the Russian Military does not use it.  The boxes having Military classic is for advertisement and description only.

All the Barnaul factory loads Scarlettpitbull named are all Non-corrosive too.

A majority of the corrosive X39 right now is Yugo; and 5.45 surplus is Corrosive.

I have seen pix of other military forces using Wolf though

Edit: I wanted to add that Chemistry 101 answers most corrosive questions.  Honestly, if a shtf scenario hit and you have to use corrosive ammo what then?

My friend's WASR10 five weeks after shooting corrosive Yugo M67 without cleaning:



Hard to tell what was going on in the bore. Definitely looked dirtier than usual. No rust in the action.

I bet that rifle still functions 100% :)

You were supposed to clean "as normal"  (C.L.P.,brush,patches,etc.) AFTER the Windex treatment. The Windex or rather the water in the Windex removed the salts but also stripped the metal of every trace of oil.

Personally, I have moved into the Balistol/Distilled Water camp.

that WASR doesn't look too hard to clean up though

'Personally, I have moved into the Balistol/Distilled Water camp'

That's great. You are doing the best thing possible for the rifle, but the distilled water isn't really necessary - any clean water is fine. Use an emulsion from 1 to 3 parts Ballistol to 10 parts water to treat corrosive salts (you want it to be mostly water), and follow up with straight Ballistol all over the gun, including wood and plastic. Clean with the emulsion as you would any CLP - use the bore brush, patches, pipe cleaners and cloths as you normally would. Repeat with the straight Ballistol. For polished/finished wood, just wipe to a gloss with a clean cloth or paper towel. Do the same for polished blued finishes but use only a soft cotton cloth - a paper towel can scratch over time. Ballistol may attack any air-dry finish like spray-can camo, etc., but Alumahyde is good, along with any baked-on finish. You really don't need any other cleaner/lubricant if you leave a good Ballistol film on everything. At the range, if you don't have any emulsion pre-mixed, just wash the rifle out with water, then spray down with Ballistol while wet. Wipe away the excess leaving the insides wet. You can finish up when you get home. If you don't have any Ballistol with you, it's best to do nothing until you can treat it properly, but you need to use the emulsion ASAP. After using the emulsion (copiously applying it to the whole gun, inside and out, including the barrel, gas system, bolt and muzzle area), you are good for an extended time before using the straight Ballistol. The best thing you can take to the range is a spray bottle of emulsion and a cleaning kit. You need a nylon brush for the inside of the flash hider/brake and some wood-handle Q-Tips for the muzzle crown area. Some brakes can use a 12 ga shotgun brush while others need smaller. Personally, I'll be glad when all the corrosive ammo is gone, but there is some small satisfaction in shooting genuine military ammo like Yugo, etc. It has a different smell and it's usually hotter ammo than the commercial fodder.

Isn't it hard to get the water out of the valve on a yugo?

And now you know why there are so many Yugo's with crapped out gas valves...

BSW

I wonder what Russia and other countries using corrossive ammo on their Kalashnikovs did before they found Ballistol.  Did they really use them once and then throw them away?  I agree with the one poster that asked "What if the SHTF?  Then what?"  In my case, I'd carry a small bottle of Break-Free with my other gear and use the cleaning rod and shitty cleaning kit to clean my rifle any time it had been used and I had more than 30 minutes on my hand.  Patches can be made with scissors or a knife and any cloth you find lying around....i.e. the clothes being worn by the zombie you just greased.

I tend to believe as long as you clean the gun soon after shooting you should be OK with just about anything you use.  I'm still not buying having a pile of rust 15 minutes after you last mag dump.

If you read the section on maintenance in this manual http://www.box.net/shared/cu2djae1zb you'll find the Sov cleaned rifles with 'alkali solution' followed by oil.

The important thing about the 'alkali solution' isn't that it's alkaline but that it's mostly water. The difficulty of cleaning rifles in combat is why the gas system and bore of in AK rifles is chromed. It also explains all those WWII 'sewer pipe bore' surplus rifles that are floating around. BSW

People were cleaning their firearms with hot water and greasing them with animal fat for a long time.
Some still do.

Science marches on but it's not like the original method stopped working.

Yep. It'll take more than that to jam an AK.

Yeah. I'm probably going to have to do the cleaning. Apparently he still hasn't. The rifle was shot in mid July. Those pics were taken in mid August. If the corrosion has gotten worse I may make about post about cleaning it.

I never take my 74 out without a thermos of hot water and a turkey baster.  Oh, and my Otis Tactical kit with CLP also.

EXACTLY what happened to me, only I waited 5-8 hours before I cleaned my rifle, not a few days.  It was COVERED in fuzzy rust.

This is funny, but when my undershorts are ready for retiring, they become cleaning patches for one last use. LOL.  GARY  N4KVE

How would you clean it good, then? Could you displace the water by soaking the block in light oil?

That's what I do with my WASR, and haven't had any problems yet.

- Boil water in a teapot.
- Pour the boiling water through the gas tube, barrel, muzzle brake, etc.
 (The rifle practically self-dries because the water is so hot that it heats the metal, which then dries quickly.)
- Clean per usual with boresnake and CLP.

Now THAT'S a good idea.






It probably seems alien to some people to purposely put water into a gun,
but if you've ever had any experience shooting real black powder in a traditional muzzleloader, this is nearly the exact same cleaning procedure.

Boiling water. The metal flash dries.

I just use the coffee maker.