Quoted:
What the hell are you guys doing? Taking the whole gun apart???
No wonder people think these guns are finicky, with you guys wasting this much time on them.
[size=5][b]15 minutes.[/size=5]
If you are taking longer than that, you ain't doing it right.[/b]
Follow the MANUAL. Don't expect to pull clean patches. You can pull 1,000 patches, and still get a patch that isn't white. Nature of the beast, especially if you are using CLP, as you are supposed to.
Per Armalite, carbon is self limiting. Don't bother scraping the bolt and the carrier - you'll only likely do more harm. I gave up scraping carbon 10,000 rounds ago, my gun still runs like a champ.
Otis makes a great cleaning kit. You can pull very tight patches. 5 or 6 and you are good to go.
Stop disassembling things beyond what the manual shows. You are just likely to screw more things up. (I've seen it MANY times at the range, so don't claim it doesn't happen)
This is a combat weapon. Your DI in the Army may have wanted it squeaky clean, but that is gone after the 1st shot anyway. Clean enough IS clean enough.
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I heartily concur. When I clean any firearm it's to maintain function and extend useful life. I generally soak out the bore with No. 9 after shooting. Just a couple of wet patches every day or so to stay ahead of fouling. The rest of the weapon mainly gets an oil change. Occasionally some area gets detail cleaning but not very often. In other words, the firearm may get cleaned three of four times after shooting, but only five minutes at a time. One of the most important things, I think, is to clean and lube the thing without doing any damange. In my military stint I saw a lot of criminal damage done to firearms on a routine basis due to the "white glove mentality" of military inspections.
I think military influence combined with pride of ownership causes folks to spend a lot of time scraping, brushing and flushing that's more detrimental than helpful to long term
usefullness of their firearms. It's just a machine folks, not a surgical applinace of something.