Hey guys, Josh Kent with US Arms Company. I’m here today to talk to you guys about cleaning the AR 15 platform. We’re gonna be using one of our Gen Two Champion rifles today. This weapon was used in a sniper competition recently and so now we’re gonna use this as a time to kind of go over a legitimate full cleaning of the AR-15 platform. So we’re gonna go through the items and resources that you would need to clean your weapon system thoroughly. We’re gonna talk about the reasons why you clean the AR-15, the way we’re gonna teach you, and then we’re gonna go through the steps to which you’re going to take to clean the AR-15 thoroughly from beginning to end.

So we appreciate you guys coming. And we’ll go through the rest of the video on the things that you need coming up.

Hey guys. So we’re here. We’re gonna cover all the resources that you’re gonna need to clean the AR-15 platform. So if you bring it in close, we’re gonna cover some of the items that we use to fully clean our weapon system.

So starting from the back, we have Hoppe’s No. 9 Bore Cleaner now to cover some of the differences in bore cleaning. You have copper solvent, with strips of paper. Pieces of copper that would embed itself in the rifle’s barrel. It would strip that out and give you back to the bare metal again. Something like 76 2 Swedes.

Those solvents that have a lot of ammonia in ’em right here we have basically a powder fouling solvent with Hoppe’s nine, but they also make a copper solvent as well. So it depends on how many rounds that you have through the barrel.  Around 450 rounds through the rifle barrel is a good marker.

Since you’ve cleaned it, we would recommend that you use a copper solvent also. And in doing so, when you use the copper solvent, you have to let it sit in the barrel for about five to ten minutes to let it get a good hold on that copper so that you can lift it out. Here today, we’re going to use Hoppe’s No. 9 Bore Cleaner.

We don’t have a whole lot of rounds through it, so we’re not gonna take the copper out of the gun right now. Next we have a lubricant, which is gonna be Extreme Weapons Lubricant slip 2000. We like it a lot. It’s a great lubricant. It has a wide operating range.

I think it’s like from negative 110 to 1,250 degrees before it starts to burn off. So that gives us a good wide operating range. It has great viscosity and works well in semi-automatic or direct impingement platforms like the AR-15, or this setup here. I realize that there are piston setups works great in those.

Continuing down, we have some wipe down rags. We have a one-piece J Dewey cleaning rod with the punch jag for mopping out the bore with some of our patches. And again, these jags right here, they thread on directly to the one-piece rod. The one good thing about these rods is that they run on a bearing system.

So, as the patch is going down the bore, it allows the rod to rotate on an axis to allow your patch or your bore brush to engage those lands and grooves thoroughly without skidding down the bore. So, this is really a great rod to have to get a thorough clean, and we recommend them.

Use any rod that has a good bearing, that will allow your floor brush and your patches to engage those land roofs. Next, we have two different size punches. I have one small punch to help disassemble the bolt carrier group, so you have that firing pin and retaining pin. Sometimes if you got really big fingers, it’s difficult to get in there and remove it.

A small punch just helps you remove it so that you can help with ease of disassembly for the bolt carrier group. And second, I have a bigger punch for our champion series or the Utaw and the pro. Our receivers fit very well together and sometimes it can be difficult. You have to apply a little more pressure to the takedown pin.

So we just use a punch to help push that out. Alright, here we have a push Jag. I have a 20 caliber bore brush and the fitting jag or fitting piece that goes on the end of the rod that connects the board brush to the I Dewey cleaning rod. I have my attachment here that’s gonna sit in my lower receiver and it, this little piece right here is really nice to have it.

It kind of speeds you up a little bit, but it’s not necessarily like you have to have it. It’s optional, but it really helps you out. With the bore of the weapon down, it allows the bore solvent to drain down out of the bore instead of back into your chamber. Okay? So I would really recommend one of these.

J Dewey makes this one, but there are other companies out there that make them too. We have 20 caliber patches. Which may sound kind of silly, but you don’t want too big of a patch because you may get it stuck in your chamber or your bore. So make sure that you’re using the right size. Because if you do get these wedged in there, you could damage your cleaning rod and you could damage your chamber.

There’s just all kinds of problems that could go into the amount of bearing pressure between the patch and the bore. So use the right size patch that gives a thorough clean, and you’re able to get it out of the gun. Here we have an action rod. So we have a chamber brush on the end of this one.

We have two of them. So I have a chamber brush and a chamber. Okay, so once I’ve cleaned the bore, I’m gonna come back behind myself and clean out the chamber. The chamber brush here is a two-piece brush. Essentially we have one for the chamber to kind of scrub out any of the carbon brass build up, you know, fouling from powder from the ejection or the extraction of the case.

You’ll sometimes have a vacuum that pulls gunpowder residue back into the barrel. So, this brush right here is really good to clean that out and get it back to the bare metal, especially if you have a match chamber like this one. And then the secondary portion of the brush where you see the steel bristles is to clean out the barrel extension.

We move on to the bore mop. Again, once we’ve cleaned it out, we’re gonna have a little bit of residue left. So anytime you’re done cleaning something, you wanna wipe it down like with the rags here we have for the bolt carrier group. Essentially that’s what this chamber mop is. It’s to wipe up anything and it gives it that good mirror finish at the end of the cleaning. Lastly, we have a milspec bore brush. You have large bristles to do some of your major cleaning over large surface areas and then your small bristles here get into those finer areas. Something that you couldn’t really reach your hand in, or maybe you need a little bit more pressure than what you could get with the Q-tip.

These brushes are perfect for that. You can bring more to the table if you want, but honestly, these right here are the bare minimum to clean the rifle over without any issues with that we could foresee you having. So if you have this right here, starting off to clean your weapon system, you’re good to go. Next thing we’re gonna cover are going to be the reasons why you clean it.

All right guys, in this portion right here where we’re gonna talk about the reasons why we clean the AR 15 platform, okay? It used to be said that the AR-15 could be fired dirty and you would never have any issues with it. We all know that that is a fallacy and pretty much a lie, okay? Any mechanical device you let run long enough will get dirty enough to fail.

Okay? So the the things that we looked at: the barrel, the barrel extension, our bolt carrier group and trigger…all of these operating mechanisms that make our our weapon system function, we have to keep them clean to a certain degree. So the barrel, we clean it because of fouling buildup. Fouling buildup decreases our accuracy.

Okay? We want to keep our barrel with copper in it, but up to a certain point if we keep backfilling it, our groups spread. So that’s the reason why we clean the barrel. The chamber build up in the chamber can cause head spacing issues, especially if you’re shooting suppressed. So we wanna make sure that we keep a chamber good and clean.

We move back to the barrel extension. Anything, brass shavings, sometimes a rim can break off and you get these pieces of brass that built up in there. If you’ve got a good tight headspace, that stuff can hinder or cause the operation or function of the weapon system to either cease or damage itself.

So we want to clean those out. Moving back to the bolt carrier group, we have things like carbon buildup behind the firing pin. So as on a gas impingement system like this here, the gas flows back into the bolt carrier group and that expansion in that chamber the gas has to either bleed out these two relief holes or it will bleed back.

Either back around or back through the firing pin. And if we’re not careful, that carbon builds up on the firing pin and it can change the stroke or the depth to which that firing pin can extend itself and you get a light strike. So we always wanna make sure that we clean those, we wanna make sure that our cam pin and our bolts are cleaned and and wiped down, and they don’t have any buildup or debris on.

So that we have a good clean cycling and function, especially the bolt, the back of the bolts need to be clean so that we get a good locking head space and it doesn’t change our headspace or causing issues there. As we move down into the trigger area, we want to just make sure that we can wipe that trigger out, that there is no debris between the primary and secondary trigger and that it’s functioning properly.

Usually a couple of drops of oil after wipe down is really all it needs. But those are the steps that we’re gonna cover. Okay guys, so now we’re gonna get into the meat and potatos, so to speak, of cleaning the weapon system.

So we’ve talked about what you need, um, the reasons why we clean the ar, , 15 platform. And so now we’re gonna go into actually cleaning the weapon system. So the first thing we wanna do is make sure that the weapon system is clear free of ammunition. We point the gun in the safe direction and we clear the.

We’re gonna lock the bolt to the rear, check it, check the chamber magazine, well bolt face. And now we can let the bolt go forward and we can start dissembling or slightly dissembling the weapon. So here for cam lock, we gotta release the cam lever into the down position. We’re gonna take that large punch that we have and depress the take down.

which is gonna allow our upper receiver group to kind of tilt forward. And that’s kind of where we want it to be anyway, so that any solvent that we use will drain out of the barrel. So we’re gonna pull this charging handle to the rear, which is gonna bring our bolt carrier group. And now where we have the bolt carrier group in hand.

So you can just push the charger handle back into the forward position. Now this piece here that we showed you earlier, , this upper receiver kind of retaining band here, we’re just gonna hook it. And then drop that down to the rear and then recapture this piece here with the, with the take down pin. So now this retains our upper receiver for us.

We’re able to clean the chamber, clean the boar without the, the upper receiver flopping around on us. So we, we have to control it. So the first thing we want to do is we want to take our cleaning rod and we want to put a scrub brush or bore brush, which. Is 20 caliber board brush here. We want to go ahead and place that on our cleaning rod and give the boar, go ahead.

Break anything that we have in the boar loose just by making a few passes back and forth, back and forth, loosening any of the copper, the fouling within the boar. Go ahead and loosen it up. And then the next thing we’re going to push through is a solvent. Okay guys, the next step is going to be pushing a solvent patch through the boar so that the solvent can get into the lands and grooves and clean out the copper with a fouling that is in the barrel.

Okay, so we’re gonna put the patch on our push jag. We’re gonna start from the chamber or the rear of the upper receiver, and we’re just gonna push get this thing started, and then we’re just gonna push that patch through.

Through our four out the end. Once we get that out, we’ll take that patch, remove it, and then pull our push rod out back, , of the chamber. And now we’re gonna let that solvent sit for a couple of minutes so that it gets into the pores. And then we’re going to res scrubb the barrel. Okay guys, next step.

We’re gonna reapply the scrub brush to our, , cleaning rod, and we’re gonna hit this boar again one more time, giving a couple of back and forth strokes. Now again, you’ll know when the boar is actually cleaned, as you’ll feel, um, grit, or it’ll be difficult to push the boar brush through the boar initially, and it’ll kind of smooth.

Once you fill that smooth operation of the, the, the board brush passing through the lands and the grooves, you know that you’ve got a good scrub and now you’re ready to start pushing dry patches out the board. Alright, next step, we’re gonna start pushing our dry patches out the boar, but what we also want to do is we want to take a clean, , shop rag or something like that, white or cleaning rod down, taking any excess solvent off of that because again, we.

To make the boar dry with dry patches, and it is kind of pointless if we don’t take some of the solvent off of our cleaning. Cleaning. So we’re gonna use the dry patch, and again, from chamber to muzzle is how we’re going to clean it. Start in, get it started, and it passes through pretty easy. Now you guys will see that this first patch, it’s pretty dirty.

And as we continue along, and if we got really. You can see some flakes of copper that are actually in the patch or, or even flakes of brass that are in the patch, that the patch is actually picking up and cleaning out. So you’ll keep making passes with your patches until you get a clean patch at the end.

So I just going push one or two more through and call that. Good game. Gotta game. Gotta do this.

See.

Alright. Okay guys, so now we’ve gonna take our, we’ve cleaned the boar. Now we’re gonna take our bolt carrier group. We’re gonna strip it down real quick. So again, we have our firing pin, retaining pin. We’re gonna strip that out with our small, , punch. Now we can sit this, kind of tap it on the ground and our firing pin.

We depress our bolt to the rear, rotate the cam pin 90 degrees and it’s kind of dirty, so it’s being kind of a pain to rotate. But there’s our cam pin and then we just we’re able to remove our bolt from here. Alright, right, so now we have a stripped bolt carrier group. We always want to inspect our parts, so check the gas carry key, make sure that it’s not loose or wobbling, and now we can start wiping down and cleaning our bulk carrier room.

One of the things that I would recommend is some of the shop rags that you. You can use some of your hop, solve it on your shop rag to help wipe off some of the carbon that is built up, especially on the exterior bolt carry group. And then we’ll get into a better cleaning of, of your bolt, of just your wipe down and your scrubbing of parts.

So one of the big places that you should scrub or make sure that you get carbon off of. If we take a look at the firing pin, we don’t want any carbon built up on this surface as it’s going to change the firing pin prot. Of our firing pin. So we wanna make sure that this is clean metal surface when we go to reassembling.

The next place we want to make sure that we clean is right here at the back of the bolt. Alright, carbon builds up right there, , pretty frequently as the gas, this is where the gas kind of gets impinged in between the bulk carrier group and the back of this bolt. So as you clean these, understand that most of the bulk carrier group is a wipe.

But those two places, we want to make sure here at the back of the bolt and here on the back of the firing pin that we scrub really well and make sure that they’re smooth so that we have a good, smooth operation of our bulk carrier group. Okay guys, we’ve disassembled and wiped down the bolt carrier group.

Again, you can use some of the solvent and , shop rag to wipe down most of your parts in here and wiping out the interior of the bulk carrier group. The next thing we want to cover is going to be the. So after we’ve cleaned the face of the bolt, wiped it down as good as we can, you can use a Q-tip, um, or even the shop rag, we want to take a small punch and depress out the extractor pin and then remove the extractor, examine our, , extractor spraying and the enhanced, , I forget the full name of this, but it’s, it’s basically just a small rubber donut that goes around there and gives some additional tension to the.

So we wanna make sure that we wipe this down, that the extractor has no, um, buildup or brass inside the extractor arm right there. So if there is any, it just takes up, , take your punch and kind of just scrub it out. You don’t want to get on it too hard, just enough to get any of the excess out, and then you can wipe it down with the shop rag.

Okay? Next thing we wanna do to reassemble, we just fit this back onto the bolt press slightly to where we get this a. And then fit our pin in there till we get flush on both sides. The last thing we wanna do is make sure that all of the gas rings are offset from one another. So there, there are three gas rings total and we just wanna make sure that they are offset.

If they ever get a line, you’ll get gas seepage and you’ll start getting short strokes. So that’s how we clean the extractor. And just a wipe down on the bolt face, as you guys can see. The exterior of the bolt carrier group has been wiped down. It looks good. It’s ready to be reassembled. Same with our firing pin, firing pin, retaining pin, and our cam pin.

So on assembly we take the bolt, we set our extractor to the right hand side, and we make sure that the tampon hole is at the rearward position. We’re gonna take this cam just like we, , disassemble. We’re gonna set it in there at a 90 degree turn and we’re going to turn it, we’ll move the bolt forward and we turn it 90 degrees.

So with our bolt in the forward position, we can now and the the camp, in turn, we can now drop our firing pin back into place. You wanna make sure that you press it as far forward as you can, and then with it being pressed forward, we insert our firing pen retaining. Now the last step, to confirm that you have a good seat, press your bolt holding the firing pin forward, and you should see the firing pin protrude through the face of the bolt.

Once you’ve done this, give it a quick pop, make sure the firing pin doesn’t fall out, and you should be good to go. The last thing you want to do is set your bolt carrier group up on your face if your bolt drops with the weight of the bolt carrier. We would recommend that you go ahead and replace your gas rings, but your gas rings should have enough tension that it should hold your bolt up.

So if you ever do this and your bolt drops back, you know that it’s time to replace your gas rings. Okay? Alright. Next we’re gonna go through the wipe down of the upper receiver. Okay guys, this step here is gonna be the wipe down and the chamber cleaning for the upper receiver. So what we want to tackle with this first is we want to take.

Action rod and our chamber brush with the muzzle down again, we’re gonna insert our chamber brush and we’re gonna start rotating till we get the chamber brush or the the silver portion of the chamber brush just inside of the barrel extension. And we’re just gonna turn this till we kind of feel it smooth out a little bit, alright?

And you’ll feel it when it’s got tension. The same as when you used your board. Once the, the debris in there, the copper, the fouling, all of that stuff starts to loosen up. You’ll feel that the, the actual cleaning motion of what you’re doing kind of smooths out and using the chamber brush. We want to take this secondary portion right here, which stabilizes the brush at the rear of the receiver, and it keeps the brush from kind of walking around inside of the upper receiver and therefore it’s an easier operation of cleaning the.

It keeps the chamber brush in line in a straight, , position with the chamber instead of kind of wallowing around and it actually makes your chamber brush last longer too. Okay. So we get that once we start getting that smooth , feel to cleaning the chamber, we just kind of keep turning and slowly back the chamber brush out as we’re turning till it is fully removed.

Alright, so from here the next thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna take our chamber. And do the same thing. So we’re gonna insert chamber mop into the, the barrel extension. Same thing. We’re gonna set our, our alignment piece right here into the rear of the upper receiver. And we’re just gonna turn until we see the back plate of the chamber mop go flush with the barrel extension.

We give it a couple of turns, and what this is doing is mopping out all of that broken up material that was in the chamber and the barrel extension and mopping. And again, continue spinning and remove that chamber mop. So as we can see the buildup here on the chamber mop that came out of the chamber.

Last thing we wanna do right here is mop up or wipe up any excess carbon or oil that may be on the internal of the upper receiver and blower receiver. So with the gun set up here, we can wipe it down thorough. And then we will reapply lubrication to the bulk carrier group and be ready for reassembly.

So once you’ve got a good feel that you’ve wiped everything down, that it has a clean and neat appearance. Our chambers clean, our boars clean. Now we’re ready for reassembly. So the parts we’re gonna lubricate here are the primary and secondary Sears. So here we have the secondary and the primary is down here at the base of the.

So that’s where we wanna put a single drop of oil will be plenty. And then we’re gonna move that oil around. So we’re gonna take, take a drop, set it here on the secondary, and then we can put it near the body of the hammer and let the oil roll down to the primary sea, our primary, , sea engagement. So we’re gonna cock that.

We’re gonna make sure to just kind of keep thumb, keep your thumb on the hammer, and then that way it doesn’t just fall forward against your. So you’re gonna just press it, let it engage the secondary with the trigger pull to the rear, it should drop forward going back to the primary and just work that back and forth a couple of times to get that oil spread around over those bearing surfaces.

Once you’ve done so, you can now reassemble your bulk carrier group are not reassembled, but put the bulk carrier group back into the upper receiver. Now we’re ready to close up the upper and lower. Once we do this and we’re done, bulk care group is now in the upper receiver. We’re gonna close that down again, we’re dealing with a camlock weapon system, so we’re going to push the take down pin in, and now we’re going to rotate the camlock lever into the farthest up position, and now it’s ready to go.

Okay guys, we appreciate you being here with us for this full cleaning tutorial. Again, we covered the resources that you would need to get a full cleaning, um, the reasons why you cleaned those specific areas to keep the function, functionality of the weapon moving, , and mechanically good. And then the steps to which you would clean the weapon system.

Again, we appreciate you being here. Stay tuned for more tutorials from US Arms.