whatnickname
Member
A bit of a warm fall day in Oklahoma today and, while I should have stayed home and done my “honey-dos”, I opted to head out to the gun club, as Sunday afternoons are usually pretty quiet out there. Had the Bullseye Pistol range all to myself so I opted to bench a couple of 22 pistols I’ve done some work on...a Ruger MKII 6&7/8” Target Model and a Browning Buckmark 5” stainless steel bull barrel and stainless slide. If memory serves the Browning was marketed as the Camper Model. The Ruger ran like a sewing machine. Just finished installing a Volquartsen hammer, trigger & sear. Both pistols shot CCI Standard Velocity ammo well under an inch at 25 yards. While the upgrade to the Ruger puts it several notches above the Browning IMO, the Browning is reliable and has a decent trigger. 250 rounds later and I’ve had an enjoyable afternoon. The down side, if there’s a down side at all, is that 22 ammo in blow-back actions is just plain dirty. I’m sure that both pistols would have run perfectly for several hundred more rounds but there’s a part of me that doesn’t like leaving all that crud and grime in a pistol to accumulate so I cleaned them as I always do at the end of a shooting session. As I was winding up I started to wonder what, if any, recommended cleaning intervals there are for 22 pistols? I’ve seen a few that were outright neglected to the point that the slides would barely cycle...pretty sure those were long overdue for a good scrubbing. Had a friend that was adamant that 22 pistols never require cleaning. Years and thousands of rounds later he ended up with a bulged barrel on a Smith & Wesson K22. May have gotten a squib load but he swore that was not the case. That kind of neglect had to be a contributing factor. So my questions are 1) How often do you clean your 22 pistols and why? 2) Can you clean one to death?