Your using an aerosol degreaser or carb/brake cleaner to clean your handgun...

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Agent-J

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I know that this stuff will remove all oil and lube and I have a question...

Do you spray down the trigger assemblies with the degreaser/cleaner? If so, how do you re-lube it all without taking it all apart past the recommended field strip (ie. doing an armorers disassemble.) I would think that spraying oil on the trigger assembly would be a bad idea as it would end up being too much.

The trigger area seems pretty complex and it gets kind of dirty and I'm not sure the best way to clean it and be sure it's oiled properly.
 
If you are using brake cleaner or the like to degrease, you are going to need to re-lube the gun as if it had been detail stripped. You will strip grease off of internal sears, pivots, etc., and that needs to be replaced. It also depends upon what handgun you are talking about - the trigger assembly on most revolvers requires opening up and some technical skill to separate the hammer and trigger sears so as to be able to re-grease them. On many autos, you can get at it easily enough to re-lube.

Whenever I buy a used gun, I detail strip it and thoroughly de-grease it. I then oil and grease it freshly and then usually never have another issue with it. I generally find WAY too much accumulated varnish and gunk on the internals from too much oiling by overly ambitious prior-owners who didn't understand lubricants well ("too much" is not always a good thing). But better this than the opposite!
 
Do you spray down the trigger assemblies with the degreaser/cleaner? If so, how do you re-lube it all without taking it all apart past the recommended field strip (ie. doing an armorers disassemble.) I would think that spraying oil on the trigger assembly would be a bad idea as it would end up being too much.
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wilson combat gun grease in the syringe form, i can get it down in the nooks and crannies like the trigger spring etc. otherwise all other lube on all other guns is high temp lithium grease.

oil is not the best choice for lube. it migrates, it splatters, and ends up every where but where you want it. oil burns and smokes, grease stays where you put it, wipes clean,the carbon sticks to the grease so clean up is easy too. and there is no better way that i have found to run a gun for extended periods of time, with high round counts, and in bad conditions.

also people normally use too much lube, and therefore they get over lubed. plus a 1lb tub of grease at napa is $2.50, it won't leak, it won't spill, and is easy to use.
 
CLP isn't that great it came in last on all but one weapon system as compared to Strike Hold at the proving grounds some years back.
 
don't feel bad, if you want i would be glad to give you a huge squirt bottle of it, dosen't cost me anything, i don't use it and the same bottle has been in my workshop for almost 3 years. I also have bottles and bottles of Mil tec too that i have no need for. The only issue is i don't know what the precautions are for shipping it is.

using high temp grease is my opinion, and from my experinces works the best while running a gun hard over a long period of time, in the training enviornment. I don't want you to stop using CLP that is up too you , however i do like to put the word out maybe someone will try it, and see what i mean, most won't but hey if it helps one, i am happy.
 
The regs are that it must go by ground because of the volatile nature so shipping by air is prohibited. I will take all of your Mil-Tec and CLP that you got, just let me know how much is shipping for your inventory!

I need a few extra bottles for my kits and my weekly shooting regimen!
 
i just checked, i have 7 4oz. bottles with the blue plugs, red caps, and applicator head on em, as well the clp bottle is a 1 pt. that is almost full.
 
Some food for thought.

Using such products to degrease a gun will stip most or all of the oil as mentioned already. Grease is a great way to lube the parts but without detail stripping you can't guarantee that you'll be able to lube all the degreased areas. And as we know unprotected steel can rust over time.

So a little idea that occurs to me is a trick I got from a camera repair tech way back when I was puttering around with antique cameras. Too much oil is the death of mechanical shutter timers. But so is NO oil. The key is to get just the right amount to coat the mechanism. His technique was to immerse the timer in a bath of solvent with a few drops of oil added. This cleans the mechanism of grunge and when the solvent dries away leaves a very light and even coating of oil.

Used this way for a typical gun strip I'd degrease using blasts of the brake or carb cleaner along with some compressed air to blow out the grunge. When clean I'd liberally flow on some solvent and oil wash and then set aside to drain and dry overnight. Less time is needed if you use a solvent with higher volitility than my usual mineral spirits. Once dry other than for the very light protective oil film then I'd smear/inject the grease into the areas that will benifit from the extra lubing as noted above.

The mix to use is something like 20:1 solvent to oil for something like our guns. On the camera shutters I used 30:1 or the leaf blades would still be too wet and would stick.

What do you think about this option?
 
Brake, or carb cleaner, followed with CLP. I spray the CLP, then turn the pistol upside down, sideways, and inside out:eek: to let the excess drip out. Done this for 10 years.
 
I have never understood why so many folks feel the need to completely degrease a weapon unless they're going to blue it. All you really need is CLP. Lube it with CLP. Clean it with CLP. Wipe it down with CLP. Just keep it off of the breechface so it doesn't come in contact with your ammo. I have used just CLP since the military first adopted it and it really does everything the maker claims. The only anti rust product I have ever found that protects better than CLP is Eezox but CLP has protected many of my firearms for many years with no rust. BCRider- I would be very careful mixing solvents with anything else unless you are a chemist. Some very nasty compounds can be formed if some of these products are mixed, like caustic and acidic solutions. Your hands and gun finishes can be seriously damaged, don't ask me how I know. The best way to apply a thin coat of oil is with a stenciling brush. Just two drops on the brush is all you need. You can easily control how much and where it goes. I keep a small brush next to my bottle of CLP on the bench just to coat guns and knives with.
 
Drail, I'm with you on that aspect. However in the case of mineral spirits and oil they are both petroleum products that come from the same crude oil.

However mixing something like lacquer thinner and oil with the lacquer thinner being a real soup of synthetic and oil based solvents may be a different story. I've done that mix too when I wanted a solvent that would dry faster and while it worked for what I needed at the time I agree that a test spot inside a frame where any damage can't be seen would be prudent.

An oily brush or rag IS a nice way to apply a protective film but when it's spots that you can't reach other than by flooding in a mixture I think there's room for my option.
 
so what is the best way to clean hard to reach spots then? "high power" aerosol seems to be the ticket. Should I not be using this stuff? I've learned that cleaning a gun is something I can read about for hours and hours (which I have), but when it comes time to clean, I just feel unsure about what I am doing.
 
I have never understood why so many folks feel the need to completely degrease a weapon unless they're going to blue it.
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I use brake cleaner because I rarely clean my guns - it normally takes the brake-clean and a lot of scrubbing to get them clean. On two occasions they had to soak in the parts washer, and on occasion it had to be bead blasted (and since it was stainless, it looked new too!). I had somewhere between three and four thousand rounds through that pistol with just lube and the occasional boresnake. I do much better now and clean them somewhere between 1500 and 2000 rounds.

Anyway, I always detail strip mine when I clean em. I have too, since the inside of my stainless 1911s look parkerized...
 
... but it does displace water!
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1) But it leaves behind a nasty residue that accumulates with each application, and

2) Provides no corrosion protection.

The WORST of both worlds. Blowing it out with compressed air would be equally effective at displacing water and LESS harmful to moving parts.

WD-40 is the main enemy of smoothly functioning guns today, in my opinion. It really gums up the trigger on 1911s, and it plays all kinds of heck with the lockwork inside an S&W.

I bought a nicely desirable S&W 66 snub-nosed .357 a while back for about a $200 discount to current market prices because the action was iffy. After detail stripping the action and blasting out the accumulated WD-40 varnish (you can usually identify it easily by its ambergris kinda color and texture), and greasing the sliding parts and lightly oiling the others, it runs and times perfectly.

This is a good place to here some common sense about gun lubricants by a well-respected pistolsmith:

http://grantcunningham.com/lubricants101.html
 
For filthy, saltwater covered shotguns I spray them with degreaser and then spray them inside and out with Birchwood-Casey Sheath (it has a new name I'm told.) I've been known to do the same to handguns if they're filthy or wet.

"was to immerse the timer in a bath of solvent with a few drops of oil added."

Similarly, Mr. Jewell of Jewell trigger fame recommends cleaning and lubing his precision triggers with Ronson lighter fluid and nothing else.

John
 
As a Duck hunter I have used wd -40 to protect the outside bluing from rust. A quck rub down with old T shirt dampened with WD -40 and it's good to go but as a Lub I agree with the other posters it doesn't work too good.
 
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