How to clean my ar-15 or how do I clean small gun parts or a pistol? Typically, when I tell people how I clean my small gun parts, they react surprisingly. That is because I use an ultrasonic cleaner for my smaller parts. To be honest with you, they’ve been around for a long time. A lot of people use them to clean their small gun parts. But for some reason, they’re still not widely popular. I absolutely love ultrasonic cleaners and that’s what I’m going to demonstrate today.
In this testing, this LANTAG I am using is a nickel boron bulk carrier group that got pretty dirty. We’re going to go ahead and throw this in the cleaner. I’ll show you exactly how it works. Now, the older sonic cleaner that I use is fairly inexpensive. I got it Harbor Freight for like 40 dollars but it does the job. There are other ones that are nicer out there like Hornady has the Lock and Load ultrasonic cleaner that’s really nice. I might look into those in the near future.
How Ultrasonic Cleaner Works on Gun Cleaning
The cleaner model I am using here has standard temperature control that heats up your water. It goes anywhere from 90 seconds up to 480 seconds of runtime. It works fairly well. Now, this particular ultrasonic washer actually comes with a little basket. It’s not really much of a basket but it’s more or less like a platform. Your parts don’t sit on the metal of the ultrasonic cleaner itself. The basket also helps keep your gun parts together, for the convenience of carrying.
Once you have all the parts you want to clean in your basket, all you have to do now is just fill it up with water. Just make sure that you cover all of the parts you want to clean because anything outside of the water will not get cleaned. So I suggest at least a quarter of an inch of water above whatever your tallest part is. After you have that done, what you want to do is add your cleaning solution, whatever solution you decide to go with. Some people use simple green hd+. There is also specific cleaning solution for certain types of cleaning items, which works really well.
You’re pretty much ready to go. Then just go ahead and turn on your ultrasonic machine. It’s like magic process. The ultrasonic cleaner actually starts taking all of the grime and oil off. I mean you can see it coming off of all the parts during the cleaning process. You can see in the water large chunks of carbon that are being pulled from the bolt carrier group now, especially the bolt that gets a lot of buildup. You can see right there the large chunks kind of floating on the top. It really does clean everything. The ultrasonic cleaning creates a vibration that releases everything from the steel itself so it basically just separates all of that garbage off of your gun parts.
Why Use Ultrasonic Cleaner to Clean Gun Parts
Why I chose ultrasonic cleaner is the fact that it can reach in all of those little places, all of those little nooks and crannies and small little cracks to make complete cleaning. Obviously, those are hard to get to when you’re cleaning your firearm with other methods. Ultrasonic cleaning gets in there without having to use any type of harsh chemical strippers, wire brushes or anything like that. The ultrasonic cleaner actually penetrates in there and gets all the grime out. Therefore, it’s a really easy way to do it. You can just walk away while the cleaning process is happening and then come back when it’s over.
Another great thing about ultrasonic cleaning is being able to just set that time and then do other things while your smaller parts are cleaning. It does really save you quite a bit of time. If the really heavy gunked parts didn’t come out completely clean, you might need a second run. You can run it in for another 480 seconds and it’ll be spotless.
Great ideas.
Gene