Five things you don't want to do to your airgun Over-cleaning
For reasons I cannot fathom, new shooters think they need to clean their airguns even more than firearms are cleaned. I know people who never clean their .22 rimfires until they start to malfunction, yet these same people don't hesitate to take a bore brush to the barrel of their favorite air rifle every chance they get. It isn't necessary to clean an airgun barrel that often, and it actually exposes it to possible damage from the cleaning process gone wrong.
Why do we clean a gun?
Historically, guns used what we now call black powder, whose residue both attracts moisture and then turns it into sulphuric acid. It begins to do this in less than 24 hours following shooting, so cleaning was/is essential if the bore was to be preserved. Later, when smokeless powders were developed, the early primers that ignited them contained compounds that were just as corrosive to the bore as black powder residue. A great many .22 rimfire rifles have lost all their rifling from the combined activities of this primer-based corrosion, coupled with over-zealous cleaning.
More recently, shooters have discovered that the jacketed bullets of centerfire cartridges will quickly foul barrels with metal deposits. While this doesn't corrode the metal, it does fill the rifling grooves with jacket metal until all hope of accuracy is lost. So, the metal fouling has to be removed with a combination of chemical and mechanical action.
The modern .22 rimfire, in sharp contrast, uses clean-burning powder, clean priming and shoots clean lead bullets at low velocities. Nothing in its makeup or operation requires frequent cleaning. Those who shoot .22s can get away with not cleaning their guns for many hundreds and even thousands of rounds. Eventually, there will be a buildup of powder fouling even in these clean guns, but the contrast with centerfire guns is vivid.
Finally, there are the airguns. They neither burn powder nor use primers, so there's no residue. They shoot at low velocities (compared to many firearms) and use clean lead pellets, so there's little metal fouling. Only with some of the more powerful airguns do the velocities get fast enough to scrape off some lead from the pellets. And some barrels seem more prone to scrape off lead than others. That, alone, is the sole cause for buildup in an airgun.
In contrast to a firearm, an airgun can be fired tens of thousands of times between cleanings...and some lower-velocity airguns may never need cleaning at all. Those with brass or bronze barrels are entirely impervious to cleaning requirements.
The time to clean your airgun is when the accuracy falls off, not before. Do not clean an airgun barrel on a regular schedule - they simply don't need it.
Disassembly without a plan
I've done this and so have many of you. The gun isn't working right, so we take it apart to find out why. Then, we haven't got a clue how to get it back together. That results in a basket case of parts that somebody else will be able to buy for a song. Don't create bargains for others! Before you take an airgun apart, give some thought to what it takes to put it together again.
The way to do this is to first research the gun on the internet, to see if there are any disassembly or assembly problems. If there are known issues with a gun, there should be plenty of information on the internet.
Another thing to look for is if any special tools or equipment are needed. With spring guns, you usually need a mainspring compressor to safely disassemble and assemble the gun. And if you're disassembling a BB gun like a
Daisy Red Ryder, you need to make a special fixture to hold the gun while the mainspring is compressed and parts are removed. Unless you have three man Then, there are guns that are assembled during manufacture in ways that make them almost impossible to repair. One good example of this is the barrel of a
Benjamin 392, which is soldered onto the pump tube at the factory. If the solder joint is ever broken, it's next to impossible to repair. That's because the joint is very long and is difficult to keep an even heat on the entire joint at the same time
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