Advice for Taking Your Gun Apart

by Massad Ayoob

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When you buy a firearm, it generally comes with disassembly instructions. If you’re gonna shoot it, ya gotta clean it…and when it gets dirty enough, ya gotta take it apart to get it cleaned right.

Actually, taking it apart is the easy part. As so many of our experienced readers know, the challenge comes when you try to put the damn things back together.

Hint…leftover parts are NOT a good sign, and were NOT usually extraneous to the design…

As a kid, I was proud of my ability to disassemble, clean, and most importantly, reassemble the family firearms. And I remember my frustration at age twelve when I ran into the first gun I couldn’t properly do that with, the Ruger .22 caliber semiautomatic pistol. (I was later relieved to learn that grownups went nuts getting it apart and back together, too. There are actually tools to help you do this. Google “Brownell’s.”)

Today I am old and lazy, and probably go too far between cleaning guns – well, at least the play guns as opposed to the work guns. Some of my match guns don’t get cleaned until I realize that lower life forms are beginning to evolve in the mechanisms. I knew I was getting sloppy when a friend asked me, “Mas, what do you use to clean guns?” I heard myself answer, “Armorers.”

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November 9, 2009

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