You have to clean it BEFORE you shoot it. The guns have tons of grease in the barrels from the factory to keep them from rusting.
You can use HOPPES cleaning solvent from Wal-Mart but you CAN'T use a metal cleaning rod. You must use a nylon cleaning rod (or piece or weed wacker line with a loop melted in the end) such as the JL Crown Saver from Mac1 Airguns.
HOPPES is not the best because it's hard on airgun seals but it will get your gun nice and clean. I don't recall what the best solvent for airguns is...but there is one.
JL Crown Saver
After the initial cleaning you should NEVER have to clean your airgun again.
Here is what comes out of a new gun: Cleaning a Brand New Airgun (video clip)
"After the initial cleaning you should NEVER have to clean your airgun again. "
Why do you make these categorical statements without verifying them first? You may choose not to clean your air gun barrels, but you should at least be aware that many experienced shots, including benchrest competitors, have a strict barrel cleaning regimen. Even though I am not a competitive shooter, I keep a log of shooting sessions, and I have noticed a small, but statistically significant, loss of precision unless I clean the barrel after a certain number of shots. The number of shots varies by airgun model.
Before you post, you could have at least done a little search. I don't know whether the old forum, with its wealth of information, can be accessed any more, but if possible please read Harry's (Yrrah) posts on this topic. In fact one can read Harry's posts on any topic with great profit.
I understand you make a lot of airgun videos, and if you want to be taken seriously, you should do your research BEFORE (I capitalize only because you seem to prefer it) you post something for public consumption.
"Should I clean the barrel of my Airforce .25 Condor and if so how often, what do I use and how often should I clean it?"
It is a very individual preference of your airgun ( power+ barrel+ pellet combination). If you are looking for the ultimate precision then you should clean it well at the beginning-- please use something mild that won't hurt your seals-- and then keep shooting groups-- say 5 shots each-- and note the group size, which should soon settle to an average. If you notice the group sizes opening up after N groups( by then you'd know what's a flier) then clean the barrel and see if it goes back to the average group size. If it does, you have just got evidence that you need to clean your barrel after 5N shots! The actual group size difference may be very small and you might consider cleaning not worth the effort.
"After the initial cleaning you should NEVER have to clean your airgun again. "
I stand by my statement. You "should" never have to clean your air gun again.
If you do have to, because your airgun has "a problem" then that's unfortunate about your airgun.
But you SHOULD never have to clean your airgun.
I don't really care enough to do a bunch of research before I make a simple post. No one said I was an expert. Indeed my videos are different because I'm a normal guy. Not some industry fan boy.
I appreciate your advice. I do want my channel to succeed. I don't necessarily need to be taken seriously. If my videos don't fit the mold... I'm not getting paid. What are they going to do? Fire me?
Unlike most other Youtube Airgunners....I can say and do whatever I want, and I won't loose my job. It's a good place to be.
Also...excellent info on the 5N groups and all that (algebra right?)..when you SHOULD clean your airgun barrel. That's something I was wondering about also. So I will apply what I learned from your post. Thank you!
I clean the used motor oil, " rust preventive" out of it when I first get it. Then after every shooting session. I let my air rifles go for as much as 75 shots once and chrono tested them to see what happened. They lost as much as 100FPS as measured. But this depends greatly on the pellet, what it's coated with if anything, and how much Antimony is in the lead. This will govern to a large extent how quickly the barrel fouls. It looks like the same black gunk you clean out of powder burner barrels to me. Wait too long to clean the bore, and that black will be tinged with ruddy brown from rust starting to set in again. I use Remington Rem-Oil, which contains a Teflon lube, but NO SOLVENTS. I accentuated those words, since so many in various forums and Facebook groups insist I'm ruining my air rifles with solvents. Can't some danged people friggin' READ!? There are no solvents in Rem-Oil. It's a lubricant, not Hoppe's nitro solvent! Anyway, I use it on patches and brushes to get the bore clean, then dry patch it out very well. The first few shots are actually a couple FPS higher through the chrono as a result. I think it's the residue from the Teflon lube in it? At any rate, the air rifles seem to like it and being clean. Just like my vintage powder burners.
"After the initial cleaning you should NEVER have to clean your airgun again. "
I stand by my statement. You "should" never have to clean your air gun again.
If you do have to, because your airgun has "a problem" then that's unfortunate about your airgun.
But you SHOULD never have to clean your airgun.
I don't really care enough to do a bunch of research before I make a simple post. No one said I was an expert. Indeed my videos are different because I'm a normal guy. Not some industry fan boy.
I appreciate your advice. I do want my channel to succeed. I don't necessarily need to be taken seriously. If my videos don't fit the mold... I'm not getting paid. What are they going to do? Fire me?
Unlike most other Youtube Airgunners....I can say and do whatever I want, and I won't loose my job. It's a good place to be.
Also...excellent info on the 5N groups and all that (algebra right?)..when you SHOULD clean your airgun barrel. That's something I was wondering about also. So I will apply what I learned from your post. Thank you!
My apologies. I didn't mean to offend you and I now see I was needlessly rude in my response. I think it's great that you are not an industry insider-- we could do with less of sleek advertisement masquerading as unbiased reviews. However I would argue that since your channel is a labour of love and not influenced by sponsorship, you should be more rigorous in your presentation and be of greater service to airgunners looking for an honest, but informed, review. May be you can develop a protocol for testing all your airguns; there are lots of people on this forum who will gladly give you ideas. I will recommend Ribbonstone's posts as a model for careful testing procedures. He is, as far as I can tell, very much a backyard airgunner like most of us, but he knows his airguns and how to study their performance.
Finally, I am not claiming I am an expert, nor am I remotely related to any airgun business. One doesn't need to be an expert to want to learn, right? And with airguns, much like any other precision tools, the more carefully one studies the patterns of performance, the more data one collects, the better our conclusions are. From my experience of shooting airguns, pcps definitely need cleaning their barrels periodically to maintain their peak performance. Obviously the performance gain may not be enough to warrant that trouble, but that's an individual choice.
"No one said I was an expert." Allow me correct that misstatement, AGC.
I don't watch your videos since watching a couple of your early ones and realizing YouTube can be parlayed for profit; even if the airgun 'review' shows nothing more than unboxing a gun and reading manufacturers specs. I laughed out loud at your forum statement, "I am an airgun expert."
Whew! I have definitely found in my experience that if accuracy falls off, cleaning the bore is one of the first things to do to try and correct the issue. It's only common sense to do so (along with checking screws, etc.) although perhaps common sense is not so common anymore....
Pcps aren't the only guns to benefit from cleaning-I owned a Mendoza springer which shot very well even though it dieseled heavily for about 100 shots; after which the carbon from the dieseling destroyed the accuracy. After a few patches all was well again. It did take nearly forever for the factory lubes to burn off and the gun settled down, but it still liked a cleaning now and then.
Needing to clean the bore is most definitely not a sign there is something wrong with the gun. Lead is soft and over time it will strip off and build up in the rifling. Granted there are multiple factors that contribute to how quickly this occurs...a tight choke, surface fretting from the rifling process, and high velocities will all accelerate this accumulation.
There is no one size fits all way to predict when cleaning is necessary. That’s why the usual recommendation is to do it when you notice accuracy has changed.
Unless it used to do 1/8” to 1/4” groups—which is a rhetorical question—then I ‘d say leave it alone.
"No one said I was an expert." Allow me correct that misstatement, AGC.
I don't watch your videos since watching a couple of your early ones and realizing YouTube can be parlayed for profit; even if the airgun 'review' shows nothing more than unboxing a gun and reading manufacturers specs. I laughed out loud at your forum statement, "I am an airgun expert."
Ditto on all of that!
"No one said I was an expert." Allow me correct that misstatement, AGC.
I don't watch your videos since watching a couple of your early ones and realizing YouTube can be parlayed for profit; even if the airgun 'review' shows nothing more than unboxing a gun and reading manufacturers specs. I laughed out loud at your forum statement, "I am an airgun expert."
Don't be hatin' . if you don't watch my videos because of what you saw 6 months ago...your missing out. The AGC is a whole different animal now. and it will keep evolving.
My first videos were amateur hour. But now I'm sitting on a gun that won't be released till Oct 2019. The only one in the U.S. (and not because I bought it from Krale this time.)
You have no idea what's in store on Youtube's Airgun Channel. It's so off the hook, you wouldn't believe me if I told you. Its gonna blow your freakin mind!
Pistolero: You should Subscribe...I'm just getting warmed up.
Youtube's Airgun Channel is Non-Profit!
Many people were confused when I started Airgun Channel because they are not used to honest reviews and Youtubers who can't be bought. I guess some of that confusion remains. I finance Youtube's Airgun Channel by busting my ass in the hot sun. My channel has not been "parlayed for profit"..although 90% of the Gun Channels on Youtube are that way.
I always do an initial clean of a gun barrel. J-B paste followed up with Hoopes liquid cleaner. After that, unless grouping changes for no reason, I'll leave it alone.
If we're talking about Hoppes No. 9 Bore Solvent and Cleaner some caution is definitely in order in regard to air guns.
If the current formulation is the same as it was in the Hoppes cleaning kit I bought from Amazon about a year ago, it can and will distort and/or dissolve 'rubber-resilient' flexible seals of all descriptions, both natural and synthetic. In springers that tends to be things like piston and breech seals, while PCP's also have breech and other seals that are used in their construction.
I've read your posts before and I know you don't make them based on a whim. Have they perhaps changed the chemical formula for the stuff? Maybe so. The smell of the stuff I have here is so bad there's no mistaking it for something else. Said another way, if smell alone was an indicator, the Hoppes product I have gives good indication that it will not only remove powder and lead residue from a gun's bore, but that it would probably also double as a heavy-duty paint and varnish remover! One of my tuning customer's brother used it on his RWS/Diana springer about 7 or 8 years ago, and the synthetic piston seal swelled up so much its tightness caused the pellets to barely be able to 'crawl' out of the end of the barrel. A new piston seal took care of it.
Point acquiesced: Maybe you somehow found a way to safely use it to clean a barrel so there's no chance of it contacting and thus damaging any seals. If so, please pardon my jumping to any wrong conclusions.
Here's the 'old' Hoppes product I'm referring to. I'm not sure why the page refers to it as being"safe", unless that's in regard to not doing any harm to firearms. The label on the bottle I have here says, "Danger--Harmful or Fatal if swallowed. Contains Kerosene. Flammable":
http://www.hoppes.com/traditional/no-9-solvent
Thanks.
Interesting range of replies here.
The very first time I cleaned an airgun bore it was because it had never been done and it just "had" to be dirty. I bought a two piece steel Kleen Bore rod and kit and used Beeman bore cleaner. Cleaning from the breech, I was as careful as could be with the rod, even back then I knew of the hazards the rod was to the barrel. And I was horrified at the gunk that came out of the barrel. Cleaner, brush, patch, rinse, repeat until it came out clean.
There was copious amounts of black goo and slivers of lead coming out of that bore for a while and I was shocked. From then on I decided to clean my R1's bore about every 500 shots fired or so. Prior to that I had fired at least four tins of 500 each. Back then I shot a lot, every day after work and usually at least a couple of hours each on Saturday and Sunday.
If you shoot a lot take a look at the fingers you load your pellets with after 50+ shots. That gray goo coats the inside of your bore too. It's my view that it's better to keep up with removing that goo and lead a little at a time vs waiting until it negatively impacts accuracy and takes a Herculean effort and and hour to remove.
My .02, YMMV.
I always do an initial clean of a gun barrel. J-B paste followed up with Hoopes liquid cleaner. After that, unless grouping changes for no reason, I'll leave it alone.
If we're talking about Hoppes No. 9 Bore Solvent and Cleaner some caution is definitely in order in regard to air guns.
If the current formulation is the same as it was in the Hoppes cleaning kit I bought from Amazon about a year ago, it can and will distort and/or dissolve 'rubber-resilient' flexible seals of all descriptions, both natural and synthetic. In springers that tends to be things like piston and breech seals, while PCP's also have breech and other seals that are used in their construction.
I've read your posts before and I know you don't make them based on a whim. Have they perhaps changed the chemical formula for the stuff? Maybe so. The smell of the stuff I have here is so bad there's no mistaking it for something else. Said another way, if smell alone was an indicator, the Hoppes product I have gives good indication that it will not only remove powder and lead residue from a gun's bore, but that it would probably also double as a heavy-duty paint and varnish remover! One of my tuning customer's brother used it on his RWS/Diana springer about 7 or 8 years ago, and the synthetic piston seal swelled up so much its tightness caused the pellets to barely be able to 'crawl' out of the end of the barrel. A new piston seal took care of it.
Point acquiesced: Maybe you somehow found a way to safely use it to clean a barrel so there's no chance of it contacting and thus damaging any seals. If so, please pardon my jumping to any wrong conclusions.
Here's the 'old' Hoppes product I'm referring to. I'm not sure why the page refers to it as being"safe", unless that's in regard to not doing any harm to firearms. The label on the bottle I have here says, "Danger--Harmful or Fatal if swallowed. Contains Kerosene. Flammable":
http://www.hoppes.com/traditional/no-9-solvent
Thanks.
Good to know. Personally I've not had any issues that I am aware of. When I just checked to make sure I was using Hoppes 9 I noticed I'd already bought a replacement bottle because my original was almost gone. This site has always been a great source for a wealth of information and advice. I'm always open to suggestions so for a safe liquid to use on bore patches what is a better product?
If we're talking about Hoppes No. 9 Bore Solvent and Cleaner some caution is definitely in order in regard to air guns...
If the current formulation is the same as it was in the Hoppes cleaning kit I bought from Amazon about a year ago, it can and will distort and/or dissolve 'rubber-resilient' flexible seals of all descriptions, both natural and synthetic. In springers that tends to be things like piston and breech seals, while PCP's also have breech and other seals that are used in their construction.
Here's the 'old' Hoppes product I'm referring to:
http://www.hoppes.com/traditional/no-9-solvent
Thanks.
Good to know. Personally I've not had any issues that I am aware of. When I just checked to make sure I was using Hoppes 9 I noticed I'd already bought a replacement bottle because my original was almost gone. This site has always been a great source for a wealth of information and advice. I'm always open to suggestions so for a safe liquid to use on bore patches what is a better product?
I'm probably going to sound like I'm contradicting myself a bit here, but that's really not the case.
I've found Birchwood Casey Barricade (aka BC Sheath aka Beeman MP5) to be a pretty good bore cleaning solvent, even for heavy deposits, but one that's never cost me a damaged seal. However, it also has a noticeable chemical scent to it, making me wonder what it might do if left in contact with a seal for any length of time. The scent is definitely not as acrid as Hoppes No.9, leading me to believe it should also be more gentle. In any case, how do I get around the possibility that any scent at all might be the indicator of something destructive to seals? Simple, I never let ANY of it get into the transfer port (which could allow it to contact the piston seal in a springer), or let any remain in contact with a breech seal for longer than a second.
I apply a scant few drops or so to my cleaning patch (or cotton swab in the case of a .177 caliber bore because the fit just happens to be perfect), and immediately insert the patch or swab straight down into the bore. If any of it at all gets on the breech seal during that step, I wipe the breech seal extremely well right away just in case longer contact could cause a problem.
The white breech seals on HW guns used to be made of some kind of synthetic 'nylon' material--that being the term that some posts used to use--so it should, in theory, be a little more tolerant of mild solvents for a short time than say, natural rubber and the like. However, the HW replacement breech seals being sent these days are black, so I don't know what material they're made of, or how chemical resistant they might be.
The black OEM O-ring breech seals on Diana air rifles are Buna-N (Nitrile?) if I'm not mistaken, at least that's what I buy when I buy replacements and they seem to be the same seal. The same size O-rings are available in Viton, but I don't use them because I found the material to be too-stiff for my liking.
Bottom line: I always keep the cleaning liquid I use away from the seals on a springer (that's all I shoot) as much as possible, and even then in contact with a breech seal for as short a time as possible should I make a mistake. There's no reason to ever let the liquid touch a piston seal down inside the compression chamber where it can't be instantly cleaned off--the right cleaning methods allow you to avoid that altogether.
Footnote: I've read good things about Ballistol as a multi-purpose gun cleaner (including for use in the bore), and it says "Skin Safe" and "No Carcinogens" right on the label. That leads me to think it's not as 'destructive' a solvent on other things besides skin, although perhaps I'm reading too much into the statement. In any case, the site page says it safely dissolves all kinds of problematic residue inside a bore. I wonder if it might be one of the better choices from what's currently on the market. Since I've never tried it, others will have to weigh-in there. Some people don't like the smell, but the one time I had a test sample it smelled like licorice to me, which I find to be a pleasant scent.
Footnote: I've read good things about Ballistol as a multi-purpose gun cleaner (including for use in the bore), and it says "Skin Safe" and "No Carcinogens" right on the label. The site page says it safely dissolves all kinds of problematic residue inside a bore. I wonder if it might be one of the better choices from what's currently on the market. Since I've never tried it, others will have to weigh-in there. Some people don't like the smell, but the one time I had a test sample it smelled like licorice to me, which I find to be a pleasant scent.
I can attest to the usefulness of Ballistol. Never used anything else to clean barrels for the last ten years and other than the interesting smell-- seems I don't like liquorice-- it has worked fine. Does get all the black stuff out of the barrel without a problem, and I have used on springers without issues as well. Of course made very sure none of it was left over to ooze back into the transfer port.
I always clean a new to me barrel new or used. Clean with good old wd-40 followed by a slight Cote of f-10 gun oil. All cleaning done with mac-1 crown saver. Run crown saver and dry patch every tin of pellets. Dirty caked up grooves a no no for accuracy as some barrels have very shallow lands. Land and grooves work in harmony to provide stability. Not happening with a dirty bbl.
