Cleaning an air rife

welsummer

How often does an air rifle have to be cleaned.

daveob007

not very often as there is no powder residue to worry about,i would sugest cleaning the bore with lead removal solvent after every 1000 pellets fired..otherwise just oil as per the manual your gun came with.
do not over oil it either or you will get smoke when firing which will damage the seals and bore.

Cass

I have heard some, with air rifles, saying they either never clean theirs because of pellet choice or rarely clean. Only if there is an opening up of the groups.

One lad i spoke to says he prefers soft pellets. It doesn't effect the bore, and cleaning is not needed as frequently.

I personally have no idea because i don't own an air rifle, but it seems to make sense. He also explained that some pellets come "waxed/coated" (like some .22 rounds) and each time you fire a pellet it cleans any residue from the previous one. Although he has since moved away from coated pellets.

Sparks

For hunting airguns, no idea.

For the target kind, I run two shoot-through VFG cleaning pellets through mine after every training session if I was live-firing (which would be anything from 1 to 100 pellets, but it's averaging between 40 and 80 these days). Every 4-6 weeks, I use a pull-through on it with one or two of the abrasive VFG pellets coated in "the blue gunk" (it's the bore cleaning paste VFG sell), then 4-6 more abrasive pellets and then as many of the non-abrasive pellets as needed until they come out clean. If they're not coming out clean after ten, I'd start over with the paste, but I haven't had to do that in quite a while.

The Germans did a bit of research into cleaning and target airguns and found that you're adding anything up to 2mm to your group size if you don't clean your barrel regularly, in a sport where a normal off-the-bench group size (for a 4.5mm pellet) would be under 5mm. So, we clean

von dreyse

Sparks wrote: »

For hunting airguns, no idea.

For the target kind, I run two shoot-through VFG cleaning pellets through mine after every training session if I was live-firing (which would be anything from 1 to 100 pellets, but it's averaging between 40 and 80 these days). Every 4-6 weeks, I use a pull-through on it with one or two of the abrasive VFG pellets coated in "the blue gunk" (it's the bore cleaning paste VFG sell), then 4-6 more abrasive pellets and then as many of the non-abrasive pellets as needed until they come out clean. If they're not coming out clean after ten, I'd start over with the paste, but I haven't had to do that in quite a while.

Sparks

Could you post up details of who ever you get the VFG stuff from.
I've tried different adds in "airgunner" and "airgun world" some of them don't ship to Ireland and the rest of them seemed surprised that I would want to clean an air rifle.

thanks.

Sparks

I've bought some from Geoff out in WTSC, and I've bought some from Intershoot (who posts on here as intershoot). Never had even a hint of a problem from either of them, and Intershoot will stick them in the post for you. There are probably others in Ireland who sell the stuff, but I've never used anyone else for much.

von dreyse

Thanks for that Sparks,
The WTSC link was not opening for me but Intershoot seems as good a set up as any and the brother goes through Omagh twice a week as well !