Video: Cleaning Your MSR

Transcript for MSR Cleaning

On screen: Cleaning Your Modern Sporting Rifle

Always follow the manufacturer's instructions for cleaning your firearm provided in your instruction manual. This content is a general guideline for this style of firearm.

Speaker fires two shots with an MSR rifle.

Now, one question I always get asked is, how often should I clean my rifle? It's a great question, but unfortunately, the answer has a ton of different variables, such as the weather in your area, the humidity, the dust, whether you're shooting in the rain or the snow. Also, depends on how often you're shooting and how many rounds you're putting through it.

At the end of the day, you always want to follow the manufacturer's recommendations, but on an AR-15, usually, I like to clean it every time I bring it back home, because if I take this out and shoot it, there's a good chance I'm going to put quite a few rounds through it that day.

Before we get started, we're going to go ahead and clear our firearm. We're going to visually and physically inspect it, as well as dropping the mag and putting our ammunition and magazine in a safe location away from our work area.

Speaker places the rifle on a desk for cleaning.

To begin, we will remove the rear takedown pin, then the front. This will separate our upper from our lower.

Now, we can pull the charging handle and the bolt carrier from the rear of the upper.

Next, you'll see the firing pin retainer on the side of the bolt carrier. Pull this out, and the firing pin can then be pulled out. Now, we're going to turn the bolt cam to the side, which will allow it to be removed, thus allowing the bolt to be removed from the carrier.

Now, we're going to begin by spraying the bolt carrier, bolt firing pin, bolt cam, firing pin retainer, and charging handle with high-performance gun cleaner. We're going to let these sit for a few minutes to help break down the build-up.

Now, using a combination of utility brushes, picks, and patches, we're going to get all these pieces cleaned up and the residue removed.

Now, we can move to our barrel. We're going to use a rod with a bronze brush soaked in some black high-performance copper cleaner. Let's run this through a few times from the breech end. This will break up any build-up we may have.

Now, we're going to use the same cleaner on some patches, running a wet one through first, and then a dry patch through. We're going to repeat this process until we get a clean patch back.

Once it is clean, we're going to put some high-performance gun oil on a patch and send it through. Next, we'll use the same gun oil to clean all the remaining parts and pieces, giving everything a nice coat of lubrication.

Once we have it all wiped down, we can go ahead and put our bolt carrier back together.

We will then add some performance gun grease to the high-friction areas of the rifle. Our last step before reassembly is using the lubricating cloth to wipe down and protect all the surfaces. Now, we can reverse the disassembly steps and put it all back together.

Alright, now that we have the Savage MSR-15 all cleaned up and put back together, we're going to go ahead and do a quick functions test to make sure everything operates as it should. As always, make sure you're pointing this in a safe direction when you do this.

Speaker demonstrates doing a functions test on the rifle.

Trigger pull works.

We're going to check the reset.

Great, that works.

Now we're going to check the safety.

Operates exactly as it should.

Alright guys, now it's time to go ahead and put this in a safe location per the manufacturer's recommendations.