To Clean

Or not to clean.

You hear about people running their guns, uncleaned for a few thousand rounds.  You may even do it yourself.  Cleaning is no fun, modern guns work just fine, generally, with caked on carbon.  Most importantly with modern ammunition.  No caked on black powder fouling things up.  And no corrosive primers in the past 65 years or so.  I mean look at My Buddy The Gun Enthusiast Ruger Mk III!  It worked great for lots and olts

And revolver are even simpler than semi-autos.  Look at Jerry Miculek's guns.  I wonder what the round count is between cleaning for him.

And then there is this.  It's a 629, so the round count isn't really that high.  Even if MBtGE had that gun for 20 years.  Twenty 50 round boxes of .44?  I doubt he did that.  And sure he cleans it, but not under the side plate.  Gunk in the works under the side plate seems to be what hung it up.

What about Nam?!  Hush now.  No one is using 1965 army surplus ammo in the jungle.  Folks are taking their ARs up through really phenomenally high round counts without a hitch using more decent ammo.  Without a hitch.  Except for the times there are hitches at round number 289.

How do you know?  How do you determine when to detail strip and really get in there and clean that gatt?  MBtGE .44 could have malfed on round 1 after a normal cleaning.  The part that was dirty wasn't what you'd normally clean.

So you don't need to clean except when you do and there is no way to tell when that really is so better safe than sorry and detail strip and clean after every 50 except that is way too much cleaning?  Yeah, I can't follow it either.  Jerry know when to let it go another few hundred, but I have no idea what criteria he uses.