Colt A2 Field Strip and Detail Clean

welcome back everybody this is Eric here with I write veteran 888 today we're going to be doing a field strip and cleaning on an AR-15 and this is a video concept that we've actually gotten a lot of requests from people to do and we've discussed this concept a little bit in the past but we're going to go into a fair amount of detail today and talk about a lot of the things you want to check out to keep your AR-15 clean and lubricated we're also going to be going over some specialized tools that you probably want to have access to that are very helpful in this process and this isn't just any AR this is uh my old school Colts Porter so this is a pre-band Sporter really cool gun this one's an A2 with a 20 inch barrel you know the old school Round hand guards Delta Rings this is pretty OG As It Gets In terms of ARs and you know the AR 15 is one of America's most popular rifles and for a reason they're accurate they're Dependable they're very well made and with the prices on a lot of entry-level guns coming down so much you can get a lot of bang for the buck and a lot of good quality and you don't have to spend a ton of money so it really does put the AR into the type of Paradigm where you can really get a lot of quality for the money you can you can buy higher end AR and have just that much better of an AR or you can buy an entry level model and it's still going to run just fine to protect yourself and defend your life defend your Liberty and defend your country ultimately and uh AR does not stand for what you think it does okay I would say ArmaLite rifle of the 15th variety right we want to we want to call it that or we can just say that AR means America's rifle I like that better AR is America's rifle so we are going to be cleaning on this guy today and we're going to go over some things before we get started I would like to thank our friends at Otis technology for supporting today's video any of you guys are deployed in the last 20 years and all these crazy Wars that we've been in you know Otis because you've been issued Otis cleaning kits like this uh pull through Universal cleaning kit right here I know some of you know are familiar with the site right here but they've got a huge line of gun cleaning accessories many of which we are actually going to use in today's video as well as solvents and oils all sorts of kits and things like that so anything you're looking for in the gun cleaning World check out Otis Technologies also Shooter's Choice which we're going to be using a lot of their stuff in today's video as well so a big thanks to Otis Technologies for supporting our videos and helping me bring this content out to the masses all right so we're going to get crack in here oh and also make sure you use the code iv8888 you can save yourself 15 off which is always awesome so we're going to get Kraken and we're going to pull this rifle apart and uh this is going to be a field strip we're not going to break it down to the smallest component but we are going to go through pretty much what you would want to consider when it comes to just everyday basic maintenance to keep your gun running and we're going to go over some cleaning techniques and some specialized tools all right so we've got our AR-15 this one is an A2 you know an A2 because of the long rifle length stock the full length 20 inch barrel this particular one has the round kind of car hand guards Delta ring this is a pretty Bare Bones uh rifle by today's standards but don't be mistaken velocity is King and it is nice to have the extra velocity and they are quite accurate and this is my old old school Colt so we're keeping our OG of course your magazine release is located right here we're going to drop the magazine we had that in there just for show of course but um of course an empty magazine we're going to set that to the side we don't really need to worry about that the only thing I would mention on maintenance with your magazines is over time especially if you're shooting suppressed a lot this follower will begin to get a lot of Fallout on it now this particular one's quite clean but you know you would obviously take your uh your rags and things like that let's just pretend it's dirty you know we'll just take and just clean that follower off and you can also um grab yourself something like a Q-tip just going to quickly mention this before we even clear this gun just while we've got the magazine in our hand you can take the Q-tip and compress this follower and just do this clean up under there and get any amount of dirt and carbon or any kind of blowback I mean look there's a little bit on our Q-tip but this mag is pretty clean but that's about the only thing you want to worry about with the mags and the only other thing I would mention on magazines too if you got the old school military magazines with the uh the really old followers that are anti-tilt followers you might want to upgrade your magazines to the anti-tilt followers that's just me though of course this one has an anti-tilt follower in it that's an okay Industries old school mag the anti-tilt follower we're going to pull the charging handle to the rear and we're going to visually inspect the chamber okay we see that it's empty of course our dust cover pops open this divot on the dust cover has a little detent see that and that locks into the upper receiver section and that keeps the dust cover closed of course you can see this concave uh you know cut that's in the bolt all that does is it provide the clearance for the dust cover and once you pull the bolt to the rear it actuates against it and pushes the dust cover open all right that way when you're traveling about you're keeping all the dust and bull crap out of your action pretty simple I don't think that requires a whole lot of explanation the charging handle has a detent on the rear that you have to depress to get it to free from the upper you should know that but just you know pushing that point home we're going to pull to the rear and we're going to look all right she's empty there's nothing in the chamber the gun's clear so now what I like to do at this point for cleaning my AR uh I pretty much I'm going to go ahead and always just separate the upper from the lower now this particular gun is our pre-band Colt so it has this Chicago screw up front that unfortunately you have to take a pair of screwdrivers to loosen but typically on the AR it uses push pins so I'm just going to demonstrate this rear pin the takedown pin is a push pin that is actually retained by a plunger in a spring so almost every single AR-15 you're going to run into is going to have this type of a configuration so this is an old school cult that has the Chicago screw but that's not typical but I am going to go ahead and just take the liberty of loosening up this Chicago screw okay um this is a step that you can more or less kind of skip but if some of y'all have been around long enough since the ancient days like we have Chad and I uh you you'll you'll know that uh the old pre-bands this was one feature that they made them put on there was having a a front takedown pin that was a little bit harder to just take off easily and if you notice on the Colt lower there's actually no Machining done on the lower to even accept the takedown pin that is self-retained this is normally where that section would go in here right and it would be retained but of course you can see this being a pre-band cult or a post Band Cult rather does not have that feature we're also going to see some other kind of post band features on this gun as well that we'll point out as we go so we're going to separate upper and the lower we're not going to worry about the lower just yet but we are going to go ahead and take the sling off guys I think that goes without saying just take the sling off all right it just it just loops on there I don't think you'll need to see me do this but we're going to just pull the sling off and that way we can go ahead and just set the lower off to the side out of the way somewhere and we're going to concentrate for now on the upper this is our Chicago screw we'll go ahead and just put this back in here like this and set it to the side again this is not something that you're going to experience with all of your newer ARS but you know for those of you that don't know or haven't ever seen that that's an interesting little historical reference for the older cults all right so the thing about AR uppers that I want to kind of talk about you know just briefly if we will is that there is a lot of different handguard options now for ARS but but back in the day you know things were pretty cut and dry you know you had cars when I deployed to Iraq in 05 my gun was an A4 which is a more upgraded version of the A2 and the major difference is that on the A4 style upper you're going to have a pick rail upper so a flat top upper now the A4 standard has has become really more of a standard that most manufacturers use now so the majority of ARS that you're going to purchase now don't have the old carry handle like this Colt they're going to have a flat top upper that allows all of your accessories to be bolted on and gadgets and things like that now it's still possible obviously a lot of your lesser expensive ARS may have a you know an A3 configuration or A4 configuration with the with the flat pickerel on top but then still retain the old school car handguard so I am going to show you how to remove the car hand guards uh just to give you an idea and while we have the handguard off we can discuss the way that this gun operates because keeping it clean it's also important to understand how the Gun Works because obviously how in the world can you keep it running if you don't know how it works I think that's important right now some of you have probably seen this tool before now obviously we already took the lower off you have to have the lower on in order for this tool to work and we are going to demonstrate that in fact I can do it without even putting that forward pin back in because this tool is actually going to pick up on the lower anyway all right so we've already got our pin out we'll just put the lower back on we're going to go ahead and pull these car hand guards off now you can see this this gun is suspended we have the front of the barrel chalked up in a vise using our Otis magnetic Vice blocks and I've got it you know not super tight but tight enough to hold the gun where we can work on it so we've already pulled that forward pin out I'm just going to go ahead and put the handguard tool on here now I know what a lot of people what a lot of people are thinking well just use your bare mitts and pull it off yes you can do that um you know and unless you got some real bear strength look I could I could pull this hand guard of this back easily right and I can pull this hand guard off by hands right that's fine I did that by hand without the tool but a lot of times putting it back on can be a bit of a chore okay and some people you know may not have the cuss words required to do it now I've done it so many times that for me you know it's it's not a terribly big deal see I just did that by hand this tool just makes life a little bit easier you're going to come in from the bottom and this hooks into the lower just like this and you squeeze right and you can depress that Delta ring and it allows you to more easily remove the handguard so we're going to go ahead and do that I'm going to pull the hand guard off and look at that like it actually it does pivot from top to the bottom to tighten this up just a bit it does pivot more like this when you use this tool so really getting the lower hand guard off is kind of difficult even with the tool anyway so look I'm just going to squeeze this sucker and pull it off all right that's going to be the end of it these are specific but well actually no they aren't they it looks like the the a2s will go in either direction so it looks like the top and the bottom hand guard are exactly identical you can see the Raceway in the in the metal protection that's in here the the the insert clears the gas tube either for the upper or the lower so that way you can just drop either side on I couldn't remember if they were specific but it appears that they're not so here we have the hand guards off and you can see that this is an A2 with the Delta ring assembly this is your gas tube okay you have your A2 front sight post site block this contains the actual um you know gas block assembly your forward your front sight base that's adjustable for elevation there is a special tool for adjusting the front sight posts for your elevation adjustments and then of course the rest of the barrel that's clamped up in the vice blocks here and we have an A2 muzzle device on here we're not going to remove that but it can be removed the barrels are threaded half by 28. all right so we'll talk a little bit about let's go ahead and pull this lower back off now that we don't need it anymore uh we we put that on there just to demonstrate the handguard tool which honestly I never use just break out your bare mitts and pull it off and don't worry about it but it's nice to have tools in the bag if you need it we're going to talk a little bit about the operation real quick because um there's been some varying points of contention about the the function of an AR in terms of the way that it actually works and while there are a lot of historical references to old-school guns that use a direct gas impingement well what does that mean when we say direct gas impingement it means that the gases the projectile was fired it travels down the barrel at a ridiculously high speeds butt naked speeds if you will and that's the as the projectile passes over the gas block there's a hole in the barrel that feeds the gas up through the gas block and back into this tube at ridiculously high speeds of course and then that gas is then puked back into the action of the gun well yeah that's direct gas impingement you are putting gas back into the action but what's inside the bolt well there's a piston that we're going to look at so it's actually a hybrid of a piston design and a direct gas impingement design all in one it's really both which is why the AR-15 works so efficiently it's so smooth shooting they have smoother recoil forces because of the way the gases expand and they're very impervious to dirt and debris entering the option because it's a closed system you see there's nothing that can really get in there I could pour dirt and crap but because of the the finely fitted parts and the good clearances and tolerances of AR it's almost impossible to get too much crap down in the action to keep the gun from stopping there's been multiple mud tests done on these and things like that and they've actually held up really really well so while we while we all want to play the game of of comparing the AR-15 to the AK-47 they're two you know famous rifles of course there's going to be comparisons drawn between the two but I would say in a miniature dirt war or any any war or situation I think I would I would much prefer the AR system to just about any other rifle and especially as you can see this is a very easy gun to take care of to be fair you know there are some things that are required we're going to go over that it does require a little bit more training and time to get used to these but you'll see it's not a big deal so remember we cleared the gun earlier we're going to pull the charging handle back this time the Bolt's going to come out of the rear of the action okay you're going to pull the bolt out set it to the side and of course our charging handle just fell right out you notice that there's a couple of like little index points right here that's going to be important later when we go to reassemble the rifle but we're not going to worry about that just yet but here's your charging handle and you can see that the charging handle actually sets against the the gas key like this and that's what you're pulling on so there's a decent amount of of tension that is put in an operational stance on this gas key you can see that the screws that hold the gas key on are staked look how gnarly those things are staked they're not meant to be taken off right they're meant to stay there so unless there's some problem like this breaks or shears or something like that you're never going to worry about taking these two screws out so any any gun not just the AR but any gun you see that utilizes these types of stakings you don't want to move that okay it's not meant to be moved of course your charging handle has you know this recess on it and there's a lot of modern charging handles that are set up to be Ambi and all this sort of stuff this is the OG standard charging handle and we're going to go over some things you want to check out on that as well you want to make sure this thing is Not Bent cracked messed up any undue stress put on it you know you're obviously going to inspect every part we're going to get to the bolt in a minute we're going to kind of stay on the upper for a moment but I do want to mention and now that we've pulled this bolt out you can see this is also a post band bolt that has had the machine gun trip completely machined off the bottom of the carrier so this is a neutered AR-15 carrier that even if you did have an auto sear installed in the lower uh it would not trip with this Bolt um you know and that's just a feature of this particular cult and some of the post-band lowers that you see you'll actually and this is getting into some nerdy stuff that we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about but I just want to mention sometimes you'll actually see these Cults with a huge plug put in right here like they'll machine this out almost like in the same circumference as the safety uh stud this is the other side of the safety stud see okay you'll actually see this area machined out and they'll they'll drive like a nylon wedge in there and what that does is that that keeps it to where you cannot install an auto sear because it's basically removing the material that would be required to hold the auto sear you know you can't install an auto sear in a piece of polymer right so that was their idea by driving that nylon wedge in there it would make it considerably more difficult to convert not my rules it's just that's what they came up with luckily we don't have to deal with this crap anymore let's get back to the upper this is your forward assist what the Ford assist does a lot of people look I I look I hate to discuss this in such simplistic terms but a lot of people just don't know how things work if you're going to take care of your stuff you have to know what the function is like how it works look at these ridges on the side of the bolt I mean how many people take this gun apart and don't really even understand what that's for right the ridges are for the Ford assist so if the bolt does not go completely into battery let's say that the gun's A little sluggish it's dirty whatever the case may be and let's say the Bolt's out of battery well there's no charging handle that I can like if an AK was out of battery I could take my palm and maybe smack the bolt and and shut it on home if I needed to like but there's no real force that can be applied to this bolt directly you know using only like the the t-handle the charging handle right but what the what the afford assist does is gives me a point of Leverage I'm going to cheat this bolt back a little bit let's pretend it's out of battery now if I push the forward assist there there's actually a tit in there that pushes forward on those ridges and look at this it pushes the bolt forward to a hard lock that's what that's for so that's your forward assist as long as your forward assist is working and it's not broken or anything like that you know there's not really a lot you need to worry about there okay if it works you're good same thing with the dust cover as long as this spring has got good tension and the dust cover works and the detent for the dust cover is nice and strong and it stays shut and doesn't pop open you know when you don't want it to you're good there's no need to take all this apart for field stripping same thing on the A2 with the upper with the front rear sight base okay this is actually a relatively complicated little Contraption here and you don't want to take it apart unless something's broken right period okay and plus you know with their iron sights if you've taken the time to zero them really well you don't want to mess with your zero so I would leave that alone and don't mess with it so at this point the upper is pretty much ready for us to undergo some maintenance right so we're ready to kind of check out the board do some cleaning and we're gonna we're gonna break into this so the kit that I'm using here is the bullseye box from Shooter's Choice and it has a variety of different rods and we're going to be using both the rifle rod and a section of the shotgun rod a 12 gauge shotgun brush with this mop on it here is actually really good for getting into this upper and cleaning it's a perfect shape to clean these raceways like this okay we want to clean these raceways see this was a brand new mop look we had a little bit of dirt now of course we're going to clean it more but that's just to give you a basic demonstration of why I decided to go ahead and set the shotgun brush up so just because a kit has let's say you don't own a shotgun but you buy the bullseye box well if well for one if you ever do wind up buying a shotgun you're going to have the necessary tools to keep it clean and that's always good to be prepared but two the tools can also kind of lend themselves to different tasks even if it's not designed for the particular item that you're working on we're going to go ahead and just uh what I want to do is just I'm going to look down and inspect the bore you know the board's got a little bit of crud in there but it's it's not super dirty but we obviously we're going to go ahead and clean it you always want to clean your barrels from the rear forward now there are some situations where you know you can't get around it and you'll have to clean from the muzzle to the rear one example that comes to mind is the M1 grand service rifle which does not really lend itself to being clean from the rear also the M14 does not lend itself super well from being cleaned from the rear although I have seen some rifles that have like if I'm not mistaken I'm thinking like the FN 49 the old FN 49 has a similar type of receiver that is you know it blocks the rear of the gun where you can't get a cleaning Rod through the rear of the rifle to the front but what they do is they'll actually put there's a hole in the rear of the receiver so that your cleaning Rod will clear that hole and then you can clean the gun from the rear so all rifles should be cleaned from the rear the the the they should travel in the direction that the bullet travels now there's there's some points of contention that some people are probably going to argue with me about but I'm just going to give you some of my experience on this the the first question that you're probably going to have going through your mind is well if I clean this from the rear and I push the cleaning Rod forward and then I pull the cleaning Rod back out okay now was that a problem I'm not cleaning from the rear at that point I'm pulling it back through um so this cleaning Rod has this articulating handle all right so if I pull the cleaning Rod back through and I'm not putting a lot of tension on this Rod the the rod is going to be allowed to turn with the rifling as the brush is is is passing back over I think the biggest issue with cleaning from the muzzle to the rear that you have to watch out for and one reason that we push so hard that we want to clean from the rear forward is because you can damage the crown of the rifle uh the the crown is the area on the front the barrel or the gases and the bullet Escape lasts like and the crown is super important if you damage the crown you're having a very inconsistent expansion of gases which can really cause your accuracy to go absolutely to hell all right so you want to maintain the accuracy of the rifle like when we go to the Civilian Marksmanship Program and we're picking out M1 garands they give you muzzle gauges so that you can check the muzzle wear because barrels as they wear they wear from the rear forward the lead and chamber area forward where the rifling where the pressures and gases are the hottest and they wear from the muzzle end rearward in like this right from muzzle from chamber forward towards the middle of the rifling that's how they wear so you don't want to accelerate that wear process by putting undue force and strain on the crown especially with a metal cleaning Rod like a military cleaning Rod you notice that this Rod is made out of brass that's so it's non-marring so the point that I'm making and what we're getting back to is that yes I'm going to start from the rear but I'm going to go ahead and pull it back through too it's it's I swear it's going to be okay all right the gun Gremlins are not going to come get you in the middle of the night if you pull the rod back through now if you're talking your your fancy ten thousand dollar uh you know masquerade you know fancy Bullseye gun or something like that you know you might want to employ a proper board guide and really be super careful about damaging that you know what what is probably a you know a 12 or 1400 Barrel right so with that being said we're going to go ahead and clean this bad boy sorry there's always a caveat you have to put in there it's never never quite so simple is it we're gonna be using some mc7 bore cleaner from Shooter's Choice now I have a couple of different um rods and things like that and I've got some cleaning materials so here's some of our Otis these are the microfiber type cleaning cloths right they're almost that same type of material like you see in the automotive industry that they use for like wiping down cars like those uh mops that you wipe down wet cars we have to dry them off it's almost that same type of material like kind of a polyester or something but anyway they're really great for this process I'm just going to lay this down so we don't get a whole bunch of solvent and crap on our um on our bench just to soak up the solvent and we don't want to you know get any of this stuff anywhere so we're gonna go ahead and put some mz10 on this brush this is a 22 caliber bore brush that is intended for this purpose now again this is important too when you're done administering what amount of bore cleaner you're going to use close it close this sucker because what's going to happen is you're going to be walking around oops you're going to knock it over and you're going to have solvent all over your bench and then you're going to go clean your sweet 16 Browning A5 it's worth three grand and you're going to get a giant splotch where the where the bluing is going to be all nasty because you got bore cleaner all over your gun close it and remove it from the equation put it out of the way okay and it doesn't take much solvent we're going to go ahead and come in here from the rear give her a little shove yep a little dry it's okay all right looks good I'm going to pull it back through yes we're pulling it back through I swear life's going to go on all right couple of passes here not going to take much now obviously the more dirty the gun is you know the more you're going to need to to spend some time on this all right yeah this Barrel was actually pretty freaking clean I'll tell you what we're gonna um now this is the other part so now when we put the solvent on this brush now we we've sort of contaminated this with solvent we don't want to cross contaminate so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and pull this brush off that has solvent on it I'm going to take a rag and I'm going to wipe the solvent off the rod okay we want to remove that solvent we don't want any more solvent on there now this is the part of the operation where I'm going to go ahead and put a patch puller on here okay now there's a couple of different ways to deal with patches and what I mean by patches are these little cloth you know these are for cleaning mopping out the the rifle okay there's a couple of different options you have mops which are like it looks like a little mop kind of like the shotgun mop that we showed you earlier and that's for you know we could run a mop through it if we want and that'll help soak up any uh residual solvent solvent really you know solvents and cleaning materials do need to be given some time to work so this is a point where we can probably just take a sip of coffee you know let that solve it you know we put a fair amount of solvent in the rifle so we're going to let that solvent sit for five or so minutes or 10 minutes and let it do some work um coffee helps too that's important lubricant for the human aspect of it so we'll allow the solvent to sit a while and what that solvent is going to do it's going to help break up all of your powder residue as well as copper residue so we'll spend some time talking about this when a projectile is fired you're generating some really really really high pressures okay and the copper is a sacrificial material that not only is designed to allow the projectile to travel down the barrel at the speeds necessary that the powder is trying to push it right if you use a cast projectile it's just going to Shear the lead off and it wouldn't work it's trying to put you can't send a solid piece of lead down the barrel at the speeds that this thing is designed to do so the copper serves as a sacrificial gilding component to allow the the the pressures and speeds to be achieved but it comes at a price right you do get copper residue that's left behind the barrels are made out of a very very tough material that of course no matter you know there is a barrel life right that copper will eventually begin to just wear the barrel down and you'll wear the rifling and lands and grooves down and the barrel will need to be replaced but that's the way of the world and that's what we have to deal with but you do get copper residue in your Barrel little bits of copper shave themselves off from the projectiles and you wind up with copper residue in the barrel the solvent as it begins to work will begin to attack that copper and there's a lot of different products on the market that are meant to handle this type of situation but in this case you know our mc7 let's look at it says removes copper lead and powder fouling also removes plastic shotgun wad fouling now we're not going to get on that in this particular video but again with the solvent allowed to work what will happen is as copper oxidizes it actually turns sort of a bluish green color okay when we push this patch out we're going to wait a few more minutes and just let that solvent kind of mellow in fact we're going to take a break I'm going to drink some coffee and I may just put a little bit more solvent in there I know we demonstrated the process but I'm going to soak a little more solvent in there and then we're going to allow it to work and when I push the patch out of the muzzle you should see some bit of green or blue on it and what that is is oxidized copper that we have removed from the barrel so let's allow some solvent to work for a bit and we're going to go ahead and Clean from the rear and let's push a patch through here all right we're going to go ahead and clean the chamber so there's a variety of different tools that Otis makes for this purpose and Shooter's Choice as well this is part of the Shooter's Choice Bullseye box but I want to mention too that Otis also has these MSR slash ar556 kits you know I showed you that pouch earlier I mean a lot of you guys that were deployed guys and gals were probably issued these in fact some of y'all probably still have them rolling around in all of your kit at the house because uh you know we didn't give these back to Uncle Sam uh that's okay I won't tell if you won't you can see it has the bone tool and a variety of other things and uh this also has your pull cord your snake if you will so all of the components that we have in our Bullseye box are in this particular kit as well the only exception being the bone tool as far as I can remember the bone tool is not included in the bullseye box you have to get the Otis kit to get the bone tool we're going to discuss that in a moment all right we're going to clean the chamber this is a chamber cleaning brush so you can see that you've got this phosphor bronze section here that's on a braided cable and so very sharp be careful because especially these little steel guys right here they will pierce your flesh and can control blood so be careful so the rear chamber extension or the barrel extension on the AR has to have the recess to accept the locking lug so if you look at this geometry here we can see that this particular area these these kind of Steel cables are designed to clean that recess really well which you really want to make sure that recess is clean but honestly I would say that what's more important to have clean in this situation is the chamber itself a dirty chamber can really cause a lot of problems you can get poor extraction you can get failures to feed look it's very important that your chamber is kept clean okay we're going to go ahead and go in from the rear using our t-handle here from the Otis kit we're going to push in until it stops you really just want to push it in until those kind of Steel bristles get kind of like in line with the rear of the barrel extension we're just going to give it a turn like this and you could put some solvent on this if you want as well I generally just run it dry me unless you're shooting a metric crap ton that's about all you need is just a few turns with the chamber brush okay and of course a quick inspection that chamber looks nice and clean now we're going to dry the barrel out as promised now in the bullseye box there's a variety of different patches I'm going to show you that it comes with what we call 22 caliber patches like these and 30 caliber or Universal patches like these you can see the difference in the size that's about a two inch by two inch if you're using a Jag I'm just going over to the kit this Jag is designed to push patches through the barrel this mop is designed to push through the barrel and soak up oils and solvents and other chemicals a patch puller is a loop like this now if you're using a puller look I'm of I'm old school I prefer a patch puller because I like that I can put a larger patch on it and get it through a similarly sized Barrel without having any issues I want a little bit bigger patch in this little 22 caliber patch that was included so I'm just going to cut about this much off just to give me you can just see as a representative example maybe about double the size just to give me a little bit more surface area and of course this this patch that I cut off can still be used as a 22 patch see or the small 22 patches can still be used with the Jag and arguably if you're cleaning like a 25 Cal or maybe even a little six millimeter or something that patch right there probably be just fine probably even this one but the nice thing about the larger patches and see I buy mostly large patches because a large patch I can turn into any patch I want I can't make a small patch bigger but I can make a big patch any size I want so I guess that's just a point of contention all right let's do the same thing with the puller all right we're going to push it through this should go oh yeah you want a tight fit but not too tight we're going to push through all right now let's see if we were correct on our solvent now when I'm removing solvent from the barrel it's important that you dry up all this solvent and get it out okay you can see here is kind of a blue color that is copper that has been basically liquefied and cleaned from the barrel it's it's really not a liquid version of copper it it's copper residue that is oxidized so that color is actually oxidation copper turns blue when it oxidizes nerdy stuff boys and girls see it is it it was good to pay attention in science class wasn't it now what we'll do while the while the rod is in the forward position out the muzzle we'll go ahead and pull the patch back through the other way I know the rifle gods are going to frown upon me that's okay okay we're going to make sure that that's all right what I like to do um as I'm pulling it through it's going to start to kind of it sort of forms against the crown a little bit against the muzzle while I've got it right there give it a little turn like this Secret Squirrel stuff you got to know the right people all right I'm going to turn it like this now when I push it all the way back through let's see if there's any residue on it um yeah a little bit of crud right but what that action just did was it made sure that we didn't have any crap up against the the muzzle you know we want to keep that clean now one thing about the the muzzle device you know the flash hider or the brake rather is that with this um you know it does protect the crown as well so that's one nice thing about a rifle like this you know I can I can bang this gun around I can set this down against hard surfaces I can stage it on something if I want and I'm not actually harming the crown of the barrel itself I can't stress that enough how important it is to have a good muzzle device that's nice and solid on an AR let's pull it back through and inspect some more all right that didn't require a lot of force at all pretty clean we did a video on this rifle I think boys and girls I think it was maybe a couple of years ago and I'll admit this gun has not been cleaned since that video I know you're going to scold me you're like well Eric if you're telling me keep my rifle clean you don't even keep your rifles clean what the heck kind of teacher are you well do as I say not as I do I don't care what anybody says there's always going to be a dirty gun in the armory I don't care how good of cleaning and maintenance you did I will go in your Armory and pull a rifle off of the rack and I will find some dirt all right that's pretty clean you know this this gun was not very very dirty it was mainly just a little bit of a powder residue and a little bit of copper but the barrel looks beautiful obviously always inspect the barrel you know if it's dirty clean it all right I'll show you a little uh hack here for getting a good bright light on the barrel now we've discussed this in other videos but I'm just going to reiterate it grab yourself a patch what we're going to do we're going to make this easy on ourselves we're going to loosen the Vise blocks we're going to turn this thing upside down just like this and then chalk it back up like this actually I probably shouldn't have pinched that right there how about we do it right here okay we're gonna turn upside down like this take your patch stick it in the rear like that grab your uh your Surefire back up that Chad brought that I didn't have take your back up and put it on the low setting lay it right there go to the front of the rifle and look down oh yes so what the patch does is it diffuses the light so it's not a super bright light it just you'd be surprised even the tiniest light or the lack of the flashlight period and just having the patch back there to help reflect the light that's available I've got a pretty good view now if I was taking a photo or a video of the board and I added that extra light this just allows me some diffused light down the barrel I can really get a good look all right I'm looking for Nicks I'm looking for scrapes I'm looking for muzzle damage I'm looking for you know to the best of my ability I'm looking to see if there's any odd erosion on the uh the actual gas port and believe it or not under good light you can see the gas port all right we're going to go ahead and take a moment to focus on the bolt assembly and the charging handle which you know it can be a daunting task at first if you're not used to it but once you learn it it is totally not a big deal and of course again we can see in better detail the cut on the carrier you know where they relieve this so the auto Seer won't won't trip but because of that cut we also can see a little bit better demonstration of the way that the firing pin is retained because that cut is normally not there they just passed over you can actually see the way they just passed it on the on the machine so that gives you a better representation so you can see a pretty decent example and as we get the bolt apart further you're gonna you're gonna be able to see this a lot better but the gas forces are shot down into this gas key the one that we told you not to remove don't remove it and then they are actuated against this bolt in here it's pretty cool so we're going to pull it apart the first thing you want to do is you've got this little pin right here this cotter pin that retains the firing pin you probably can't see super well you might actually be able to see it you see it holds it in place there's a couple of different ways you can achieve that if we were to take this is a dummy round AN action-proving round if we're in the field in a military environment and we didn't have any tools we could use the nose of the round to push it out and if you're lucky you might even be able to use the nose of the realm to pry that out like that okay now if we have a cleaning kit like we have here we can see you know sometimes getting that guy back in is a little tricky now in this case we have the the Otis kit now if we didn't want to use a projectile you know we've got this little punch here we could use of course you can see I've already got the brush set up on our cleaning rod but if we were to wanted to take you know this little punch and use it to push it out we could totally just do that let's do that all right so use whatever tool but pull the cotter pin out all right invert the carrier to the rear like this give it a little smack your firing pin comes out okay now what you're going to do is you're going to take the bolt push it to the rear to a hard stop you're going to rotate this cam pin like that we're going to take the bolt turn it upside down once we've we've moved that cam pin to that location and you'll also know it's in the correct position because it's actually not going to come out any other way so once you rotate it to this position what I like to do is just take the bolt don't hit the gas key hard but just give it a little a little smack on the table and that cam pin will come right out now what that cam pin does is provide camming action and what it does is as it is actuated against the carrier it forces the bolt to rotate in this manner at this exact degree of tilt okay and that allows the bolt to lock forward into the barrel extension locking the gun shut for the firing cycle okay so that cam pin is a pretty important component of this rifle so once the cam pin is out go ahead and pull the bolt just like I just did completely out okay the carrier is now stripped and ready to clean we're going to set it off to the side again you're not going to remove the gas key it's staked for a reason don't remove it if it's broken or damaged you're going to cross that bridge when you get there firing pin firing pin retaining cam pin okay all there now the bolt mechanism itself now or the bolt itself what I like to do and you can see the piston in which the gases operate towards all right pretty interesting stuff the way this Gun Works it's pretty fascinating okay you have a gas seal that is formed on this Piston Cup with these gas Rings we are going to remove those we will remove them but we have their extractor our ejector we're going to check all this stuff what I like to do is I take the firing pin you're going to compress from the rear I don't know how well you can see this I'm going to try to do it kind of slow maybe you can see if I push the rear see how it kind of lifts up the front of the extractor is sort of lifting up a bit what I'm doing is I'm compressing that plunger and I'm taking a good bit of force off of that pin so it should be easier to push out so I'm going to sort of just give it a little push and then take the firing pin and use it as a tool just like that if you take the pressure off efficiently enough you should be able to just grab it pull it out with your fingers although sometimes it may require a little bit of additional persuasion in the field we take the cotter pin and we'll push it in there like this and use it as a tool to push it out that's just a little hack so you don't have to worry about a tool but don't lose that PIN don't lose that pin don't lose any of these parts okay all right the extractor looks good this Bolt's actually pretty clean you really want to pay close attention to your extractor this is probably one of the most common points of failure on an AR period are going to be your extractor wearing out you'll begin to get some real sloppy extraction you'll start experiencing more issues and you really want to pay attention to the wear of this component now luckily extractors are cheap you know so you should have quite a few of them on hand you can see some brightening here we can take our finger now and kind of scrape that we can feel you know it's pretty smooth there's a little bit of wear but for the most part nothing to write home about but you really want to pay close attention to this part and make sure that you're not you know having any type of an issue this spring should have a fair amount of tension okay if it's if this spring is wore out you're going to get some real sloppy extraction it's just it's not going to extract properly and here's the thing is is guns give us little Clues about what's going on as we use them right as as some performance aspect of the gun begins to degrade then you'll know that over time hey we need to look at certain components you know if the extractor is not if the gun's not extracting properly there's something in that extraction cycle it's not working I think the culprit is usually going to be the extractor being worn or this spring and plunger assembly being worn out you can replace just this spring assembly if you want of course there's all these parts are available individually but I think as reasonably priced as extractors are everybody should have some spare extractors laying around everyone should have plenty of oops kits that have these small components right because you are inevitably going to lose a small pin like this especially in the field and believe it or not I think it's important for every rifle especially in A2 that has a um we're going to I'm going to show you the accessory compartment on the A2 if you have an accessory compartment I think everybody should have an extra cam pin in there too because these do break okay things break all right now we're gonna we're gonna show off the bone tool this this is another component that I think is a really important thing for every AR shooter to have in their inventory is the 556 Otis bone tool and I'm going to show you how this is used and it's going to make your life a heck of a lot easier first we're going to take the gas rings out now I want to discuss the position of these gas rings they do need to be staggered in this you'll notice that there's slots in the gas Rings okay and those slots are mainly so that you can separate the gas rings and remove them from the gas piston assembly this is a piston I mean forget that it's a gun part that's a piston all day long right all right so we talk about direct gas impingement well what is that gas impinging against a piston so it is a hybrid piston system right but this piston can get a lot of Fallout and crud on it now this one's not super dirty but we're going to show you how to get that clean with the bone tool and we're going to pull these gas rings off we can pull the gas rings off but you know considering that this is a field strip video why don't we leave them in place and just correct the gap so if you look at your gas rings and you see that there's a little Gap in each one of them all right if that Gap overlaps another Gap you need to separate that Gap as far as you possibly can okay so that means that there's three of these gas rings you want one Gap to be let's just say about right here well where would we want the second Gap in the middle gas ring to be we don't want it to be close to that Gap because as the gun is operating and and cycling back and forth and moving and jostling around and things like that if those gaps intersect with each other you're going to lose gas pressure and look just like losing compression in an engine is going to rob the performance and the gun could Short Stroke and things like that now there's a couple of fixes that people have come up with over the years for this one is cmmg sells a continuous gas ring it is one assembly that can still be sort of threaded on and everything like that but you will never have that Gap issue but considering this is an old school A2 it still retains the original gas ring setup so I can see here that the gas rings are staggered quite well and it would take a heck of a lot of jostling around to get those gaps to line up with each other and cause the gas pressure to be greatly reduced to the point where the gun will Short Stroke so that's just something I want to mention on that I'm not going to pull the gas rings out for this because for everyday cleaning you don't need to the Bone tool has a Scraper on the end we're going to put it in here I'm going to scrape it look at that and all that chunk that uh caked on carbon right that's all gas assembly like caked on carbon that is hardened carbon it's I mean it is organic which is kind of one of the strange things about it you know you could really almost call it like a almost like a plant byproduct in a way like this carbon as it hardens and informs this this nasty crud right as powder Burns you know it's it gunpowder is a really weird thing when you think about smokeless powder and it's residues that are left behind pretty neat stuff all right so you can see the bone tool is doing its job and of course we could we can take this guy and just kind of wipe it down and look at all that dirt and carbon and things you just want the you just want this Piston Cup to be as smooth as possible and you don't want a whole lot of build up and Grime on it all right there's another reason that a lot of the Otis kits and the Shooter's Choice kits come with pipe cleaners because for ARS pipe cleaners are pretty pretty important pretty indispensable thing I'll go ahead and get some of these long Q-tips too we'll probably use a few of those just for demonstrative purposes okay there's really about no other way to clean an AR bolt properly unless you use pipe cleaners okay so the pipe cleaner can get down in here and that cleans this firing pin Channel out and also this really critical area and and really actually I take that back it's not super critical you just want to make sure that there's not a whole lot of gas and Gunk build up in this firing pin Channel anything that can inhibit the movement of your firing pin which you know it would take a lot of crud to do that but you know you just want to take uh some time to clean that and of course be careful with your pipe cleaner that you don't get a bunch of crud in the channel like what we just did right there that's okay just want to make close attention and if you do happen to get a little crud in there you can just take your air compressor and just blow it out like that easy okay now the bone tool also has another area on it that is designed for the carrier again you see another scraper right here so you had the scraper for the pist the the Piston Cup on the bolt and then you have the scraper for where the bolt goes in like this so we're going to go ahead and scrape that not quite as much crap gets in that area but the point of the scraper is definitely to make sure that you don't get not a lot in there but that's what that scraper is for and then last but not least there's also a scraper component for on the bone tool for the firing pin okay so the firing pin goes right here and sometimes you can get in fact if you look there there's a pretty good little bit of crud right there right put this in here give it a little turn and that helps scrape the crap off of the rear of the firing pin okay this little guy right here is threaded so that the bone tool can also be used as a handle with your Otis cleaning kit so that's a nice touch that they added there was that was that threaded boss because that does make one gnarly handle to use for your cleaning rods and things like that but that's a great accessory that's something I recommend every AR shooter to have and you know at first I thought well how useful could this really be but the first you know like dozen or so times I use it I was like wow this really does take a lot of the grunt work out of cleaning your bolt especially in the field all right so we've we've shown off the bone tool but obviously there's tons of cracks and crevices in this whole assembly that will require you to kind of wipe down and clean and that's where the Q-tips come in handy you can just take a little bit of fp10 this is fp10 that came with the bullseye box and it has these little needle Oilers on there so the needle Oilers are nice because you can put the oil exactly where you want so for applying oil that's really what these are more for but I like the needle Oilers because it allows me to make sure I'm not using too much oil and it allows me to not waste product so I can make the oil go a lot further by only using exactly what I need and putting it exactly where I want it may not matter to some of you but you know sometimes it's just important to consider that we'll take a little oil on this Q-tip and again like anywhere dirt and crap and things can find their way you can use the the Q-tip to clean these recesses now there are various mops and tools and accessories that they make for cleaning those types of stuff you know all different types of specialized AR accessories but sometimes just a little old-fashioned elbow grease and attention is merited okay we're going to switch to this other scraper that comes with this kit it's basically just a you know tool steel leaf spring with a hardened Scraper on it like that and we can take that scraper and get in there and really check that bolt face you just you don't want anything interfering with the operation of this rifle right so we could take that scraper and just really scrape any and every little area that might have some crap down in there you know just kind of go through and inspect and check and clean it the best you can all right if we've got a bunch of hardened crud in between the Locking lugs the scraper can fit in between the Locking lugs so that's helpful and of course we already saw like the little tiny uh punch here and here's an actual punch assembly if you need to you know push various components out you can do that here is a screwdriver blade that can also double as a scraper if you've got some really hardened crap that you got to scrape off that's why it's brass okay so that you're not going to Mar or damage your components and again we also have a brush assembly we've got a couple of brushes we'll show you so this brush here it's just nylon so we can get in there and just it's actually doing a pretty good job there was a little bit of crud on the inside of this carrier and that brush is just cleaning it right out of there and the brushes are really more for like dirt and dust like the last thing you want to do is go throw in like a whole bunch of uh oil and everything on a bolt or a carrier that's got dust and dirt all over it all you want to do is just get that dirt stay there so the brushes are good for that so that's just kind of a demonstrative idea there to show you that like this little kit includes all your little accoutrements and whatnot and then of course in that kit there's also this dirt brush which is kind of cool it's like a lipstick case with a brush so if you got you know you can these are really the brushes are really handy for the lowers they end up getting a lot of crap down in there but you may not want to you may not have some compressed air to blow it out or you may not have the ability to get down down in there and clean in the little cracks and nooks and crannies and things the brushes are good for that so that's a useful component and that's small enough to throw in your kit you know and have along with your bone tool in fact this guy would probably fit in the butt stock accessory on a comp compartment on the A2 so this is just to demonstrate some of the the cleaning areas and also on the carrier something we really want to pay some decent attention to very decent intention too is this actual gas key here right you take your um yeah look at that look at all that put your your uh Q-tip in there push it down to a hard stop give it a good turn it a couple of times until the Q-tips come out clean I wouldn't oil it or do anything crazy but you know definitely get in there and clean that really well now one thing you can notice about these carriers that I think is pretty important to think about is that this area in here is Chrome lined all right that's good for cleaning right notice the Chrome lining so that is made so that all of the dirt and debris not only does this thing say really slick in here but it also makes it easier for cleaning and we can even see on this carrier there's a c stamped on the side and I'm assuming that would mean Chrome line just like it does on the barrel right this gun has a chrome line Barrel and it makes cleaning easier okay it's very hard that Chrome okay look here see there's a there's a c stamped on there it's a chrome line Barrel just something to consider but we're also going to get in here and clean this too now again with the universal cleaning kit we can just go over here and grab a brush that fits pretty good let's try tell you what let's try 45 ACP cleaning brush look at that we're going to get in there and just scrub this out really well okay and because it's Chrome line it's not going to give us really a whole heck of a lot of issues it's going to get in there and kind of break up some of that crud nice and smooth looking there and again just like we used that 45 brush like again earlier we used a shotgun brush right for that other purpose we're going to use the 45 mop for the same thing I'm going to thread that on there but this time we're just going to soak up any crap that might be there just like this yep look at all that dirt that we got out of there you don't have to use solvent on the uh the bolt if you don't want to just depends how dirty it is um I'd probably avoid putting too much solvent on it if you don't have to right you know clean it as much as it needs to be cleaned we're going to look at it and it looks nice there's a little bit of crud in that firing pin channel in there that we had some difficulty getting to but I think we can probably just go ahead and get in there with another bore brush this time let's try let's try the 25 caliber rifle bore brush and see if it fits that firing pin Channel nice and tight all right we can come in from the front oh it fits perfect all right we're just going to work that back and forth all right and without moving the bolt I'm going to slam it down right here I'll see if anything comes out see that gets you to fail inspection right there get that bone tool in there I think you guys get the idea make sure that this area in here is nice and clean make sure your gas key is really clean make sure that the cam surface in the carrier is not galled or messed up or or you know have any type of deformation as you see there's a pretty unique cut that is made on this carrier and you want to make sure it's not galled or messed up anything that could Rob performance right you're looking for splits and cracks and damage galling wear all of those things right are very important to consider I'm going to take all of these components and I think what we'll go ahead and do before we go to the lower because there's not really a heck of a lot we're going to talk about on the lower just a few points that we want to look at I guess we can just go ahead and put this bolt back together now since we're we're already right here together here um we're going to go ahead and go in the in the reverse order and we're going to and putting it back together honestly is is a heck of a lot easier we're going to take our extractor and place it back in here okay just like this take this hardened pin again applying a little bit of pressure I'm pushing down with my thumb I'm going to apply some pressure and start the PIN now when you're applying that pressure let me pull it back out when you're applying that pressure and the pin may not want to start take your thumb and push back and forth look I'm just going to exaggerate the movement see how I'm pushing back and forth with my thumb work it down and back and forth like this as you're pushing it in and that'll help you find the find the spot now you don't want the pen to protrude any extreme Direction in either way so just look at both sides where the pin is coming out and just visually inspect and make sure that the that the distance is about equal you don't want it to push out on the side on either side really well that's that's not going to be good now once this bolt is back in the carrier you don't really have to worry about that pin finding its way out but before you put it in you don't want to scratch or Gall any of those surfaces by having the pin sticking out you know in any kind of an extreme direction again before we put this bolt back into the carrier we also want to inspect our gas key location and we saw as we were handling this bolt sure enough those gas Keys found themselves or the gas rings found themselves out of alignment now if I just put this back together haphazardly and didn't think about it those could find them themselves getting close to each other and give us a little bit of a robbing of performance so we're going to take a moment to just double check the position of those gas rings and make sure that the gaps are not overlapped in my opinion my humble opinion this is one of the only real shortcomings of this design is is that if the end user does not take the time to properly clean and line up everything like it's supposed to be and really inspect the system properly honestly this is probably one of the weakest points of the system right here now in modern times that looks good that's that's what we want in modern times with the continuous gas Rings that's pretty much going to make it a non-issue but just for those of you I mean look a lot of the Lesser price ARs and things like that they do use this old school uh you know assembly so that's just something to consider a lot of people get confused on which direction to put the bolt back in but I'll tell you uh it's quite simple which direction does the gun extract it extracts to the right correct well if we know the bolt goes in this direction then we know the extractor needs to face in that direction but what they did also for you is they have this hole that's a nice clean hole if you turn around the other side you notice these divots all right if memory serves look at that those divots are there we cannot even put this gun together the wrong way even if we wanted to so you're going to quickly see that those divots are there to prevent this pin from being inserted in the wrong direction so don't worry about putting the gun back together wrong because you can't now when you go to put it back in make sure the extractor is facing to the right and you're going to want to generally kind of Wiggle a little bit to get those gas rings to kind of line up and force themselves back into that assembly but before you do what I would do is have the the bolt right here and you got those gas Rings showing through the cam pin slot take your fp10 Oiler just just just just just throw it a little half a drop of oil on there and once you get that those rings to settle would give it a turn like this just to oh man look at look how good that rotates just for having that little bit of oil in place made such a difference all right we're gonna we're gonna take the extractor point it to the right and you're going to push it home until you see the hole in the bolt line up with the cam slot in the carrier okay now the nice thing about the the cam pin is it can't be put in wrong either way so it's like it doesn't matter which direction you put it in as long as it's in the correct orientation this is the orientation that the cam pin goes in and comes out where I'm holding it right not like that like this so we're gonna put it in there and and also if you notice the orientation of the hole in the campaign that the firing pin goes through all right so let's let's pretend the firing pins in there all right in the cam positions in this this position well the firing pin couldn't go through the cam pin there once it's rotated back into place that then allows the hole under which the uh the firing pin goes through the bolt okay so we're gonna again line it up put the cam pin back in place like this give it a rotation like that we're going to cheat the bolt forward and that's one way you can check your gas gas key your gas rings too you want to make sure that this moves real easy and I'm going to show you how to do that in a moment now to get the firing pin in what you want to do you don't want to push down like that against the table because now what you've done is you've pushed the bolt back and the firing pin is not going to really line up that great push it forward hold it like this well we're kind of cheating here because this slot is here this is a whole big area you can just drop it in just like that which is sort of cheating but if you have a traditional carrier that still has the trip and all of this extra geometry what I do just cup your hand around it like this and just drop it in look at that fell right into place okay take your thumb place it like this against the back holding the firing pin forward or any finger if you will you don't have to have a lot of pressure but make sure the firing pin is forward you'll notice this cam this uh the cotter pin here has a split in it so it's like it kind of puts some tension on the outside of the of the PIN and over time these cotter pins will wear out and they will begin to eventually lose their ability to hold the firing pin in very efficiently it takes a long time for them to wear out but this is another consumable component that you probably want to have an oops kit or two with a few of these I'd have a half a dozen or so on hand just so you don't have to worry about it because sometimes these things can be a little bit of a bear to get in and a lot of times what you'll end up having to do is take a a set of pliers sometimes and you'll have to you'll have to occasionally compress this guy like this you can see that Gap closing now normally you really shouldn't have to do that but on on one that's in really good condition and it's real new and real stiff it can be a little bit difficult to compress with just your fingers on this what I would do start it at an angle like this I know this is a little difficult to see started at an angle you notice how when I take my thumb and push it it compresses started at an angle and compress it and push it in look it's that easy okay it ain't rocket science if people make a make it into rocket science when it isn't now one last thing we'll check before we assemble we're going to lubricate when the gun is assembled and I'm going to explain why when we do it we're going to push the bolt to the rear and I'm just going to off camera I'm going to give it a little flick look I can do it on camera see how easy that is just a flick of the wrist and that bolt moves without very much undue stress or issue that's properly put together and we're good to go now on the charging handle just very quickly look there's not a lot that can go wrong here but I'll just kind of reiterate you're looking for galling splits breaks tear anything that could indicate to you that the charging handle has any kind of wear about the only thing that you really have to worry about on the charging handles really just the latch that's about as long as you don't damage it or or do anything too stupid the only thing it can really wear out on this thing is eventually the spring can wear out but boy it is I in all the years I've been shooting ARS I I can't I can't tell you I've hardly ever seen this spring wear out you will occasionally see this latch Gall really bad but honestly the receiver Galls before the latch does but we're going to go over that when we reassemble it and lubricate it it's pretty much it for the charging handle and the bolt carrier assembly and all that that's probably honestly for maintenance this is probably the area that you're going to pay the closest attention to to keep this thing running properly the bolt being improperly cleaned and maintained and lubricated is probably going to be the and the extractor those those are probably the areas where this gun is going to fail the most is if you do not take the time to properly clean that that piston okay with this bone tool so that again pretty important to have all right we're gonna move a few tools out of the way I mean we went through a few pipe cleaners and uh Q-tips and things pretty important stuff to have laying around okay we're going to go ahead and move to the lower now I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the lower but there's just a few things that I kind of want to mention all right for one you the minute I picked this up I took my A2 stock and grabbed the receiver I'm going to give it a little bit of a turn I can feel you can't feel it but I can the stock is a little bit loose we're going to go ahead and correct that right now luckily on the A2 it's literally just this bolt right here in the rear of the stock okay I'm going to grab the same screwdriver that I used earlier to break that Chicago screw and I'm just gonna I'm gonna tighten this bolt right here yep it was a little loose you know what I wonder thing well look this is a good opportunity to go ahead and let's check out the accessory compartment since we need to dig a Little Deeper here all right let's see what I have in here and I swear this wasn't planned but here we are okay forensic we have a bone tool we have some ALG Go Juice that looks like it's kind of hardened up but it probably could still use it we have a chamber brush and we have an Otis microfiber gun cleaning cloth and an old school mil-spec cleaning kit just like uh just like Uncle Sam intended all right look for field cleaning this is more than adequate so the A2 does have a storage compartment which is nice that stock does feel a little bit loose I probably have to pull the butt plate off and get up under on that tube and give her just a little bit of a tighten we're not going to worry about that right this moment all right again on the lower we're not going to spend a lot of time here because there's not really a heck of a lot that can go wrong this is mainly just a point of inspection we'll make sure that everything that has spring tension on it that the Springs aren't worn out that includes our magazine release right we'll make sure that Springs nice and stout that feels good that spring is nice and stout of course because this uses a Chicago screw up front we don't have to worry about this plunger retaining pin and everything like that but obviously check to make sure that's got plenty of power our rear take down pin nice and nice and tough that's looking good all right you've got another plunger that retains the buffer and spring we're going to go ahead and pull that out and look we're not going to get fancy here we're going to use our dummy round and uh you're going to push down with the dummy round and this also allows you to keep your your fingers out of the way look at that and that comes out push the hammer down [Music] there's your buffer and spring now these are all specific to each gun design like you know carbine pistol I mean there's all different types of buffers and things like different weights of buffers this is just an old school Colt with a standard rifle assembly now um there's not a heck of a lot here to report I mean obviously just clean it and wipe it down but there is one little hack on this particular thing like you notice when you're shooting at AR and um you you you hear a bit of action noise when you're shooting it you hear like a throwing you know like a like a bonging kind of sound or ringing kind of sound there are ways you can sort of Escape that a little bit you can you can actually put some light grease on this uh some Luber plate or some grease you know whatever you know kind of Grease it up a little bit don't get crazy but you don't really have to worry a ton about a lot of crap getting into this component so it's not like you're going to get sand or dirt in here I mean it's a pretty close system again being an AR um I will take my grease pin and just grease this thing down a little bit again some lubricate would probably be good and something else I want to mention about the lower that's kind of cool a lot of people may not know this about A2 but if you look at the screw all right that holds the stock onto the buffer tube assembly it's kind of hard to see but it's Hollow it's got a hole in it so that means that if you get this thing in water and the whole gun is full of water all you have to do is just hold it upside down like this it'll drain a lot of people don't know that that that's a drain hole in case you get the gun full of water they really did think of everything I mean look there's a reason the AR is awesome and that's one reason I'll Lube this up later but I just want to mention that about the uh the buffer and the spring lubricate it with some grease or something and throw it back in there and move on with life wipe it down with a rag now on the lower this is probably one of the most important points I I could probably think of is keeping that trigger lubricated you know there's a lot of moving Parts in this trigger assembly you know we can control don't allow that hammer to just drop okay on your bolt stop because that bolt stops already it's doing a lot of work already and on the lower that's probably one area that you're gonna probably see break more often than anything else you know these things do snap off from time to time so be careful jostling this thing around I mean like use it as a tool but think about it when you shoot the last round out of the magazine and the magazine follower pushes up on this tab right here and then that bolt comes to a hard stop on that stop that's what it's for it's a bolt stop you're putting a lot of pressure on that bad boy from time to time so just keep that in mind you know it might not be a bad idea to have a few extra bolt stops laying around because it is a component that will break over time and you don't want to add to that wear by allowing that hammer to smack so if you are going to do function tests and things like that and do it like I'm doing right here with the lower off of the gun just control the hammer and inspect and look at everything you know if I if if the if I squeeze the trigger pull the hammer to the rear and then let go and it's locked in the rear position watch this Hammer as I release the trigger it's going to move up just a little bit okay and that's a Siri setting but you want to really lubricate all this stuff pretty well let me grab screen spin which I happen to have right here all right all weather firearm grease let's check it out here's our grease pin we're going to go through and grease this up there's a lot of different types of Grease but basically if you look at you know really just about any standard AR trigger you're going to see some polished components that are you know let's just say for for lack of better term surface ground or or fitted rather where you'll see some of the Coatings kind of wore off one is on the back of the hammer right here you wanna give this a squeeze oh I have a feeling this is going to get gutsy here let me just give it a little squeeze oh yeah there we go all right we're going to put some Grease on the back of there and of course that's that's going to intersect here with the disconnector but whoop or the the sear we'll put a little we'll put a little bit on there too and also on the rear of the hammer there's a stud right here you can see that that intersects against the the front of the trigger bar okay you want to keep that lubed up and of course I'm getting freaking grease everywhere because I'm trying to explain and film and all that stuff but it's right there and look you can you can go full hem it's not going to hurt to put a little grease on there don't get crazy but put some grease on it yeah so the rear stud on the hammer the bottom of the hammer that intersects with the trigger bar all right we're feeling we're feeling the tension of our Springs make sure everything's got some tension that feels good and what I like to do as well you know see this wear Mark right here a little bit of wear this is where the carrier you can see this kind of cut on the bottom of the carrier that sort of slides across all right now I'm not going to shoot this bolt across the room but I can demonstrate to you when this bolt goes to the rear that that kind of convex cut that's in the bolt but if the carrier pushes the hammer down to allow it to catch again okay and that creates a wear component see that wear I would say go ahead and go ahead and take a little Grease not a lot but go ahead and grease that hammer a little bit just like that looks good we'll go ahead and put just I mean literally just the residual grease that's on the tip of this thing on this takedown pin so it can slide nice and easy you don't want it to where it's excuse me you don't want it to wear too much against uh against that stud that's in there that goes the stock holds the spring and retaining plunger in from the rear of the receiver that retains this pin okay you want to keep it lubricated so it's just easy to pull in and out okay gosh boys and girls I think honestly that I mean other than wiping it down and cleaning any obvious signs of dirt and and debris and nasty stuff I mean that's really about it you know clean this uh mag well out you definitely don't want to get all the dirt and crap out of there I don't really spend a lot of time worrying too much about the lower one thing that I would probably pay uh you know a little bit closer attention to as well would be that in a gun that gets really really really really dirty with a whole lot of crud in it you can get lots of unburned powder in this area here the reason I didn't really worry about it too much is because this thing actually is like pretty clean so there's not a heck of a lot to worry about but you can get it down in there with Q-tips and with pipe cleaners and clean all that crud out of there you can use compressed air you can use your brush to get in there and clean anything so there's lots of tools at your disposal for getting that area nice and clean if you need to but those are the areas that I would probably spend the most time you know greasing up really well and getting lubed up and everything like that all right we're going to go ahead and reset that hammer and put the lower on safe about the only other thing that I would probably just kind of pay some close attention to on the AR would also be the trigger pins themselves you want to inspect uh the actual Springs right so there are cuts in these trigger pins that those spring legs are meant to sit on just make sure they haven't become dislodged or or anything like that and that they won't allow the trigger pins to to come out very easily okay and it's also worth noting that depends on the Colts are a specific size so if you ever do have to replace these especially this particular one these are a little bit larger diameter pin than what all the modern ARS use it's I don't remember the exact measurement but it is a bigger pen you can see it's definitely a bigger pin the only other area I would uh pay some close attention to take the grip grab the gun in your hand take the grip give it a twist does it move okay if it doesn't you're good it needs to be tight check that grip and make sure it's tight if not obviously you can see maybe there's a screw in there just take a screwdriver of the appropriate size and tighten it up why would the grip be in loose matter well the reason is because the grip actually houses the spring and plunger that powers your safety so if that grip is loose you know that could obviously not only do you not want the grip being loose because you don't want it loose when you're trying to shoot it but if it got too loose that could potentially cause your safety to not only fail to function but potentially even fall out of the gun so you don't want that that's pretty much it for the lower we're going to go ahead and put the gun back together and do a functions test and I'm going to show you some lubrication points that I would probably consider checking out so that's pretty much it for that let's get it back together all right so remember when I said that the hand guards are going to be a real bear to get on and off oh this is the part that's the most bearish but we're going to go ahead and do it anyway all right again we're just going to check this real quick we did have a little bit of crud in there but you know this is a pretty good hand guard design it's held up pretty well you know it dissipates heat pretty well and in our meltdown videos we've seen that given enough Heat these hand guards will catch on fire so just keep that in mind but boy you really would have to get this sucker hot to do that so I don't think many of you are going to have to worry about that problem because you're not mad Lads like Chad and I go ahead and you can see that you know there's some little slots up front right here and again I think we can both agree that the upper and lower precisely the same that makes Logistics really easy to prove the point I'm going to take the Warren section that was on top and put it on the bottom I guess we can kind of come in at an angle like this and kind of work that guard in all right it'll it'll set in place like that pull down on the d-ring see right here with my thumb I'm going to pull you don't have to smack on it hit on it and all that sort of mess I'm going to turn it around one last inspection just to make sure everything looks nice looks good to me again the upper hand guard back in place it'll kind of find its way okay the d-ring does not need to be compressed all the way all the way down when you're putting the top hand guard back on compress a d-ring but kind of favor towards the top and leave that bottom like this see how it will articulate see that movement it articulates a little bit put the majority of your of your tension on the top end of the d-ring like this and I find the best way to do it is to hold it like this close the dust cover so you can get your hand in nice and flat break out your man mitts look that wasn't that hard was it everybody was so worried about it it's only intimidating if you allow it to be too easy we're going to put the bolt back in you notice because of the genius of Eugene Stoner and the genius of Colt and all those people that if we take this upper and invert it that the charging handle and the front sight assembly actually allows it to lay pretty flat right and one of the cool things about that when you think about it too is our front sight post protects our front sight it's just a well thought out design like sorry I just don't know any other way to put it look at that it's like it just wants to be put back together put the rifle upper on it on its on its uh back like this remember what we did earlier with the bolt push forward all right you want this bolt to be out if it's in like this you're not you're not going to be able to get it into the upper okay make sure the bolt is out in the outmost position remember those uh little notches on the charging handle you can see right here where my finger is you're going to place the charging handle in there and you'll see some cuts in the upper that those little slots are designed to go into that's just a design to get the charging handle back in place and again this is actually a great way to show you see that gas tube that's coming out what we talked about earlier that you want to check for all that galling and wear look at that you can see how it intercepts in there okay really cool stuff and this is probably a good uh moment to kind of discuss the wear on this area too you can see on the upper as we put the charger handle back in place you can see some brightening right there on this receiver where that look I'm going to push forward and watch this watch this guy right here watch what it does right that just retains the charging handle in place because once the gun is in battery and ready to shoot the firing cycle is going to happen 30 or 20 times how many rounds is in the magazine and this charging handle is just going to stay forward like this so that that not latch is pretty important for it to be in good shape and have good tension on it so that charging handle doesn't walk out on you you definitely don't want that but again let's take our grease pin we're going to take our grease pin and we're not going to get crazy boys and girls but we're going to put let's put a little bit of Grease right there just a bit just a just a scotch that's probably more than a scotch but you know what I think Eugene Stoner will forgive me oh beautiful okay so again we'll put it back on its back pull the charging handle out about halfway again making sure the bolt is forward not like this but like this out and you'll know the cam pin will be the most forward take the bolt turn it up on its back like this lay lay the gas key in The Recess of the charging handle line the carrier up with the opening in the in the receiver push the whole assembly home just like that that was actually a good demonstration of that uh dust cover popping open okay we actually had the dust clever closed and then when we pushed the bolt home it opened it on up all right real easy stuff we'll work this back and forth a few times check it out right bolt locks in place real nice all of that looks good now the grease that we put on the hammer surface is going to lubricate this so we don't need to worry about putting more grease on that there's already enough grease on the hammer we're going to go ahead and assemble the rest of the gun here all right again if this was any other AR it would have a self-retained forward pin I don't think I need to bore you guys with the details I'm going to go ahead and put the upper back on to the lower we'll go ahead and push this rear pin home now obviously on any modern AR you would have again the sulfurtain pin but this pin comes out because this is a post band Colt okay so we're just going to pretend that this isn't that this isn't um you know A A A Band Cult all right so let me get this pen back in you guys get the idea may have to persuade it just like I persuaded the camera just then all right mallets are good sorry I bumped the camera all right again we're just going to put this screw back in I feel like I must reiterate that this is not something you're going to have to do on all the modern ARS it's just because this is an old school one okay do not take the pin all the way out of your if you remove the forward take down pin on your modern AR uh there is a problem okay it is not designed to work that way but because we have to deal with these stupid pins here on the old school cult we're gonna go ahead and just tighten that back up but let's pretend all we did was go and push the PIN all right now functions test now how many of y'all fail the functions test or how many of y'all don't do this properly what are we checking for when we do a functions test are we just making sure the bolt moves or we just we make sure the trigger works there's lots of things that we're going going to go through here right that we want to check well for one this is where I see people do a functions test wrong right out the get-go right they never tested safety they always put the gun on fire and then test the trigger reset they like to hear the clicks I get it you know we're creatures of habit in that regard first thing I would do obviously making sure the rifle is empty and there's no magazine or ammunition nearby and all that good happy stuff allow the bolt to come to a hard stop and slam before you even remove the safety check the trigger does the safety work people don't ever test the freaking safety and I don't understand but but they just don't okay now we're going to put the rifle on fire we're going to squeeze the trigger we're going to leave the trigger held to the rear pull the bolt back to a hard stop let go allow it to slam forward release the trigger you should hear metallic hear and feel metallic click okay now the next part of the functions test that you want to do is put the gun on safe all right can you put the gun on safe is the answer yes okay you pass that part of the function says that's something a lot of people don't do is even try to put it back on safe I'd go and test the safety again all right we can see the safety works right good stuff okay all right everything's good and it feels nice and slick too that grease really really helped there's one other thing I want to mention just real quick while I'm talking we'll put the sling back on there I mean you you guys see what's going on here you can you can see the orientation that the sling goes in I'm not going to bore you with those details I'm just going to do it heck I'll move it back you can see what I'm doing all right we're going to go back through we're going to open this up I like to push it for you got you know generally a good bit of slack on the sling Push It Forward like this and then fish it back through back through again all right you know get you a couple of inches there tighten her up that looks good and this particular sling is is kind of a aftermarket sling that has fully adjustable when I put this thing in the rack I'll go ahead and adjust this sling up like this we're going to take all the slack out of the sling when we put it on the rack and that way that sling can't get caught up on a bunch of crap when it's on the rack now if you want to have the gun in a configuration that's ready to fight in I wouldn't do that but if you don't want it getting tangled up on your rack that's one thing you can do is just to keep you know everything nice and tight all right so we did a quick functions test now we'll just lubricate this thing now the cool thing about ARS it's a self-lubricating system and oh my gosh I know people just turn it into so much of a of a point of argument and everything and I swear to God good people it's really just this simple okay to lubricate this gun don't over lubricate the mess out of it see these holes those holes are there for a few different reasons I'm not going to try to you know pretend to know every little tiny articulation of it but the holes are there in case there's a gas ring failure to allow venting of gas forces and they do gas forces do come out of these holes but it's also a great area to just literally you're going to drop just one drop in each hole like that's it and maybe a little more one more and I swear to God the gun is going to self-lubricate if you do that just put a few drops in there this is your bolt stop hold it down we already greased this Notch so we have to worry about that we already greased the trigger and all that good stuff just take like a couple of drops like that that back and forth lock it to the rear see that galling now you don't have to get crazy on this you could probably even run a light grease or a Luber plate or even a copper anti-seize if you wanted to because it's not a super tight fit I mean look at that I mean there's a lot of Tolerance there it's not like it's a super super good tolerance or a super tight fit just throw some freaking Lube on the dang thing you ain't got to do a lot but but you know you can see the shininess where it kind of Galls and rubs and things like that and that's just going to help your sanity oh yeah that's a lot better having a little bit oh yeah you don't feel that greediness and you don't feel that dragging and everything like that um that's way better beautiful all right well that's been our AR-15 cleanup I love the A2 I think it's an awesome gun and um yeah I think we covered things pretty well to the best of our ability here and that will definitely keep your AR running well if you take some of the points into consideration that I went through in this video one more little just tidbit of information it's not really important per se but maybe something folks may not know okay most military Triggers on on ARS you know especially like an old school A2 or something like that or an A1 or or whatever you know something like this usually the weight of the trigger exceeds the weight of the rifle and I don't know why they thought of this or why it was ever a point or whatever uh but we're going to go ahead and check the rifle it's empty obviously we're gonna put the gun on fire all right if this trigger is a military trigger a mil-spec trigger I should be able to hang this rifle from my finger without the gun discharging on semi that's a tall order because I mean this is what like a eight pound rifle nine pound rifle so it'd have to be a pretty decent weight trigger to be able to do that instead of hanging on my finger I'm just look I got my Vise tightened up got this stud here I'm going to try setting it on this Vice right here I'm going to take the weight off of it and let's see if it discharges it does all that really tells me is that this trigger is lighter than a military trigger most military rifles can have the and can support the weight of the rifle with the trigger being on fire which is weird you would think like who who thinks of that but you're talking about Joe okay you're talking about soldiers and Marines like imagine some guy oh I gotta I gotta go hit the head real quick and let me hang my rifle up I mean how many people will hang their rifle by the trigger but they really do think of everything so that's just one little interesting factoid you know might might matter might not and again we could take this Brownells XM 177 all right now granted that this is a a lighter gun okay but let's see if it'll hang without discharging the 177. wow so that's a decent trigger on that gun especially considering how light this rifle is so just something that you can kind of um you know try just to impress your buddies or maybe fail to impress them who knows all right one last thing before we go leg Queen uh the lead cleaning wipes you know since I've been handling all this bull crap you know this is a great thing to have you know you do not want to get all that lead in your body you know and even though you're cleaning a rifle and everything like that there's gonna be lead residue that you're going to have mixed in with that carbon you do not want that stuff to get in your skin now uh you know if you're doing a lot of cleaning with your hands on a regular basis probably would not be a bad idea to just have some nitrile gloves on to protect your hands because you don't want to ingest any of this lead residue okay into your body it can do some very bad things so just make sure you're paying attention to lead exposure all right well there you have it that's your AR um of course these techniques can be used on a wide variety of different AR platforms there's a ton of different stuff out there of course we don't get into like different piston designs in terms of piston guns and things like that but for your di guns this is going to get you like 90 of the way there have a great day many more videos on the way we'll see you soon [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Iraqveteran8888

Views: 53,828

Keywords: iraqveteran8888, iv8888, ar15, ar, ar-15, ar 15, 2a, freedom, liberty, gun rights, gun control, top 5 guns, top 5, meltdown, guns, gunsmithing, gun gripes, life liberty and the pursuit, AR field strip and clean, field stripping an ar, otis techonolgy, otic cleaning kit, otis bone tool, otis military cleaning kit, ar disassembly, ar15 disassembly and clean, gun cleaning, colt a2 sporter, how to clean ar, how to clean ar15

Id: zLPS1vpgJ98

Length: 103min 54sec (6234 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023