A lesson learned - Moderators

by **Jubbles** » Sun Mar 19, 2017 9:01 am

While perusing a gun shop near my GF's family home a gent walked in and asked for help resolving an issue with his rifle.

Said rifle (Howa 1500 in .223) was not extracting cases and he was having to knock them out with a ram rod.

On inspection the shop owners could not physically remove the moderator from the end of his rifle.

When asked when he had last cleaned the rifle it appeared he never did. The result of this being that the carbon in the moderator had drawn water into it, the barrel and the chamber.

This corroded everything and would require at minimum a chamber polish, 3-4 inches off the end of the barrel, re-crowning, and re-threading of the barrel. Possibly with a trip to the proof house.

So learn the lesson, take your mods off when not in use and clean your guns

by **Ray7756** » Sun Mar 19, 2017 11:50 am

Sounds like he would be cheaper buying a new rifle, thats what he gets for being a lazy sod :die:

Ray

by **Jubbles** » Sun Mar 19, 2017 12:03 pm

Absolutely, I think people forget that the inside surface area of a moderator is BIG and plrovides a lot of space to capture moisture.

In fairness I a lot of people post on the internet about how they don't bother to clean their guns and this undoubtedly has convinced people to do daft things.

by **flintlok** » Sun Mar 19, 2017 3:36 pm

I always do a gun maintenance cleaning every time I shoot a firearm. I don't go crazy but the bore is cleaned and oiled and the gun is wipe down with oil as a preservative. I don't use moderators and if I did they would get cleaned too. I can see letting gunk build up in any machine. I have a buddy who never cleaned his AR 15 and wore the gun action to junk. I had to replace all of the trigger mechanism and certain bolt parts. The bolt's gas rings were paper thin and the hammer looked like it had been mashed. I have AR's with tons more rounds through them and the don't seem to have 5 percent the wear that his gun exhibited.