THAT was hilarious!
What a visual! Ha!
:D
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Yeah, for testing purposes is one thing....I'm still happy to let somebody else do that! :p
Ther was one such incident, several years ago, involving a Marine with an element of 4th Recon Bn tooling around up in Alaska. He forgot to drain, and popped off a round. Not pretty.
That's part of it but even with new weapons that didn't have time to have the surface finishes cleaned 'properly';)
We still had issues with areas that the user couldn't access legally:
Most of the issues centered around a white crusty oxidation (?) and some rust.
Slave pins in the lower receivers, the detents/springs holding the takedown pins in, the inner workings of the rear sights.......basically every piece of metal that wasn't aluminum (some of the aluminum got the white crusty crap also).
While these things are no brainers to most here, allowing an Infantry company to completely take apart the rifle is a no-go.
This is the way to do it guys. Lower the muzzle and pull back on the charging handle slightly just to open and allow the water to run out, I would only add when you release the charging handle hit your forward assist to make sure the bolt is fully closed. I have run M16's in very heavey rain, streams, etc. As long as you get the water out it will keep on working. First chance you get, clean the weapon as soon as possible, feasable!
This may sound crazy, but when I was with 2nd Force Recon, Camp Gieger, after a while training we would take our NEW M16, (we had just switch over from the M3A1 .45 cal., which had hardly had any protective finish left....
Anyway we would take the 16 into the shower with us and with the hottest water possible, just hit everything. Then we would hang the rifle up and as the water was hot it evaporated pretty fast, then we would clean as maintenance required. The washing got rid of most sand, dust, dirt, etc.
That works, we did that with the 16s in our sniper platoon but.....it won't fly in a Smallboat Company...while the Marines were authorized to wear UDT shorts and black running shorts while we were the walking dead.....running the rifles in saltwater was operationally required....for some reason, back a Horno...the unknowning would not allow hot water to be used because the weapons would rust.....we were able to 'accidently' get a fresh water rinse while we were fresh water rinsing the LRRCs but not to the level that the weapons needed.
On the Ogden we were able to use the Boatswain's high pressure air hoses...these worked very well.
Makes sense to me - hot, soapy water is one of the best things to clean a black powder firearm with, and BP is notoriously corrosive. Of course you want to dry and lube everything ASAP, but especially around salt water it makes sense to me. I recently bought an M16 upper that have the worst pitting I've ever seen on a barrel, and the FSB has the front sight post rusted into it - I'm not even going to try to turn it out - it's that bad. The rest of the upper is pretty sweet, so it's going to get cut down into a dedicated .22LR - I'll take pics though next chance I get. It looks like it was stored barrel down in the bilge of a Thai pirate ship for 20 years...