Graduate to One Piece Cleaning Rods
Dr. John Woods 06.13.15
Sometimes in life you have to learn lessons the hard way. For years and years I cleaned all of my hunting rifles, shotguns, rimfire plinking rifles, and survival prepping/varmint ARs with two or even three piece jointed cleaning rods. I bet you have too and learned just like I did the problems with using these sectioned rods for gun barrel cleaning.
First on the list of bad characteristics of the jointed cleaning rods is the inherent weakness they have in driving a cleaning patch from the breech end down to the muzzle. On more than one occasion I have had a jointed rod seize up inside the barrel. Either the patch was too large or some phenomenon with the cleaning solution caused the rod to lock down. Then the force needed to either reverse the direction of the rod or push it out the other end could not be mustered with regular arm driving pressure. This then resulted in having to apply short strokes of a rubber mallet on the hammer to get the wet patch out the muzzle end. I don’t even want to know of the jointed edges of the rod sections rubbed up against the barrel rifling causing damage.
Twice I can recall trying to push a two piece rod through a tight bore when the rod simply collapsed and broke off at the threaded coupling point. This action resulted in using lockdown pliers to extract the piece of the rod already inserted part way into the bore.
So, finally I broke down and bought a high quality one piece, heavy duty, coated stainless steel rifle cleaning rod and my troubles ended. With a one piece rod you can carefully apply sufficient torque to push a tight patch clear of the muzzle. Now I have bought a second one piece rod to handle the .22 caliber bores.
If you are still using the old weak, cheap, screw together gun cleaning rods, then do yourself a favor and trash them in favor of good one piece rods. You’ll see the difference the first time you use one.
