Clean As A Whistle

My 2024 deer hunting season looms this coming weekend, and guaranteed I’ll be out there somewhere looking to notch a tag.

As I’ve grown older, I always look at each season as if it might be my last. I want everything to be perfect, from the carefully measured loads in my .30-06 to the sparkling clean bore in my sixgun. Probably tucked inside my parka will be a .22-caliber pistol “just in case” some blue grouse is dumb enough to stroll in front of me.

As this season loomed, my pal Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, introduced me to a product I’d never tried before, which didn’t seem possible. After all, I’ve been cleaning guns since I was about 12 years old, using everything from commercial patches, bronze bristle brushes and bore mops to torn-up pieces of old T-shirts tied to a string with an old hairpin at the other end to provide enough weight to bring the string down through the bore to be pulled out.

After all, I’ve gone through bags of my favorite cloth patches from Otis, and even have a new one waiting to crack open for a final trip through the bore before I head down the road to put a fouling shot down my barrel. Then it’s off to camp.

But on a table in Gottlieb’s office were a few bags of little cleaning plugs called BarrelBuddy push-through barrel cleaners. Almost weightless, these things are made from some kind of foam and white polymer with a rough front end for holding a bit of bore solvent followed by the foam plug which picks up the residue.

“Take a bag or two and try them out,” he said. So, I did.