gun maintenance - My Gun Culture

Goop, Gunk & Good Sense: Cleaning and Testing for Reliability

By Tom McHale|2025-11-25T11:50:10-05:00November 25th, 2025|

Gun cleaning marketing suffers from the same problem as diet fads: spiffy photography and sometimes questionable science. Some products are game-changers in extreme environments; most are not. For average users, what separates success from failure isn’t a proprietary magic chemical. It’s far more mundane. You know, stuff like good cleaning habits, proper placement of lubrication, and simple functional checks.

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Shooter’s Choice Universal Cleaning Kit

By Tom McHale|2025-06-23T15:02:47-04:00June 23rd, 2025|

This kit is an OCD delight. I know because I’m the kind of guy who (usually) maintains an organized workbench and folders all his thousands of emails by topic. Yes, really.

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What You Need to Know About Loctite

By Tom McHale|2025-05-28T13:57:37-04:00May 28th, 2025|

Loctite is an adhesive often used in the gunsmith trade. It can secure threads to various degrees of permanence, so it can be critical to select the formula that works best for your application.

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Handiest Bench Block for Gun Maintenance?

By Tom McHale|2024-11-15T11:50:33-05:00November 14th, 2024|

This nifty little accessory from OTIS Technology is one of those things I end up using all the time. It’s made from hard rubber, so it won’t mar your firearm and has 11 holes for driving out pins and such. Different “groove” cutouts on both sides keep things like barrels, slides and frames still while you're cleaning or doing routine maintenance.

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1,2,3,4… I Declare a Gun Lube War

By Tom McHale|2022-11-13T15:26:40-05:00November 13th, 2022|

Like all those “Housewives of Toad Suck, Arkansas” reality TV shows, capitalism is subject to the immutable and universal laws of unintended consequences. Take the gun lube market, for instance. We all need it, and presumably, there’s always room for a better mouse grease trap. So, in theory, I have no real problem with the onslaught of miracle gun lube products. Entrepreneurs everywhere have figured out you can package stuff auto repair shops purchase by pallet-loads of 55-gallon drums into teeny, tiny, plastic bottles with eyedropper attachments and charge a per-ounce price equivalent to platinum, and, these days, gasoline. It is not unusual for a container small enough to legally carry on an airplane to cost $15, $25 or even $40. If a container won’t cause anxiety and suffering among TSA agents, it’s small indeed.

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