Rumor Doctor blog archive
How do you keep your rifle working in the desert?
Published: August 20, 2010
When it comes to how much weapons lubricant troops should use, there is what the rule book says, and there's what troops have learned from experience.
In 2006, a civilian gun tech in Iraq told the Rumor Doctor that most of the weapons he had to fix broke because they did not have enough weapons lubricant applied to them.
"A dry weapon will attract dust and when you fire it, it will gum up," said Samuel Harder, who worked at the small-arms repair shop at Balad.
But since then, The Doctor has talked to troops who say that using too much lubricant in a hot and dusty environment will cause a rifle to jam. They said the standard-issue lubricant, known as CLP, attracts dust, grit and carbon, all of which can cause jams.
One soldier said that in dusty environments, he uses a dry rag to wipe down most of his rifle and then puts a little CLP on his finger and rubs it on the bolt until it glistens.
So The Rumor Doctor tried to get an official ruling. The Army tells soldiers to put enough CLP "so that it can be spread with a finger" on the internal moving parts of a rifle, said Debi Dawson, a spokeswoman for PEO Soldier, the Army's center for advanced equipment.
Studies have shown that M-16 and M-4 rifles perform better in the desert with a heavy coating of weapons lubricant, Dawson said in an e-mail.
A Marine Corps expert agreed with the Army and declined to add anything further.
Gunsmith Jack Landis also said that rifles need a good coating of weapons lubricant, but he acknowledged that lubricant attracts dirt and dust. He said the solution is not to use less CLP, but to clean your rifle more often.
"What you do is you use [CLP] to clean the gun with and you wipe it down with it and then you wipe it off and go on - it doesn't mean pouring in a ton of the stuff," said Landis, of the American Gunsmith Institute.
Still, The Rumor Doctor knows that troops believe less lubricant is better in desert environment, and all the officials and experts in the world aren't going to dissuade them.
THE RUMOR DOCTOR'S DIAGNOSIS: The debate over more versus less CLP will never go away. Trust your experience and your senior NCOs.
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