Few of us clean our guns as often as we should. If you’re a long range precision shooter, there’s a good chance you actually clean your rifle(s) after each range session. But how many of us have come back from an afternoon of shooting our carry gun, maybe the favorite K-frame and the home defense pistol and promised ourselves we’d scrub them down after dinner…only to get involved in a hockey game or a movie, leaving them to molder in the safe until the next time we head to the range?
So let’s stipulate that most of us really don’t clean our guns as often as we’d like. Particularly if you own something like a Ruger Mark I-III that’s, let’s say, a challenge to take down and put back together again. While we’ve heard of people who take their guns to a gunsmith occasionally for a detail strip and full spa treatment, northern Virginia’s High Caliber Weapons Detailing — a mobile cleaning services that comes to you — was new to us.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Steven Gutowski makes a good case for the service:
When I first heard about the concept of having somebody come to my home to clean my guns, I thought, “Well, that’s a nice idea for rich folks with more guns than time.” But when High Caliber Weapons Detailing showed up to my apartment, I realized there’s a lot more to it than that.
I’m not necessarily a man who hates cleaning his guns. I absolutely love the smell of Hoppe’s 9. My BoreSnakes and Rem Cloth keep my guns in good shape with a nice sheen between deep cleans.
Like any honest gun owner, however, I can admit that I don’t do a deep clean of all my guns as often as I would like. If I’m being completely honest, I’ve never stiped my Ruger 10/22 or my Remington 870 Express to do a deep clean. And, like most gun owners, I’ve had my guns get dirty enough to affect their function.
It ain’t cheap. There’s a $75 set-up fee to get them to come out if you have fewer than 10 guns that need scrubbing. Then it’s $40 for each handgun and $55 for long guns.
But if you have a good sized collection and no time to keep them clean and in good working order, that could be money well spent. So would you? No matter how much you may enjoy cleaning your own pistols, revolvers, rifles and scatterguns, would you pay someone else to do it for you?