Quick and easy cleaning after shooting corrosive ammo

I shoot a lot of Yugoslavian 7.62x39 ammo in my AK.  It's corrosive, so I do make sure to clean the gun afterwards, but I think a lot of people spend way too much time and effort on it.  The entire cleaning process shouldn't take longer than about 10 minutes.

Key concepts:
The primers in corrosive ammo contains salts that attract and hold water, causing rust.  The salts are water soluble.   The best way to get rid of them is to wash them away with water.  The idea of 'neutralizing' the salts with ammonia or other chemicals is not necessary, and is dubious as to whether it works at all.   Heating the water or adding soap would help in the cleaning but is more effort and is unnecessary.  We want to make sure that the water we use to clean the gun doesn't get trapped in any nooks and crannies and cause rust itself. So we either displace it with WD-40 or use Ballistol which will protect the gun until after the water evaporates.

Ballistol is a gun oil that emulsifies in water.  When you use Ballistol diluted with water, the water component can dissolve the corrosive salts, and then when/as it evaporates, the oil component is left behind to protect from rust.


I have 2 different procedures that I use, depending on how dirty it is.

Procedure 1, for when it's really dirty:
1) Field strip the gun, and spray everything dirty in the gun with water from a hose, including the bore.  If you can get hot water to come out of your hose, that would be desirable, but if not, cold water is fine. If there are patches of crud that aren't coming off, brush them with a bronze brush while spraying them with water.
2) Run a boresnake through the bore a few times with a light coating of CLP or similar oil on the brush part.  Wash the boresnake later with the hose to get rid of any residual salts.
3) Spray everywhere that water was sprayed with WD-40 to displace the remaining water. This does not include the bore, since the snake + oiling should have taken care of that.
4) Wipe everything down with paper towels.
5) On parts of the gun that need lubrication, add gun oil or grease.  I wouldn't consider the WD-40 a good lube in itself.

Procedure 2, for when it's not that dirty:
1) Field strip the gun. With a spray bottle full of Ballistol diluted 1 part Ballistol to 9 parts water, spray everything dirty in the gun, including the bore.
2) Run a boresnake through the bore a few times with a light coating of CLP or similar oil on the brush part.  Wash the boresnake later with the hose to get rid of any residual salts.
3) Wipe everything down with paper towels
4) Lubricate the gun as needed.

Neither procedure should take more than 10 minutes, and you can probably get it down to less than 5 with practice.

On an AK, the key parts to clean are the chamber and bore, the gas tube, the bolt and bolt carrier, the muzzle brake and the threads on the end of barrel.

I've run my AK during training days where shooting started around 9 am, it was raining the whole day, and I cleaned the gun at about 7 pm, with no rust or corrosion.  I've shot about 1500 - 2000 rounds of the Yugo ammo total. I could probably get by with less cleaning, but this is a level of cleaning that I have found to be fast and effective.

Some other links that you might find useful and are sufficiently lazy for me:

Shooting and cleaning after corrosive ammo (Box of Truth)