[Citizen Carrier]

I use brake or carb cleaner to routinely clean guns.

And those chemicals smell remarkably similar to something like Birchwood Casey "Gun Scrubber" or other similar spray cleaners you find at gun shops.

I suspect they are near chemically identical. They are not identical in price though.

Just make sure you remove any plastic or wood grips or the stock if it is a rifle you are cleaning. Most "gun cleaners" stipulate doing that as well.

That's one thing I like about the Rugers. Aside from the grips, everything else on the gun is metal. No plastics.

Until I switched to the Pardini match pistol, I used a Ruger Mk II "slabsides" extensively in weekly rimfire bullseye matches. This was the method I used to clean them and I never had a "dirt related" misfire or jam.

I believe I first encountered the "brake cleaner" suggestion years ago when reading an article in "Gun Tests" about the Ruger guns. That was how the staff of that magazine cleaned their Rugers.

In my experience, and this is with both Mk II and III pistols, the only recurring problem was what I call "The Ruger Stovepipe". What would happen is that an extracted case would impact the left lip of the magazine before it hit the ejector. This would cause the spent case to tumble in the action and lodge. The case would be sticking open end out with the rimmed base still in the action with the bolt closing on it.

I had this happen on both my II and III pistols and I witnessed it in my friend's Mk II as well.

It was an easy fix. I just put the magazines in a vice and carefully removed small amounts of metal from the left magazine lip. Then I chambered a round, and watched as I slowly pulled the bolt back to extract it. When I could see enough metal had been removed to insure the case would always hit the ejector and never the magazine, the pistol worked 100% save the occasional dud round commonly encountered with .22 rimfire ammunition.