Smyth Busters: Do You Really Need a Chamber Brush?

"C'mon, you don't need a chamber brush. A bore brush'll do fine. It's just a way for Brownells to sell ya more cleaning stuff." That's what "they" say on the Internet... But is it true? Do you need a dedicated brush designed to clean the chamber of your gun? Let's find out what Caleb and Steve have to say! The truth is, cleaning the bore but not cleaning all the gunk out of your pistol's / rifle's / shotgun's / revolver's chamber is basically leaving the cleaning job half done. The chamber does just as much work as the bore, and you'll pay a price down the line for a cruddy chamber: extraction problems, failures to feed, and more.

Chamber cleaning is particularly important on a gun like the AR-15, where the bolt lugs lock into recesses behind the chamber. The AR-15 needs a specialized chamber brush, but on ANY gun - even those that shoot straight-walled cartridges - the chamber is a larger diameter than the bore. So the bore brush's bristles aren't long enough to properly scrub the chamber. Hence the need for a special chamber brush.

If you shoot shorter cartridges in your revolver (for example, .38 Special in a .357 Magnum gun), you'll encounter another problem, which Steve explains for us. Special note about .22 rimfire guns: the bore and the chamber ARE the same diameter, so for those guns the bore brush WILL clean the chamber, too.