I got a gift card for Gander Mountain for christmas this year, so the other day I went to a store to find something to buy. I ended up buying a jar of Hoppes Elite cleaning gel. The jar stated that the stuff was non-toxic which made me sceptical about how good it was, but I thought I'd give it a try.


The stuff had very little odor- a faint ammonia smell if anything. It was very thick, which I found nice- I'd dip a patch in it, and the stuff wouldn't not drip off all over my shop floor. I took a rifle that I had cleaned previously and followed the directions- ran a patch, waited 5 minutes, brushed with a bronze brush, then ran patches through again. The stuff took a lot of crud out of a bore that I had deemed clean in the past. I spent some time and cleaned 5 more rifles, and 4 out of 5 of them gave up some fouling to the bore cleaner.

I then tried it on a badly pitted and fouled mauser bore- it took me 5 minutes to clean it until it was mostly shiny again. When the rifle was new, I had spent a week trying everything I had including filling the bore with brasso and scrubbing and scrubbing it with JB bore paste, and It ever got this clean.

I'm sold on the stuff.