Since the question was asked about cleaning tank guns… Here you go, Homebru!

Gun cleaning is an essential part of shooting. Today, before I leave the range after shooting, I usually run a patch soaked with Ed’s Red, a homebrew cleaning agent, through the barrel, then when I get home, I carefully clean the barrel.

With a tank, things are not quite so handy. For one thing, the barrel is fixed to the tank and weighs a couple of tons. Second, it’s twenty-odd feet long. Third (and we’ll talk about the 105mm gun on the M60A1), it’s over four inches in diameter. So it’s not going to be a one man job. You’re not going to do it sitting cross-legged on the floor of your den.

The best bet is to start the process while the barrel is still hot from firing, but the procedure is much the same, hot or cold: The crew starts by opening up one of the “sponson boxes” on the fender of the tank. According to the published plan, the rammer staff sections are in the left forward sponson box. We had five sections, hollow aluminum, about an inch and a half in diameter, about six feet long, threaded male on one end, female on the other.

We screwed them together end to end and ended up with a thiry-foot cleaning rod. Then we pulled out the cleaning brush. This was, of course, of a diameter to be a very snug fit to the gun’s bore, with a solid center and short bristles around its perimeter. It was about two inches long and had an eye on one side and a male threaded fitting on the other which screwed into the rammer staff.

Add to the necessities a quart can of mil-spec bore solvent and a pile of old rags, and we were ready to start. One guy got into the turret and stood off to one side of the open breech to help things by retrieving fallen rags and to realign the brush when it came out. On the other end was the rammer staff crew. Since this was tough job, we usually combined the crews of two tanks to get the manpower necessary to “punch the tubes”. So four or five guys grabbed the end of the rammer staff. One guy held up the brush and poured a glug of bore cleaner on it and guided it into the muzzle. And then it was pure manual labor.

It usually took a good GRUNT to get the brush to moving down the barrel, and then you pushed it all the way to the breech end. the inside guy would make sure it was aligned at the breech end, then you’d give things a heave and pull it all the way back out. If you had a new brush, this was pretty tough work. but a new brush did a better job. Still, most tanks kept a worn old brush around for the next step. ( on a side note, for “cleaning” when the gun hadn’t been fired, we’d just use the old brush. Without rags, two guys could punch it through. It met the requirement on the maintenance schedule that said “Clean main gun.”)

After a few brushings, we’d take the old, loose brush, wrap a couple of rags around it, and punch these through. The inside guy’d make sure they didn’t fall off inside the turret. Then, if everything looked clean, a clean rag with a little engine oil was the last thing through, coating the inside of the barrel for protection.

But that wasn’t the end of it. You still had two more tasks. First, remember that you’d just pushed a nasty, dirty brush through the breech? Well, now you had to disassemble the breech and clean it. This wasn’t rocket science. There weren’t but a handful of parts. But while the breach bolt of a rifle might weigh 8 ounces, the breechblock of a 105 weighed 90 pounds. Fortunately, every tank was issued a little chain hoist specifically for this task. so we’d take it apart, clean and lube everything, inspect it all to make sure it’d work the next time. And before we reassembled everything, somebody’d take a rag and carefully cleant eh chamber of the gun. This was like doing a vaginal exam on an elephant… you had to reach your arm way up a big dark hole and wipe and feel around. Then we put that end back together.

The last task was to clean the bore evacuator. The bore evacuator is the chamber around the barrel fo the gun. Its function is to bleed off a small amount of gases as the gun is fired, then to release them back into the barrel in such a direction as to help suck the fumes out of the barrel and turret. It worked pretty well, but got dirty in the process. So a retaining ring had to be screwed off, the chamber knocked towards the muzzle with a sledgehammer and a block of wood, the the inside of the chamber and the outside of the barrel which was subject to the gases was cleaned. The inside of the chamber was cleaned by wiping it out with rags and solvent, followed by a light coat of oil. The outside of the barrel was leaned similarly, except we learned that a piece of rope soaked with bore solvent and coated with a little sand would make this go faster if it was wrapped halfway around the barrel and pulled back and forth, shoeshine fashion.

By this time, the main gun was clean. If you’d been doing machine gun work, you still had one or two of them to clean too, but after punching out a 105, a .50 caliber machine gun was like working on a watch… The 7.62mm M73 or M219 (quite possibly the worst machinegun ever adopted by the US Army) was even smaller.

And so you ended your day in tanker fashion. Or maybe not.

You still had to check the tracks. Each track had 160 end connectors, each with a 15/16 head bolt just waiting to fall out, and 80 centerguides, each looking for all the world like the roots of a giant steel tooth, and each with a big nut in the middle that had to be checked for tightness. You might even need to check and adjust track tension, which required a wrench that tankers lovingly referred to as “Little Joe”, three feet long and weighing forty pounds.

Then there was the engine: Check and top off the engine oil. The transmission oil. Drain the sumps on the fuel filters. Pray like hell that you didn’t have to beat out the elements on the air cleaners.

Then get inside the turret and tidy things up. Check the hydraulic oil in the turret power system and recoil system and top those off it they needed it. Check the batteries under the turret floor. Haul off the assorted trash accumulated during the day.

So now you had a nice clean happy tank to put to bed for the night. You also had a crew sullied by the drips and splatters of half a dozen different petroleum products and coated with the dust that a tank can raise even in a rainstorm. And unfortunately, the army did not seem to take as much care with providing cleaning products for the crew…