My cousin called last week letting me know he'd bought a new-to-him Ruger MKII and wanted to set up a range time for us to go shoot together. I told him I would but he needed to BYOB (bring your own bullets), so we scheduled to meet up one afternoon.
I pulled three of my MKII's out of the vault, reminding myself to grab both MKII standard magazines and MKII 22/45 magazines. We had a great time, but my cousin's MKII standard with 4 inch tapered barrel was experiencing a few failure to feeds and jamming up the works, while I was not having any problems with any of mine. Eventually, I asked him if he wanted me to take a look so he handed it over. After making sure the gun was clear I gave it a visual once over and asked him if he'd field stripped it and cleaned it yet.
"No," he replied. I've never had one apart and I hear they're a bugger bear to get back together.
I guess I didn't conceal my rolling eyes very well because he looked at me and said "what?"
"Hey, my boys were field stripping and cleaning mine when they were 8 or 9 years old. If they can do it, I can teach you to do it."
He followed me home and I took him to my gun cleaning workbench. I pulled one of my MKII's from the bag, made sure it was clear, and told him to watch me field strip, clean, and put it back together. After I reassembled it, I told him to pull his out and do the same to it. After making sure his was clear, he field stripped it with no problem. I coached him through a proper cleaning, and with it being pre-owned, it looked as though it had never been field stripped. Who knows, maybe that's why the previous owner sold it. Once we got all the built up gunk out of it and cleaned it up, he put it back together correctly on the first try.
"Hey, that wasn't so hard," he said.
"Very good, now you can practice on my other two pistols."
I handed him my MKII 22/45 and told him the process was the same. He walked right through the disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly without a hitch. I then handed him my MKII Target with bull barrel and again he got it apart, cleaned, and back together without a hitch.
As I'm watching him clean up the last one I'm thinking, maybe some of these grown men who whine about how hard MKII's are to deal with just need a little mentoring. In all fairness, maybe they didn't have a dad or grandpa like my boys did to show them.
