If you have a barrel that doesn’t seem to foul excessively…
How often do you try to remove the copper fouling?
Most will say not until you notice a change in accuracy that’s measurable from your shooting logged performance. That may vary for your barrel, stated round counts seems to be over 500.
Yeah… makes sense. It came up when Pappabear was watching the Magpul Precision shooting video. He says Home Boy doesn’t worry about copper that much… more concerned with carbon fouling.
Cold bore vs Clean Bore…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SICfh6iYkpQ
If you remove copper, you’re changing the bearing surface of the barrel. I don’t remove copper unless I start to get accuracy problems. Carbon gets removed after every range trip. Just a shot of degreaser and brush, patch until clean, run an oil patch, then a clean patch…done.
No question that the carbon gets cleaned… I’m going to leave the copper alone for a while though.
I played around with my AI and the Bartlein barreled 700 and nothing matters concerning cleaning methods in regards to the cold bore or clean cold bore.
From my experience, barrel quality is the main ingredient.
I shot a shilen barrel that you could clean out of whack… but it’d settle back in in 3 shots.
Our factory 700s stack holes out of the gate.
Which was more or less the message in the video. If you start with quality, you’ll end with the same.
That’s great for a factory Remington. The 300wm I had was a great barrel as well.
Cleaning is so much easier also. Maybe not the best analogy, but it’s a lot easier to wipe mud from glass than a brick.
Never, and I don’t break them in either. After accuracy drops off (My 308 is around 600 with Varget or 8208 on a Bartlein…not sure on my new 260 as I have 500 on a Kreiger and it still bugholes), I use a squirt of Gunslick Foaming Bore Cleaner, 20 minutes of rest, and 5-7 patches. If i’m in a hurry, then a bore snake will suffice.
My 223ai went 800 on the barrel (Rock) before I cleaned because I couldn’t stand it.
Yeah… I’m going to cry when I have to replace my Rem 700 barrel.
When l rebarreld last time l said l wasnt gonna clean the bore until accuracy falls off. I’m over 2k rounds still shoots as well as l can.
For clarity, what do you guys mean by clean?
From what I got from the video I posted was that clean was all carbon AND copper removed.
After my range trips, the only thing I do is remove carbon.
When accuracy suffers.
Only when accuracy is affected.
The standard answer is when accuracy falls off and I agree with that completely.
But I think it’s important to be able to make an educated guess on when that will be.
If you shoot your barrel / ammo combination often enough, after a period of time you will know about how many rounds it’s going to take before accuracy falls off and you have to clean the bore.
Let’s say I know that GUN X + AMMO Y generally starts to have its groups open up at about 750 rounds, obviously +/- some.
If I have 650 down the tube since the last decoppering and I have a week long outing coming up, I’ll clean the bore even though I have not noticed accuracy starting to drop off yet.
This may be obvious to everybody and perhaps it was implied along with “when accuracy falls off.” I’m just saying that it’s important to have a general idea of when that will be.
Hodgdon has a new powder out called CFE 223 “copper fouling eraser” that is ideal for 204 ruger, 223, 22-250, and 308. Looks interesting.
Billy Mays would be selling it if he were still around. :sarcastic:
On my AI and Surgeon, I only clean it when the accuracy falls off. On some of my remingtons, they foul so much more and accuracy falls off much quicker so I clean them more often.