Bore cleaners - one more data point

[603Country]

I've been shooting my 220, working on the loads with 60 gr Partitions. Wasn't getting much in the way of decent groups yesterday and it was getting late, so I thought I'd clean the bore. I gave it a good cleaning with Butch's Bore Shine and got all the powder fouling out, along with some copper. The patches looked decent, but before I put it away I decided to make a pass or two with Boretech Eliminator. Wow! Dark blue patches after dark blue patches. Then I'd wet it and let it sit for a half hour and then got more dark blue patches. Left the bore wet last night and this morning got more dark blue patches. The point of this is that if you aren't using a good copper remover, you might think your bore is clean when in reality it is nowhere near clean. Normally I like to have some copper in the bore, but I'm going to remove all of it (I think) and then lay some copper back down. It's a custom barrel, so we'll see how it shoots when really clean.

 

[swampy308]

Just wondering how did it turn out.

 

[Magnum Wheel Man]

I like to "season" my barrels with Kroil before shooting, makes removing all kinds of fouling much easier...

but agree with the copper solvents are often overlooked, & especially needed on over bore cartridges like the swift, 17 Remington, etc.

 

[603Country]

Swampy, it shot just about the same with less copper. Truth is that I never did get all of the copper out. I was still seeing some blue on the patches. I can shoot my Ruger Hawkeye 223 half a day and it won't lay down copper like that 220 will.

With the 220, I was trying to find a great load for the 60 gr Nosler Partition. It wasn't easy to do with the powders I was using, but once I switched powders to Reloader 17, I started getting great grouping. Once I reached that point, I decided that there really wasn't much need to be doubledarnsure that all the copper was out of the bore.

 

[myfriendis410]

I've encountered the same thing myself in the last few years. I am in an area that requires us to use copper and one thing about shooting the Barnes well is to remove the copper fouling. In particular one of my rifles (Browning) needs a thorough scrubbing every 30 rounds or so. I use the CR10 and it takes about 2 hours of repeated applications to get the bore clean. Once I do the rifle shoots into 1/3" but give it 30 rounds and it opens up to 2". My other rifles are far less finicky.