My brother and I have virtually identical, heavy-barreled Remington 700 varmint rifles chambered in .22-250 Rem. He cleans his rifle every time he shoots it, even if it is only one shot. His contention is that a perfectly clean barrel will shoot more accurately for a longer number of rounds than a fouled barrel will. It is infrequent for him to shoot more than 10 rounds before he is scrubbing out the bore to prevent copper and carbon from building up.
I keep my ammunition in 100-round boxes, and when I have shot all 100 rounds, I clean the barrel with a bronze brush and a good solvent. Once the solvent sits in the barrel for a few moments, I run three dry patches through it to chase out what’s left and call it a day with a light wipe down of the outside of the gun.
My brother thinks that I am ruining a good rifle by not cleaning it more often than I do, and I think he is going to wear his out by cleaning it so much. Both rifles have just more than 1,000 rounds through them and are still solid groundhog medicine out past 300 yards.
Taking our cleaning habits into consideration, which barrel will last longer?
P.F., via e-mail
Let me explain from a couple of different angles and share a little of my experience gathered over the years in chasing that elusive cleaning combination that works every time on every barrel. Every barrel has its own personality, just like you and your brother do. Some have similar traits and give similar performance overall—and some don’t.
A test that you might consider is to thoroughly clean both barrels in the same manner and shoot several test groups with your best ammunition. Ideally, both should be shot from a rest and under similar conditions. This will give you both a baseline. Keep a record of the groups and replicate the test every so often to see how long the groups stay within your range of acceptability. Since you clean every 100 rounds, it would be interesting to see if the accuracy changes appreciably over the course of those shots fired. My guess is probably not, but you will have to see for yourself.
Your brother, on the other hand, should perform his own test to see if his more frequent cleaning is worth the effort. If he uses a bore guide with a coated cleaning rod and a bronze brush with standard cleaning patches to clean his barrel (starting, of course, from the chamber end), I don’t see how he could wear out anything moving the brush the full length of the bore with each stroke.
From my experience, seemingly identical barrels not only may shoot differently, but respond to cleaning differently as well. The reality is that unless you have access to a bore scope to inspect the inside of the barrel, you really have no idea whether the barrel is clean or not. I know this is heresy and I’ll get a lot of readers taking exception, but I can unequivocally say that I have yet to see a standard barrel, with a box of ammunition through it, that would clean to the base metal on the first cleaning using the conventional and accepted methods to clean a rifle barrel.
The methods I’m talking about are written on the side of every solvent bottle for sale in the gun shop. Their caveat is, if the patches don’t come out clean after the first cleaning procedure, keep cleaning until a clean patch comes out the other end. This could take days and sometimes weeks to accomplish. I’ve done it, and borescoped the barrel after each cleaning to see what progress I had really made. I was disappointed in the time it took to get to the base metal because it took a lot more work and time than I had anticipated.
Over the years, it was thought that copper was the perpetrator of inaccuracy in a rifle, and in many cases, it was—to a degree. Now we find that a little bit of copper is desirable in an accurate-shooting barrel. Carbon build-up, however, can hinder accuracy and is often tougher to remove from the barrel. In one of my test barrels, accuracy was detrimentally affected by a carbon buildup just less than 2 inches in front of the chamber. At the time, I had to use a mild abrasive to remove the buildup, as no solvent I had access to would touch it. Each time the carbon was removed, the barrel’s accuracy was restored until the buildup re-occurred in a few hundred rounds and the abrasive had to be used to remove it again.
A clean barrel doesn’t have to be perfectly clean to be accurate. In fact, even benchrest shooters shoot fouling shots after cleaning, but before they shoot for record.
You and your brother can keep doing what you are doing without worrying about which barrel will last the longest. As long as you hit your targets when you do your part, it will be moot. Odds are that it will be a long time before you find the answer to your question of which barrel will last the longest. Let me know when you find out.
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