Perfect Barrel - Proof of "leading in" after cleaning ??

[Lol Moore]

So I have been messing with barrels, what i want to try to do is make a mediocre barrel into one of those hard to find "keepers".

The plan longer term is to get a polygonal barrel for one of my rifles and polish it to a mirror finish, i just think Poly barrels will be easier to deal with - I believe Cardew and Whiscombe both found true rifling (cut or button) was just too much for air rifles and that just scratches were enough to provide adequate rotation, probably why FX have gone the "smooth bore with a tad of poly" at the end route.

Anyway, I digress, the first step was to get a full VFG cleaning kit, rod, intense & normal felts, cleaning compound and Lupus grease, I will be using this to eventually polish a barrel.

So I have a recently aquired used rifle that is quite accurate but not sure of its history, I can see the barrel is dirty, to the naked eye it looks like the lands are shiney but the grooves are grey (lead) coloured. Over the chrony its doing 795ft/s avereage with a spread over 30 shots of around 8ft/s so not to bad.

So just got the kit so had to go and play for an hour, instructions for use of the kit are sketchy so I freestyled somewhat, cleaned with the gun assembled.

- put 3 intensive felts through and they went from very dirty dark grey to dirty
- then 3 intensives with cleaning compound on, these went from very black to just black
- so then tried 10 normal felts with cleaning compound on and these went from very very black to black
- then tried 3 normal felts with Lupus on thes went from grey to slightly grey
- finally 3 dry felts these went from grey to clean

Looking down the barrel it now appeared mirror clean

So thought I would have a look at the Chrony:

- first 10 shots were 740 to 745ft/s
- next 20 shots steadily climbed to 770ft/s
- next 30 shots slowly climbed to 780ft/s and levelled out

One thing I did notice is that the grey fouling was visible to the naked eye very quickly, the shiny mirror finish was gone within the first 10 shots

Not sure if the mirror bit is good or the grey bit is good, it may be mirror finish is not ideal on rifled barrels, but may be in a Poly - if you see what i mean?

So the cleaning has definately had an effect, not sure about accuracy, will have a play the weekend

Has anyone else "played" with intensive cleaning?

I will report back

[Charlts]

Yep, it cost me £150 for a new barrel.

[ChrisC]

Yep, it cost me £150 for a new barrel.

Same here and 30 quid for a re-crown. This was for a very early model Steyr.

Mind you my cleaning regime was pretty intensive with many pull throughs after every shoot and using the VFG kit once a month. Now i only pull through once a month and will only use the VFG once a year.

The VFG routine i got with my kit (although cannot find the doc anymore) was to use the intense cleaning felts and blue paste, concentrating mostly on the first 20 cm of the barrel (breech end), use pull throughs until clean. Then to use a normal felt covered in lupus grease and very, very slowly draw it through the barrel, leave for 30 mins and then remove with pull throughs.

[iceni1]

Do you not find some pellets are dirtier than others, I have only ever used Crossman and Accupells as i find them a hard alloy as opposed to JSBs.
To be honest i haver never cleaned a air gun barrel in 55 years of shooting, All my fire arms yes to get rid of the corrosive materiels.
For a test just fired one of those felt pellets thru my Panther and it is as clean as a whistle, Shot count on this barrel is over 25k

[Lol Moore]

Do you not find some pellets are dirtier than others, I have only ever used Crossman and Accupells as i find them a hard alloy as opposed to JSBs.
To be honest i haver never cleaned a air gun barrel in 55 years of shooting, All my fire arms yes to get rid of the corrosive materiels.
For a test just fired one of those felt pellets thru my Panther and it is as clean as a whistle, Shot count on this barrel is over 25k

Interestingly I have found with the shoot through felts that the longer you leave it between cleans the cleaner the felts look when used

It could be that as the deposits are begining to be laid down the felts can take them off, but as the deposits become "established" the felts struggle.

I am wondering if after 25K shots you have very little rifling grooves left, they may be full of lead and you are shooting a Poly barrel

[sharpsman]

Yep, it cost me £150 for a new barrel.

That remark made me laugh.

[iceni1]

Interestingly I have found with the shoot through felts that the longer you leave it between cleans the cleaner the felts look when used

It could be that as the deposits are begining to be laid down the felts can take them off, but as the deposits become "established" the felts struggle.

I am wondering if after 25K shots you have very little rifling grooves left, they may be full of lead and you are shooting a Poly barrel

The pellets are far to soft to wear the barrel, Unlike some of the jacketed bullets you use in some firearms.
For instance pull any car engine down even after 100k miles and you will see the Honing marks in the bottom of the bore were the Rings do not travel but the alloy pistons do.

[ChrisC]

The pellets are far to soft to wear the barrel, Unlike some of the jacketed bullets you use in some firearms.
For instance pull any car engine down even after 100k miles and you will see the Honing marks in the bottom of the bore were the Rings do not travel but the alloy pistons do.

Yep, maybe true. Some barrels group better when clean but it's finding the perfect balance of keeping a clean barrel but not letting your cleaning regime damage the crown.

[Lol Moore]

The pellets are far to soft to wear the barrel, Unlike some of the jacketed bullets you use in some firearms.
For instance pull any car engine down even after 100k miles and you will see the Honing marks in the bottom of the bore were the Rings do not travel but the alloy pistons do.

I never mentioned wear, I was saying the grooves could be "full" of lead, not the lands worn away

[landymick]

I only ever clean my barrels if i feel there is a loss in accuracy or been used in the rain.

[junglie]

I've only had to do it once, luckily it was a chuntsman (chinese daystate old huntsman copy). I'd ruled out everything else that could affect accuracy before resorting to this. I used the phospher bronze brush with a little penetrating oil on & ran it down the bore 2 or 3 times following the twist of the rifling. This showed fine rust when I cleaned it. I shot a few rollup filters through to clean the oil out,then very carefully so as not to damage the crown polished the bore with a few patches with a little solvol autosol on the first one. I then cleaned all traces of it from the barrel. It resulted in a .22 barrel that groups as well as any & better than some right out to 60yds & much less pellet fussy than for example the bsa on my sons R10. Took about 50 shots with jsbs to re-lead in after but was grouping much better with no fliers from the first 10 shots. I just used rods but I wrapped the steel rod with tape & did it with the gun clamped vertically & was very careful to keep the rods central to the bore so as not to damage the crown.

[Greenfingers]

my airwolf barrel needs a good pullthrough after about 1000 rounds or accuracy goes to pot.. each gun is diferent as my old hw80 never needed a clean.

[gibboj]

intresting, I have heard that shooter that fire powder burners [pistols or rifles] suffer a lot until the barrels are leaded in , there are some good vids on youtube about hand lapping barrels in using melted / set lead on a wire pull through with some grinding paste on it to remove hight spots and lands .and I have heard of a world champion hft/ft shooter used to highly polish his barrels with some form of solvo-autosol to a mirror finish. when you think about it it all makes sence, anything to keep the pellet / bullet stable and spinning and not putting nicks in it can only be a good thing
atb john

[Amac]

I also used to give the barrel of my competition rifle a "good rodding" with felts and the blue cleaning paste every week. However, after reading about how so many shooters have damaged and ruined barrels as a result, I ditched that method and now only use, once per week, Napier pull through paper lightly lubed with LT1. It usually takes seven or eight patches to fully get rid of JSB body materials, but the gun shoots well and appears fully "leaded up" and ready for action after about 15-20 shots on the zeroing range.

I am sure that the gun would still shoot accurately if I didn't bother cleaning her for weeks. Problem is, if you don't clean the barrel and it goes off during a competition, your basically b------d. Hence the preventative cleaning regime that I am sure is part of a lot of competition shooters regular gun maintenance programmes.

Andy

[Jimsiss]

I've played with barrels a fair bit and found you only really need to clean them when the accuracy starts to suffer.

As for polishing, I've only had to really polish one barrel and that was a friends Webley Raider 10 shot in .177. Wouldn't group with any pellet, spread was about 20 inches at 15 yards on a new gun (but been sat in a shop for years). Got it down to under 1 inch groups at 25yards by polishing the whole barrel lightly and then set on improving it down to 1/2 inch groups by polishing the choke extensively. The barrel itself was rusty internally and full of bluing/manufacturing residue before I started, all patches came out dark brown

As for leading in the barrel, it depends on the barrel contact surfaces as to how much of a difference it makes. All barrels have manufacturing marks in them, quality barrels less so. I've got a barrel from a rapid I've just bought on here, came dirty so I cleaned it, looks like someone let it go rusty around the muzzle end as it's heavily pitted on the rifling. The lead covered that up so it probably shot well enough after quite a few leading in shots as the lead will eventually be compacted into the imperfections and smoothed over.

A smoother barrel will need less of this to get it to its peak efficiency. Lead being self lubricating to a degree will help improve the FPS until the friction levels even out.