Ever thought about using steel wool?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
JRLesan
Have used both brass and nylon brushes along with Butch's, Shooter's Choice, Sweet's, and Tactical Advantage to name just a few. Comments...
If you're not terrified at the very idea of using steel wool wrapped around a brush to scrub your bore, you can give that a try and see if you feel there's any resulting improvement.
When I helped the attempt to get the carcass of the defunct Montana Rifle Company running again, starting with barrel manufacturing on those old surplus Springfield Armory Pratt & Whitney gun drills, first thing I did was track down some of the former workers who had been there through the Remington ownership period as well. When they assured me they hand lapped all rifle barrels, I couldn't figure out how that was possible. Turns out their version of "hand lapping" was scrubbing the hell out of the rifled barrel blank to remove drilling and reaming tool marks sufficiently to meet whatever the quality standard MRC had. I mean SCRUB: two fisted handles on those cleaning rods.
I was beyond sceptical, so at the end of one work day I took a scrap barrel, pinned it to determine the bore diameter, then went to town scrubbing the hell out of that barrel with steel wool, just as the barrel shop workers were doing. It took a LONG, LONG time to open that barrel up to accept the next bigger size .0005" pin gauge in the shop sets. .0005" pin gauges are available for about $5/ each from Amazon if you can't get them locally. I have a range of three or four successive sizes for the rifle calibers I cast bullets for.
I have no idea what the result on a frosted barrel might be, and whether removing the frosting to any extent would result in a barrel much nicer to shoot and clean. But I would guess that if there's any remaining copper, lead, carbon, etc in that barrel, steel wool will probably do something about it, and possibly removing some of the pitting if you work at it hard enough.
I never bothered using a borescope to see if anything noticeable was happening in the bottom corners of the grooves, but the top edges weren't rounded - I assume the steel wool doesn't get right into those bottom corners of the grooves. I assume going the lead lap routine would be required to lap all surfaces inside the barrel.
BTW, McGowan Barrels also in Kalispell was also "hand lapping" their barrels the exact same way with steel wool at that time I was doing this a couple of years ago. I wouldn't have any problem using steel wool to clean a bad bore now, if I felt the bore needed it because regular cleaners weren't getting the job done.
