by jshuberg on Mon Oct 20, 2014 11:01 pm
It depends on what your rifle is used for. A precision long range rifle gets a different cleaning procedure than an AK you're willing to drag through the mud. One thing to keep in mind is that over cleaning a rifle will damage it more than shooting it can. It's mostly from damaging the crown, but you can also lose accuracy by damaging the interior of the bore as well. The bore of a rifle undergoes metallurgical changes as the result of being fired. The first few microns of the bore surface are exposed to extreme heat, pressure, and carbon. The results is that the surface of the bore in infused with additional carbon at the molecular level over time, giving it a higher carbon content, and making it more brittle than the original steel. Carbon fouling in the barrel can actually protect the surface of the bore from having microscopic amounts of surface stripped away during cleaning due to micro-fractures and increased brittleness.
There are generally 2 schools of thought on cleaning the bore - to either fully clean the weapon to sparkling clean, or to simply remove enough fouling to prevent it from building up to excess and maintain a fouling level equilibrium. I tend to fall into the 2nd camp - I allow a certain amount of carbon fouling to remain in the barrel, and only do a "deep clean" when copper fouling begins to become a problem or if accuracy starts to fall off. I think everyone is in agreement that using a single piece cleaning rod and bore guide is essential. The coating on the cleaning rod shouldn't really matter, since it should never impact the inside of the bore, but I prefer a nylon coated rod as a just-in-case.
When you run a wet cleaning brush through the bore, it's much more time consuming to unscrew the brush and wipe it clean, remove the cleaning road and then reattach the brush for the next pass, but it will prevent damage to the crown by not pulling a fouled brush back across it. For an AK or machine gun barrel, I just run it back and forth, for a precision barrel, I take the extra time and remove and clean the brush after every pass.
I use a clean dry bore snake in the field to get the worst of the fouling out after shooting. At home I run a patch or two through, let it set a few minutes, and then run a wet nylon brush through a few times, followed by a few more patches, until the patches come out clean. There is still fouling in the barrel at this point, but unless I'm doing a deep clean, I leave it at that.
If I am doing a deep clean I switch to a bronze brush, and alternate a few passes with the brush with a few passes with patches until the patches come clean. This can take awhile, so patience is essential. I use Hoppes for carbon and KG-12 for copper. After getting all of the carbon out during a deep clean, I leave the bore wet with a patch for around 10 mins, followed by a dry one. If there's a goodly amount of blue or green on the dry patch, I switch back to a clean nylon brush and switch to KG-12 and run a wet brush through 3 times, followed by 3 wet patches, and then 2 dry patches.
After a deep clean it takes between 20-50 fouling rounds for accuracy to come back to where it was. One it gets back to it's equilibrium, it's back to a couple nylon and a couple patches after each use to keep it in "the zone".
Everyone is going to have a different procedure, in general though whatever you decide to do, just don't scrub the bore excessively, be careful and patient, and do everything you can to minimize the amount of contact any object has with the bore. Let your solvents do the work for you.
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