Friendly reminder to clean your barrel

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Sqwirl57

Sqwirl57

Member
Apr 13, 2020
4,144
6,370
PA, United States
So..........

Probably should have cleaned the barrel of my new toy when I first got it (duh). It was shooting well and figured it was clean enough. Welp.

First two dry patches felt like I was pulling the patches through peanut butter. After I pulled those through I peeked down through the barrel and could physically see the buildup starting to seperate from the rifling.

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Switched to 2x Hoppes soaked patches and let them soak for a few. You can actually see chunks of lead buildup on the patches.

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After the patches starting coming through fairly clean I put 10 down range and then 10 more on paper.

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Not counting the flier (it wasn't but I won't get into that) 9/10 landed in a neat little 0.35", MOA group at 32yds. Not too shabby for a 20ftlb .177 break barrel. Its officially too dark to keep testing but I have some very high hopes now :)

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I'm curious if anyone has ever seen buildup like this on a break barrel? I pretty routinely pull a dry patch or 2 through every couple hundred shots so I haven't. I'm wondering if maybe someone decided to give slugs a try in this thing before I got my hands on it
 
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Long_Gun_Dallas said:
Typical for barrels to be lubed like this. It's to prevent rust/corrosion in shipping or warehouse, ect.
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It was a second hand, 5 year old gun 😄
I definitely should have known better and usually do clean them first. I still can't believe that it had been shooting as well as it had been before hand
 
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A.G.R said:
Wow. Hammer that is.. I rarely hear about them as they were so quick to leave the market.. Gas ram.. looks to be a 30 mm chamber prolly about 90 mm stroke.
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They're pretty amazing guns and I'd probably go as far as to say they were the best production full power guns in recent history. My .22 ASP is 23fpe with JSB 15.89gr and is as easy to cock as a factory HW95.

As far as the actual internal specs go, I have no idea. I plan to tear one down for no other reason than to see whats inside soon so I'll let you know.
 
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My Crown MKII with a 600 mm barrel was starting to shoot poorly at 100 yards after less than 150 shots with JSB 13.4 gr KO slugs. Cleaned all the gunk and lead flakes out of the barrel and did some polishing with JB Bore Paste. Here's the before and after pic. One test is worth a thousand expert opinions as my old friend BD would say.

.177 cal before and after cleaning.jpg
 
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Sqwirl57 to me that’s very impressive shooting after cleaning your barrel. To answer your question no I have never seen that much gunk in a barrel but I only own 4 break barrels and they were bought new.
I once ran some patches through my LGV Challenger Ultra when the groups started opening up on the advice from members here. It took many shots after that to get back to decent grouping. I think these were shot at 30 metres.
Gary

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This is an excellent topic. No matter what the gun is when it arrives here I clean the barrel in order to eliminate one of the variables of accuracy. In air guns I don't advise using hoppes.

I'm a fan of JB Bore paste and a brass brush. Not necessarily polishing but removing the cosmoline and lead.

Final patches with FP-10 or ballastrol to remove the JB Bore paste.
 
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11x 5 shot groups at 32yds after cleaning the barrel. 0.48" or 1.42 MOA average across the board. Happy there already. The kicker is there were two head scratcher fliers. Im not sure what happened on target #6 but #8 the gun jumped weird. Removing just those from the mix brought that average down to 0.39" / 1.15 MOA over 53 shots with unsorted pellets.

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Screenshot_20240416-174004_Range Buddy.jpg
 
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Windmill01 said:
Sqwirl57 to me that’s very impressive shooting after cleaning your barrel. To answer your question no I have never seen that much gunk in a barrel but I only own 4 break barrels and they were bought new.
I once ran some patches through my LGV Challenger Ultra when the groups started opening up on the advice from members here. It took many shots after that to get back to decent grouping. I think these were shot at 30 metres.
Gary

View attachment 456357
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Wow that's quite the difference. Excellent shooting and fantastic gun!! The LGV is another one of my favorites. Mine is a .22
 
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klentz said:
This is an excellent topic. No matter what the gun is when it arrives here I clean the barrel in order to eliminate one of the variables of accuracy. In air guns I don't advise using hoppes.

I'm a fan of JB Bore paste and a brass brush. Not necessarily polishing but removing the cosmoline and lead.

Final patches with FP-10 or ballastrol to remove the JB Bore paste.
Click to expand...
I usually use Ballistol but apparently I'm out amd need to order another can. Plenty of Hoppes on hand though 😄. My one concern using Hoppes was the breech seal so I made sure to keep it off of that.
 
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