Thread: Gun Cleaning

I must admit when I look at the hardness of a barrel's material, its finish and the heat and physical stresses its put under ( I mean typically it is worn out with about 10 actual seconds of use) and then I hear/read ppl "suggesting theories" on cleaning significantly damaging a barrel I just go "huh? really?"

So my conclusions are a) The big thing for me is I think there are a lot of expensive over-hyped cleaning substances (especially), methods and tools that in some cases may even do more damage than not cleaning a barrel (really we do not know), carbon fouling excepted. The big thing for me is scientifically few if any? of these products, tools or methods have been proven by repeatable and published experiment to do what they claim.

b) copper removal, I strongly suspect the barrel works best coated in a thin layer of copper, this is hinted at in some advanced tribology papers by academics I have read plus the odd comment here and there I have come across in technical papers. Hence blindly scrubing the barrel clean (especially of copper) seems to make no sense to me at present. I mean consider that some TR/palma and FTR shooters tell me that on a clean barrel the first shot is typically 1/4 to 1/2 MOA low so why? (and yet they blindly accept this effect). That tells me that something is happening with the first shot or two shots to reduce friction in the barrel as the subsequent velocities are higher because the MOA drop "recovers". The only two things that I can see are carbon fouling and copper "fouling". The barrels are very heavy so heat isnt likely.

On top of this I know some of the older shooters quietly clean their barrels with a carbon only cleaning regime, some use carbon only cleaners and lube with car engine upper cylinder oil, (wow designed to remove carbon in a high temperature environment no less) , or even Kerosene / diesel. The first is something like 1/2 or 1/3rd the cost of a gun oil and the last more like a 1/5th ~ 1/10th. So I just have to wonder just what is going on, snake oil salesmen ripping ppl off? or genuine products offering a significant advantage? if so show me the evidence.

So if people out there can point me at some URLs testing and verifying these expensive gun cleaning and lubing products really do work, please post. Otherwise I am off to repco to get some more upper cylinder engine oil....