316 Stainless Steel rod covered with copper after using Outer's Foul-Out. Copper stops 2/3 way because remainder extended beyond the top of the barrel. Electrical tape used instead of expensive O-rings. This barrel required another run.
Stuff on scopes is now here.
Some shotgunners and .22 rimfire users never clean their bores. They claim that its better not to. More power to them, if it works for them, I won't argue with them. This is a "religious" issue that has many opinions. I won't really argue with anyone except concerning long-term storage; then, a complete cleaning of the bore is a must. I can show you examples of what happens when rimfire guns are stored for 20 years both cleaned and uncleaned.
Trap shooters tend to shoot often enough that they don't get rust... also, many expensive Trap guns are chromed lined. I find that extended shotgunning leads to thick plastic (wad) fouling around the full choke. After a while, it affects the pattern. That, at least, needs to be cleaned out regularly.
Some .22 rimfire shooters claim that cleaning ruins accuracy. I think that the source of this belief is the fact that many novices clean guns from the muzzle (firing end of the barrel). The constant scraping of the rod and the impact of the rod-to-jag joint ruins the crown (where the rifling ends and the machined curve of the end of the barrel begins ). The crown must be perfect to ensure good accuracy. You can have a gunsmith regrind the crown if necessary.
Another possible source of this claim is the fact that an oily bore will often produce a first shot flyer. This can be prevented by running a couple patches through right before shooting, especially with some RemAction Clean (spray) or TriChlor on the first, which dissolves oil and then evaporates. Some benchresters even scour the bore with bronze brushes to pre-foul the bore with copper.
Worn .22's often shoot most accurately when fouled, that is, the bore evenly coated with wax lube and powder fouling. In this case, if the gun is fired weekly, it need not have the bore cleaned, but when you store it for the winter or longer, it needs cleaning.
I clean .22's from the breech (loading end) and carefully guide the jag back into to the muzzle after pushing out the patch. This eliminates the possibility of damaging the crown. On closed receiver guns, a bore guide can be bought for low cost. Word on the Internet is that the Midway bore guide for the Ruger 10/22 is too large to properly protect the bore. Some 10/22 owners drill a hole in the back of the receiver to allow cleaning from the breech.
Soft, fluffy powder residue retains the moisture condensating in the cooling gun, and will cause rust or corrosion eventually. Copper or lead fouling will eventually cause loss of accuracy. It may take a long time before copper fouling to do that, so it gets confused with barrel wear.
Also, a rifle barrel that is kept clean becomes smooth and well burnished with use, making it easier to keep clean.
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Last Fall ('95) I volunteered for Hunter sight-in, helping all the deer hunters to align their scopes and sights for accuracy. I have a collimator (or "bore sight", a device that allows you to optically align a rifle scope with the bore), so I worked with the hunters who had just put scopes on their guns.
I had targets set up at 25 and 50 yards to see if they were hitting the target at all ("on the paper"), but for final accuracy adjustment, there were coaches with many 50 and 100 yard targets doing the final adjustments. I just got them on the paper at 50 and then sent them on to a 50 yard coach.
Early in the day a guy came with an expensive Sako rifle. He looked
contemptuously at my stuff and said, "You don't have a 6.5mm spud,
do you?" "Sure I do." After checking the breech,
I installed the spud in the bore sight
and put it in the muzzle of his rifle. He took my tools and began
to adjust his scope. I was a little annoyed; they were my tools,
but after all, it was his scope. He finished, and began to walk
away.
"Wait a sec, let's try it on the 25 yard line."
"No, I'm ready for the 100 yard line," he said.
"How about just one shot at the fifty?"
"No," he said again, "I'm ready for the 100."
And he just walked off. I figured that he was a range member and was going
to get away from all the hunters and shoot on his own, so I forgot
about it. My mistake.
Later, one of the 100 yard coaches came by and asked if I was the one doing bore sighting.
"Well," He said, "you better check that device of yours, it doesn't work."
"Why?"
"I just wasted the whole afternoon on a guy's gun, we never saw where they were going."
"Was it a Sako, bull barrel, Leupold scope?"
"Yeah, and if you had bore sighted him in better I wouldn't have wasted so much time. I sent him home because he ran out of ammo before we got on the paper."
"Well, let me tell you about that guy... everyone but him got on the paper at 25 and then at 50 before I sent them on, and I always sent them to the 50 yard coach, except for one guy who was grouping one inch at 50 in the bull, I sent him right to the 100, and another guy I sent home with a broken scope mount. I asked him if he wanted to check it at the 50, but he just walked away."
"Well, he wasted all my afternoon, I had other guys lined up waiting."
"Sorry, I can't tie them down and make them shoot. If I'd have known he was going to you, I'd have warned you, but I thought he was a member and was going off to shoot on his own."
I had the presence of mind not to say that he should have sent him back to me, I had gotten other 50 and 100 yard rejects.
The guy who was shooting 1 inch groups at the Fifty (with both iron sights viewed through the see-through mounts, and with the scope), went on do the same thing at the 100. He was a former Army sharpshooter with an inexpensive scope on a Marlin 30-30. He gladly heard all the advice I gave him, let me adjust his equipment, and we got him out of there and on to the 100 yard line faster then anyone else. They guy with the $2,500 setup went home with a rifle totally unadjusted because he wouldn't listen to anyone. Now which one do you think took a deer that season?
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Buy one.
OK, so you want to know more. Well, in well-behaved .22LR's, even shooting a lot of lead bullets, you don't really need one. Even my oldest .22 didn't yield any lead. Low velocities, straight, smooth bores, and good lubricants are the reason.
If you shoot Magnum rifle, Varmit rifle, or cast lead bullets in any kind of centerfire, you NEED one. If you shoot over 1,000 shots a year with one centerfire rifle, you need one. If you hate the ammonia smell of Sweet's 7.62 or Hoppe's Benchrest, you need one. If you shoot standard intensity centerfire guns, it's a nice accessory. If you have a revolver with timing problems, it's a necessity, but you still need to get the gun fixed.
Of course, if you are a neat-freak who can't sleep with the idea that there might be a speck of copper fouling in one of your guns, well, then, you already know that you need one.
One place where the FO II excels is for the collector. First, it provides a water-based cleaning, which is always a good idea for a barrel old enough to have been fired with corrosive primers. Second, it uncovers strata after strata of copper (or cupra-nickel) layered with powder fouling. Third, the volume of removed copper gives a good idea of how much bore degradation is due to shooting as opposed to corrosion. I renamed one ancient piece the Copper Mine after four consecutive FO II cleanings... and that was after many conventional cleanings!
When cleaning on old collectable you will probably find the first few runs never want to end, and it is important to stop and drain the fluid. You will notice it is yellowish or brown in color. Discard it, as this rust will allow current to pass and eventually pit the bore without accomplishing any cleaning. Clean and degrease the bore conventionally and run it again. You may find a lot of powder fouling that was layered under the copper. After two or three runs you will stop removing so much rust and remove mostly copper (and more powder fouling). It might take up to six runs to clean it all out. Even bright old bores with strong clean rifling will yield a lot of rust, copper and powder fouling due to porous metal and tool marks in the rough machine-cut rifling. Old barrels were never as smooth as today's button-rifled and lapped barrels.
How does it operate? Clean out powder fouling as usual. Degrease the bore with Rem-Clean, acetone or other tri-chlor-like solvent on a patch. Plug the chamber with the stopper, use the stainless steel rod to dribble the electrolyte solution into bore. Making sure the rod is not shorting (they give you rubber o-rings for this), hook up the unit to the rod and the barrel or receiver. It basically plates the rod with lead or copper that it removes from the bore. Check after one hour and remove excess lead or copper with steel wool. Run for no more than a few hours with one solution. Clean conventionally between runs for heavily fouled barrels.
One thing that disappoints some new owners is that they still have to clean the powder fouling out conventionally before running the machine. You also have to degrease the bore with a solvent (Remington ActionClean or acetone or alcohol). If you don't do both, the electrolytic reaction will be slowed down and cleaning will be spotty. Another disappoinment is that only a slight sheen of copper is removed. Medium intensity rounds fired in well-behaved rifles season the barrel with a certain amount of copper fouling (my term), after which things don't get much worse.
A few disappointed folks buy the Foul Out II after hearing that copper fouling destroys accuracy, find that it removes little and their old deer rifle shoots the same. A simple test will help you determine whether you need it. First, look through the breech with a small flashlight or dental mirror and determine if your rifling starts just after the chamber like it should. If it does not, it is either obscured by copper fouling or eroded away. If you use a copper-solvent cleaner in this area and the patch comes out bright blue or green, then you have some copper fouling in that area. The FO II will help you with fouling but not erosion.
If your rifle is not visibly fouled and you are a low volume shooter of a low or medium intensity cartridge, you may not need this item.
One tip, follow the instructions! Leaving it plugged-in overnight can pit steel, even if the LED says it is not done. What it is really telling you is that there is enough dissolved rust in solution to keep the wrong kind of electrolytic reaction going. I have read 2 magazine different articles where the writers claimed that a bore was so old and fouled that it needed an overnight run with the FO II. Obviously they don't know how to read instructions. Maybe they dictated the articles to someone literate.
Finally, some money-saving tips. Save battery money and buy a plug-in adapter, but don't pay $25 for Outers when you can get the multi-voltage one from Radio Shack or Wal-Mart for $12. It can be used for other things as well. Actually, the selling price for the Outers unit has come down lately in some catalogs, but many stores still have it on the shelf for the old price.
A large 316 stainless steel rod can be had for cheap from a local supply store or www.onlinemetals.com. If you need a rod longer or thicker than the provided one, you don't need to pay $45 for Outers to repackage it! Avoid cheap iron rods and galvanized rod stock like those found in hardware stores and home centers. Save more money by getting o-rings from the auto parts store, or just use electrical tape. I like to cut the tape in half lengthwise to maximize the exposed electrode area, but it is still wider than an o-ring and that helps prevent shorting-out at the muzzle.
Buying a stainless rod about two-thirds the width of the bore is the only way to go when you deplate lead from shotguns, long smokepoles like Kentucky and Pennsylvania long rifles, monsters like long-barreled and big-bore civil war rifle-muskets, big-bore Hawkens and Jaegers, etc. Using a whole bottle of electrolyte and that tiny skinny too-short provided rod on one of these old warriors is silly. (The provided rod does just fine on typical barrels of .22 to .338 caliber out to 24 inches long.) The longer rod gives you more electrode area from top to bottom, making a faster and more efficient deplating run. Its width lessens the amount of expensive electrolyte fluid you need to do a run, too.
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