bore guide or snake for all milsurp rifles

[DirtyRussianAmmo]

Vickers guns during WW1 had the barrel jacket filled with urine when water became unavailable during long fire missions (hours straight - one lasted 48 hours!). I have read that the smell of boiling urine was pretty rank.

Sewer pipes

[kowalski]

We use neither. The only brush that touches a bore here (and it's rare) is a nylon brush in the chamber only. No brushes ever touch a Swiss rifle bore, or any other bores we have.

So how do you clean your rifles?

[Armistice]

So how do you clean your rifles?

I'm guessing patching it

[Latigo]

Good morning, Kowalski! For the past number of years we've used the same method on all of the rifles here, not just Swiss rifles. We use the Wipe-Out foam. Putting the rifle into a horizontal rest, we plug the breech with a .45 caliber swab. (Patches work well too)

We flow the Wipe-Out into the muzzle end until it flows back out the muzzle onto the rag we've placed on the floor below it. we then plug the muzzle with an oversized patch and let the rifle sit for an hour. After that it's simply passing a couple of dry patches down the bore.

If the rifle is heavily coppered, we let it sit overnight. If there is carbon in the chamber, we use Montana Extreme. If you buy a used rifle with a very heavily coppered bore the process will have to be repeated twice or more. No brushes, nylon or otherwise go down any of our bores. If the chamber needs to be scrubbed at all, we have used nylon .45 brushes, but never in the bores.

We also do the hBN process on all of our bores, so cleaning for us is simply a dry patch down the bore. Copper doesn't bond to a solidly hBN coated bore and firing ICPs exclusively. The only thing in the bore is maybe some powder residue, but it doesn't bond to the bore either.

All of this began for us because of potential barrel replacement down the road. A new barrel for a k31 is about $1,200.00 delivered from Switzerland, and never mind the zfk55 barrels!! And for us the hBN process is critical for extending barrel life double and even triple. That process requires a real dedication to a rifle, and most will never bother with it, but I want these Swiss Rifles to be in the hands of my Great Grandchildren. If I do my part, they will.

This may sound overly simple, but it works every time and we have a huge load of barrel cleaning/treatment supplies sitting on a shelf unused for the past 4 years.

hBN aside, barrel life is greatly reduced by scrubbing with brushes, and it often goes unnoticed until group sizes begin to change. Maybe you won't have any given rifle with you long enough, but I be keepin' mine, mon!

[Armistice]

Do you guys do that because you're shooting so much? Me, I'm lucky to shoot every other month. Plus rotating through my rifles, there's a handful that haven't been shot in a yr

However, are brushes brass because it's softer than the steel and thus the brass should wear out faster? Nylon brushes even more so?

[Latigo]

Yes. we shoot a lot here, even in the winter. We have a lit and heated ShootShed at the 100 yard mark, and we've even shot as low as 35 below zero. We use a Rhino to run back and forth to the targets.

A lot of you guys have already seen some of these shots, but this is why we do so much shooting here, and the reason is that load data development for 6 different calibers never stops for us.

We start with making our own targets of all kinds, from 1" pasters out to 1,000 yard pasters and a bunch of target types printed on 4'x8' sheets for stapling to the target frameworks.

Printing on our Wide Format HP.



Building the ShootShed at the 100 yard mark 5 years ago.



Winter's coming!



Mounting 14 targets on one sheet.



We built a Chrono Coffin for shooting in bright snow. We have both bench and prone firing ports, and both of them have very effective sound insulation in them called Sonex.



From the ShootShed downrange. In the summer we use our diagonal range that's 500 yards.



In the spring these darned Elk are always in the way.



This is the mowed track to the 500 yard targets, barely visible.



And THAT is why we do so much shooting, and it's also why we have our barrel cleaning technique for as many rounds as go downrange here.

[knucklehead0202]

Sewer pipes

Urinal drains smell much worse than sewer lines, ask me how I know...

[Gutter]

Glad to see someone else uses wipeout also. I always wondered if it was more corrosively damaging to the barrel than constant brush scrubbing. Thought it always worked a bit too well which made me wonder.

[Latigo]

Wipe-Out is water based. It can seep into chamber cracking and not do the damage that ammonia based products do. That chamber cracking usually can't be seen other than with a Hawkeye Pro or other types of pro-borescopes.
A simple coating of oil in the chamber will neutralize it.