Barrel Cleaning & Break in

How many "Break in" procedures have you seen or heard of? Let me guess. You heard "buy this bullets to break in bore" or "use this bore compound" or "shoot 3 shots, then clean, then shoot 5, then shoot 10, and after 100 its broken in" etc etc etc. So count me in with another site on the internet telling you about a method. Get ready for it. Here is the secret method.

There is no standardized barrel break in procedure because every barrel breaks in differently. You really only need to understand a few things about breaking in a barrel. These might be:

If you clean after a few shots, etc, on new barrel, and you see excessive copper, then the barrel is not broken in yet.
If you clean after a few shots, and you see little copper and after a several more shots, the barrel cleans up with good looking patches quickly, its broken in.

That is it. Regarding 1. A new barrel is newly machined. It might have some rougher spots or tiny burs inside it , so when you shoot it, those rough spots or tiny burs will essentially shred, like a cheese grater, a tiny layer of the bullet jacket, thus excessive copper in your barrel. Barrels that are smooth and lapped well from a good barrel maker with quality process, will "generally" break in very very quickly, as you will see. If you check the patches and see more than normal copper, and you keep shooting, what will happen is the rough spots or tiny burs will smooth out and eventually it will stop copper deposits in the bore to normal. Its super easy to understand when your barrel is broken in, and when it needs to be shot more. You just look at the patches. A broken in barrel will clean up to basically clean patch between 4-7 patches after taking say...50-100 shots. So you go to the range, shoot 50 shots, it should clean up within 7 patches pretty well. That is normal.

This is really common sense, as there is no magic amount of bullets you shoot, then your barrel is broken in. Some barrels could be broken in almost immediately, some take 100 shots for example. Good, quality barrels, that have hand lapped barrels, and more attention to detail, will generally break in faster. Because of course they will.

What kind of cleaning products?

Hey? Why is it when you watch some dudes gun channel or read an article, the dude is always like "I paid with my own money for this, and have no affiliation with the company, and they don't pay me , I am not sponsored, etc" We could care less about sponsored, free, we paid for it, all we care about, is DOES IT WORK?

We like Bore Tech. We tested it versus some other cheaper, regularly used products, and we found them to be effective and removing copper and removing carbon,as well as not burning our skin off or causing us to pass out in a small space adn burn our eyes, like for example...BUTCHES BORE SHINE. LOL Butches works good, but damn is it strong and very big irritant.

Here is website, if you want to check it out. There is a lot of good cleaning products, many work fine. We just like this brand.

BORE TECH link

Copper remover - removing copper..gold stuff

Carbon Remover - remove the black stuff...

Eliminator - Its like half Copper Remover/Carbon Remover and we use this the most

Parker Hale style JAG. I will just go ahead and say it. This is the best jag I ever used, and its not even close. You simply WRAP, tightly, the patch around it...and the result is way more surface area cleaning than a traditional loop or pointed jag. Just get one, soak it with your favorite cleaning product and run it through the bore guide, then take patch off after it goes through end, using your 1 piece cleaning rod....easy. Do not pull patch back through the bore..just go one way. you just cleaned your bore, why would you want to run the crap through it again.