Have I wrecked my barrel?

[RC20]

Glad it looks good, what did you use to clean?

Caliber? The fast movers will leave copper, anything slower like 308, 30-06 don't leave much if any.

Carbon tends to be more the norm. It really sounds like the brew you mixed up was the cause of the corrosion or appearance of (muddy looking stuff is metal though it does not have to be much).

Lot of debate on cleaning, I know some barrel shoot dirty, but nor4maly 50 rounds is more than enough reason to clean.

Hunting wise if your rifle settles in after X number of rounds then its better to hunt with it a tad fouled to ensure consistency.

 

[RAfiringline]

Wipe the bore clean. Take it to the range with a few sandbags for bench shooting, see how it groups, preferably at 100 yds. It's probably fine.

 

[Renol]

So the process I had used was to soak it first in the kroil overnight to loosen up the deposits. I pushed through a clean patch to get the remainder out the next day then I believe it was birchwood casey foaming cleaner for copper fouling that I basically soaked a patch put it through, waited 15min pushed a clean patch, saw lots of blue from the rifling grooves, "rinse repeat". I believe it was before the foaming cleaner I used JB bore cleaning compound to "buff" things up. Granted this was 6+ months ago so the precise details are hazy.

The rifle is a Remington 783 in .30-06. The "hunting" mindset was why I let it sit for so long without cleaning. I bought it with the mindset of hunting/training for long distance shooting. I knew I should've started with something like .223 but I wanted one gun I could hunt with sooner rather than 2 guns. But the reality has been that I live in IL which bans 30 cal rifle deer hunting, and seeing as how I'm new to everything (apart from the days of my youth of shooting 24oz plastic bittles with water with a .22 rim fire) I want to go with someone to get a deer. Sadly, most people I know are city folk who aren't hunters and I'm too cheap to spend hundreds of dollars on a non-res deer tag in Indiana where I can use the gun.

So yea bad choices which I'm stuck with atm so I've been making lemonade as best I can.

 

[RC20]

Life can be like that, make the best of it.

30-06 is not noted for being a copper layer. Might be if you push a 125 gr pill fast enough.

 

[Brian Pfleuger]

I made the mistake of following bad advice and didn't clean my rifle for a season.

I put a scope down the barrel and it all looks 99% good. There was a few spots of what looks like minor copper fouling that I'm not going to worry about. The rest of the rifling was clean and shiny metal.Looks like I was being paranoid.

Self-described paranoid assumption proven wrong. My guns are rarely "cleaned" and I have never seen any negative effects. If they're exposed to water, I wipe them down and leave a light oil coating on parts prone to corrosion. The bore gets cleaned if accuracy degrades. That can be a really long time. Years even.

Some folks like to clean their guns. That's great. I don't. In fact, I hate it. I used to clean every time I shot them... which made me not want to shoot because I "knew" I "had" to clean them if I did. I was wrong. It doesn't hurt a thing to leave them "dirty", assuming you're not using some esoteric cartridge with ancient corrosive ammo or primers.

 

[RC20]

The flip to not cleaning is when they go bad, they go really bad. Our family 270 was shooting 2.5 inches with factory, it had been a tack driver. Reloads were 1.5 inches which si ok, but not what it did at one time.

I took a look and found it carboned to the hilt. Took me hours even with my proven fluids to get it clean.,

Result, a bit under an MOA. Shots of 400 yards are not uncommon with Caribou. 250 is common. Moving animal and a badly landed shot, no thank you.

 

[stagpanther]

Self-described paranoid assumption proven wrong. My guns are rarely "cleaned" and I have never seen any negative effects. If they're exposed to water, I wipe them down and leave a light oil coating on parts prone to corrosion. The bore gets cleaned if accuracy degrades. That can be a really long time. Years even.

Some folks like to clean their guns. That's great. I don't. In fact, I hate it. I used to clean every time I shot them... which made me not want to shoot because I "knew" I "had" to clean them if I did. I was wrong. It doesn't hurt a thing to leave them "dirty", assuming you're not using some esoteric cartridge with ancient corrosive ammo or primers.

I'm the polar opposite--I aways clean after every use--and like you have never noticed significant degradation of accuracy due to cleaning alone. In fact I'll usually run a clean patch before use as well--mostly to make sure the chamber and bore are totally free of anything.