04-08-2011, 03:00 AM
sta500rdr Congratulations on your new upper!! I am waiting for a barrel from Satern Machine for my 6.5 Grendel build. This will be my first custom cut barrel and I to have been looking into barrel care . Like you I want to try my best to make sure that I am going to treat my new barrel right. I have done some light barrel polishing in the past with production barrels from manufactures like browning and remington using a little J-B on a cleaning patch passed through the barrel a couple of times then cleaned well before heading to the range for the first time. Guns shot well doing this but I can not say if it truely had an affect in the actual acurracy due to no before or after comparisons but these were just your normal production guns nothing custom or top end. But here is a link that has some very interesting things in it written by an experianced gun smith machinest he talks about when the throat is cut the reamer is spinning around the same as a drill bit that has the effect of creating some very fine cross grain only in the throat area. and the rest of the tooling running length wise down the barrel in the same deriction the bullet would travel. When the machinest crafts the barrel then laps and polishes it the throat area cut by the reamer is not polished with the rifling and it is the first dozen or so rounds fired that polish the throat right at the mouth. It is my understanding that this can cause a small amount of copper fouling in the barrel carried from the throat area down into the length of the barrel. When the next round is fired that remaining copper is pressed into the bore of the barrel. It is my understanding that is why a barrel should be cleaned after each shot for the first dozen or so shots or until the copper fouling in the barrel is no longer present after each shot. It is also my understanding that when this is done to a good quality new barrel it will help to enable the barrel to have less fouling problems later enabling the barrel to shoot longer between cleanings. ANY HOW I am by no means a expert in this area but I do have thirty years under my belt as a mechanic and the reasoning of the machinest that wrote the artical seems pretty sound to me . Here is the link if you would care to read it. http://www.kriegerbarrels.com/Break_In__...wp2558.htm Or another view http://www.6mmbr.com/GailMcMbreakin.html