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Posted: 7/24/2010 10:19:30 AM EDT
I have heard to avoid cleaning the barrel on rimfires? If true, what is the logic on this? If I am  apologies, I tried search and did not find anything.
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I think this is an older generation kind of thing. The older guns had a little rougher bores and the .22lr ammo was all "wax" type lubed. You clean a barrel bright and clean as new and the next few rounds are going to shoot different than after the barrel "fouls' itself. A lot of the .22lr's shoot a little better with a somewhat dirty bore. I personally clean my newer .22's bore every 500rds or so or when they have been out in the elements hunting in less than perfect conditions.
The newer .17's on the other hand like a clean barrel. They normally shoot good after a few fouling shots, then need to be cleaned in the next 50-200rds. |
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Most rimfires will shoot poor if the bore and barrel are truely fouled, but they also don't shoot their best squeeky clean. Cleaning extractors, extractor recesses, ejectors, feed ramps, and mag lips are far more important for cleaning in shooting rimfire than the barrel. Run a boresnake two or three times down the barrel to get the real big pieces of crud out every 100-200 rounds depending on your gun. A real scrub-job on the barrel with Hoppes#9, brushes, patches, and other dissolvents is only needed on my rimfires about 1x every 1000-2000 rounds. Any more than that and you are either wasting your time, or there is something fundamentally wrong with your gun. Rimfires will shoot poor if the bore and barrel are truely fouled, but they also don't shoot their best squeeky clean. |
| I clean mine after each range session. I lightly wipe everything down dry first with a soft cotton cloth, then run a bore snake down the barrel. Next I use Hoppe's #9 on it all and a wet patch down the barrel at let it sit for abut 15 minutes. From there I wipe it all dry again and depending on which firearm determines which lube I'll use. As for the wax on .22's, I don't care for it. It helps me not as I use a light coat of molly-Teflon lube in my barrels and all my metal on metal parts. I tumble mine off in walnut media (NOT infused) with a bit of lacquer solvent. I'm actually doing a brick now for tomorrow. Normally, I have a brick or two ready but I've been off the week and took the kiddos a few times and ate it all up including some that were not clean off. From the tumbler I bundle up a handful in a rag and roll wipe them off with a bit more solvent on the rag. I then put them back in their racks and give them a spray of Remi dry lube. If they are value packs then I use some extra racks I've kept and then they go back in the packaging. I've been doing this for the past couple of years and I've had no feeding issues at all. I have plenty of value packs but all the bricks I buy are Elly primed. I haven't had a single failure to fire yet using them but they do come in at a premium. For time it takes about 45 minutes to tumble and another 1/2 hr to wipe spray and repackage doing a brick at a time. The actual time gets cut in half by doing multiples as the next one is tumbling, the one before it is getting it's final prep. This method totally slicks up the rounds. I do the same thing for my .380s, many times a mixed bag in the tumbler of .22s and .380s. I do the .380s as again, it slicks them up, not for wax removal. |
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Visit www.rimfirecentral.com
There are guys there that run several thousand rounds through their rifles before cleaning the bore. Most benchrest .22 shooters will not clean the bore until accuracy begins to drop. That could be thousands of rounds. More rimfire bores are ruined by excessive cleaning than anything else. |
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Quoted: I have around 1500 rounds down the pipe hole of one of my Savage .17 HMRs since the last barrel cleaning, it doesn't seem to bother the gun any so why should it bother me.... Cleaning the gun means that you are cleaning the moving parts, ramp, feed and extraction mechanisms, any recesses that the feed and extraction mechanisms may fit into, mag well, bolt face, bolt lugs, follower, bolt carrier, firing pin channel, fire control parts, etc, etc...... Field strip, clean enough to maintain functionality, reassemble, and fire. Cleaning the barrel means de-leading, copper-disolving, and de-carbonizing of the interior surfaces of the barrel. Nobody is saying to run the gun filthy. NOT cleaning the gun itself, rather than gun + barrel, will result in caked-up crud in all of the above-mentioed parts that will become subsequently more difficult to remove as the crud builds-up. One of two things will eventually happen....The first being a malfunction due to the crud getting in the way of a moving part or providing enough resistance to slow, or stop a moving part. The second is that the crud will win in a battle with the moving part by breaking it. You see this more with extractors than anything. All that is required to clean the gun itself, is usually a quick field-strip, a half dozen q-tips with Hoppes #9, a few dry patches to wipe the Hoppes clean, and a few more to apply a light, protective coat of CLP or your favorite oil based lubricant back on the parts. And I'm far from meticulous on the cleaning. Just enough to keep the crap from building-up significantly is good enough. This really applies to all of the guns that I own. The only guns that I clean the gun and the barrel regularly is my CCW piece, as it is a lint, dirt, and rust magnet being tucked deep into my neither regions for seemingly days at a time. I also do a full barrel cleaning semi-regularly on C&R guns, not due to corrosive surplus ammo, but because they tend to have NOT been chrome lined, and tend to hold moisture, so a nice coating of oil in them is a big help. And any gunk/garbage/etc in the barrel is going to displace oil and become a spot of potential rust. And rust sucks.  I run my two AR-15's dripping wet, which improves their functionality when they are dirty and run dirty russian ammo, but it also means that I have to clean them a bit more. Oil + Crud = more crud in the way of moving parts. Dry guns = less crud build-up, but harder to de-crudify. To any of the "gotta gotta gotta clean it" OCD folk out there (lightly kidding here) take your favorite firearm in a beyond factory fresh squeeky-clean configuration, fire ONE single shot from the "cleanest" ammo you can think of in it. Bring the gun home, break it down. Douse one Q-tip in Hoppes #9 and run it on the inside of the chamber, across the muzzle face, or along the inside of the receiver near the chamber face, and it will be soot-carbon black as night. One single shot did that. Is the gun "dirty" now? Better get the ol' 10/22 broken-down for a detail strip and an overnight session in the ultrasonic cleaning tank. |
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My uncle has a 10/22 that he bought in 1983. It was bought BEFORE I was born, and when we finally took it apart a few months ago for S&G's, it still had packing grease in it. He'd never cleaned it in the 27 years he owned it. It probably had 30-40 thousand rounds through it. When it started to jam, he would soak down with WD-40 and blow it off with a compressor. Still works like a charm.
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I used to shoot 20-30K rounds a year on ground squirrels. I would clean the action of my 10-22 with Hoppes No. 9 when it started malfunctioning and the barrel with brass brush and Hoppe's about every 1K rounds. Of course this was in the 70's and almost all I shot was CCI Blazer and Winchester Wildcat depending on what was on sale at K-Mart or Big "R" in Klamath Falls. Or what ever the farmer would give me  for taking care of the varmits.
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| I bought a fancy barrel for my 10/22...I quote..."Hand lapped for superior performance and improved accuracy, the by-product is a trouble free bore that rarely ever needs cleaning with anything other than a couple of dry patches"....haven't fired it enough to reach the "drop in accuracy" point. |
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Quoted:
I have heard to avoid cleaning the barrel on rimfires? If true, what is the logic on this? If I am apologies, I tried search and did not find anything.I've heard that also. I clean all of my firearms after shooting them, including the .22s. I usually use nothing more aggressive than a bore snake and Bore Scrubber though. |
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Quoted:
I think this is an older generation kind of thing... Actually quite the opposite. Always "clean after every use" is heard most often from the older generation because they remember what could happen to a bore when you shot ammunition with corrosive primers. If you neglected cleaning your bore it would begin to rust and pit because the burnt priming compound attracted moisture. As the US and other militaries used corrosive ammunition almost exclusively until WWII, "clean after every use" was drilled into every pfc and likely still is. If your dad served (mine in Korea '51 or so) , odds are strong that he believes in immediate cleaning. Because it was the Army way. I'm 53, from the time I first shot a gun (about age five or six) I was taught by my dad to clean it immediately after returning from a hunt. It was quite the revelation when I first heard of rimfire shooters NOT cleaning the bore after every range trip. It was uncomfortable explaining to my dad that it was not only unnecessary, but potentially damaging to accuracy to clean so often. |
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