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which will smooth out a barrel quicker by just shooting, High antomony lead or jacketed bullets? I have about 75 jacketed bullets and my thoughts were burn them up through my rifle just as fast as I can feed them:twisted:. then clean ALL copper out and only shoot lead.
I wouldn't heat up your barrel too much. This has drastically greater effect than a like number of the same loads fired through a normal barrel. The first thing to go is the leade, then the rifling. Shoot em slow(er), maybe roll em in J.B. bore lap.
Once you lay down a layer of copper fouling, the rest of the bullets will not smooth the steel. You must remove all of the copper after every shot. I would do it for 20 shots, then after every two for a while.Quote:
Originally Posted by TREERAT
Lead boolits will take forever to do anything.
You could just buy fire lapping boolits.
Most barrels today don't need anything done to them unless you shoot BR anyway.
reason I asked, years ago I bought one of those cheep turk mausers when they were giving them away for $39.00 and several 70 rnd bandoliers of HOT turk machine gun ammo. well you could not hit a sheet of notebook paper more than once out of 5 rnds. So I got mad an ran 70 rnds through it in in less than 5 min then left it to cool while I played with a .22 lr, then tryed it again - 5 rnds in 3/4 inch. thought this had to be a fluke so over and over I tryed until I ran out of ammo and it never exceeded 2 1/2 for the next 140 rnds. my sholder was getting sore! since then I encountered a .223 rem mod.7 that was the same way, so I did it to it and it also responded the same. so when I here people say not to let it get to hot I take it with a grain of salt. goes to prove different guns like different things.
Treerat it has nothing to do with "different guns". Only a person who knows no better or doesn't give a hoot about barrel life shoots a rifle fast enough to get it really hot. Why do you think the barrels of machine guns are either water cooled, fired in short bursts with open bolt cooling or have quick change barrels? It is entirely possible to wear out a barrel on a good rifle in less than fifty rounds. Ask me about a friends .264 Winchester Magnum sometime.
All you likely accomplished was fouling the barrel. Some rough barrels shoot better when heavily fouled than when clean. Fire lapping works best with cast bullets that have a long shank that have a mildly abrasive grit embedded in them. They're fired with minimal powder charges so that they travel down the bore relatively slowly (for bullets). This takes down the high spots in a barrel, a little at a time.
guess fire lapping was the wrong phrase, but I sam pretty sure red neck was close. what ever it actually did to the turk 8mm & rem. mod 7 .223 was drastic and made an un usable gun into a very good shooter! so even if I can not tell you why this worked, it absolutly did! and I will leave it at that.