The Savage 340V .225Win I picked up recently is in dire need of firelapping. My friend just re-cut the crown for me, as my first visit at the range with somewhat reduced loads was dismal....nearly 4 inches of vertical with J-word bullets. I used 30.0 gr of IMR4064 under Speer 50gr TNT`s to keep the pressures down. (The single lug bolt is not a good design for this caliber.)
Cast is planned later on, but I thought I`d try the other bullets first as a baseline.
I borescoped it first and saw the pitting that the Outer`s bore foam revealed. (It took 4 or 5 soak cycles to remove all the copper fouling.) The foam is a real time saver! No brushing...I like that alot. But the pitting looks absolutely awful with the borescope. A blessing and a curse so to speak to have one of these available.
The crown was so bad, I preferred to have that corrected first. But even my friend commented afterwards "This is a candidate for firelapping". because he took a peek down the bore as well.
I have used the LBT firelap kit before on a Marlin 94 in .25-20 but the chamcer and bore was so bad the effort was wasted. I will borrow that kit again and will have to cast up some 14 BHN booilts to use with the kit. But I see NECO also offers charged J-word bullets already charged with lapping grit to accomplish the same task.
This begs a question to the board...has anyone else been down this road before, and what method did you use??
Grit charged cast boolits will require several rounds to acheive the desired effect, but will the NECO J-word bullets be as effective? I`m not interested in any shortcuts, but need some "been there, done that" feedback.
I don`t mind the effort, but would prefer to launch hard cast boolits at reasonable pressures rather that use J-word bullets at "safe" pressures.
I figure to coat the lapped bore with Moly paste to offset the resulting bore condition and give it a chance with cast.
Am I "coldpatching" New York State potholes, or do I stand a chance of reasonable success?