Chad Roberts added
2 new photos.
October 11, 2016 ·
Copper and Muzzle Brake issue on train up Friday before the match: Hopefully this helps others out in the future.
So as most have heard I had a rough morning Friday before the match
with my gun shooting a half MOA group at 100 yards and just not
performing as it usually does. Typically this is a one hole puncher and
I've shot a 3 inch group at 1000 yards, so typical for this rifle is
perfection. Certainly not throwing shots all over the zero range like it
was.
Brian Allen spotted my muzzle break being all kinds of fouled up and honestly I just didn't
realize it had gotten as bad as it had. So as first steps go we took it
off and fired a group, it was still throwing shots. When I say throwing
shots it would be two touching, two or three spread out. I then put my
suppressor on and same thing, throwing shots. To make sure it was not
just me Brian Allen shot a group and results were conclusive that the
gun was just not grouping. Pissed off, I went back to RV to collect my
thoughts, etc.
As luck would have it this big beautiful looking guy named
Brian Bowling who was a stranger to me at the time decides to park beside our RV. He
gets out of his truck and proceeds to yell across lot to his buddy that
he has a bore scope with him if his buddy needs it. I immediately asked
if he wouldn't mind checking mine out because I couldn't figure out why
my gun was throwing shots. So him being a great dude that he is, he
takes a look for me. Turns out my barrel is coated with copper and some
pretty bad spots built up at the muzzle and at chamber, one deep spot
about halfway down barrel also. At this point there is 817 rounds on the
barrel.
I grab my Eliminator copper remover that's been collecting dust for years and run four soaked patches down barrel
followed with 20 passes of a nylon brush. I repeat this about 8 times
until I'm getting no blue on my patches.
Up until that moment I hadn't used a copper cleaner, just clean my barrel about every 300
rounds with a bore cleaner (not going to name which one because I'm no
pro at cleaning and that wouldn't be proper etiquette)
The pictures of the chrono are from before cleaning the rifle and after
cleaning the rifle. Same ammo loaded all at the same time before the
match. The 5.4 SD was before cleaning the copper out.
The seven shot chrono with zero sd was rounds 3-10 after cleaning. I tossed out first three shots bc barrel was re-fouling.
After cleaning the copper out and putting a clean muzzle break on the
rifle it was back to shooting solid one whole 5 shot groups at 100 and
zero SD's.
I hope this helps some of you out there who were like me and honestly didn't understand the effects of copper issues. I will
certainly be buying a barrel scope now after seeing how great of a tool
they can be. A big thanks to both Brian Allen and Brian Bowling for your
help.