Over the years I've had a lot of different .22s.  Some barrels will lead up worse than others, and some of those barrels will seem to get more accurate after a few hundred rounds through them.  I've thought it was just that the barrel was getting polished from the shooting and cleaning and becoming more consistent.  I've gone through the fire lapping routine with a couple of big bores, but it's a pain in the a22.  

So I want to polish up the bores of a couple of new .22 barrels.  My idea is to take a .22 caliber bore snake, rub fine polishing compound on it (white rouge) and pull it through the barrel a couple of dozen times.  I would only pull it from breech to crown so that it would polish in the direction that the bullet travels.  To protect the breech mouth from being polished I was thinking to take a fired case and carefully cut the back rim off and put it in first, and then pull through the case.

So what does everybody say?  I'll probably try it whatever the consensus, but just wondering if there's any ideas to make it more successful.  I plan on doing it to a stainless Ruger factory 10/22 barrel first. This is a rifle I'll be putting together using an 80% receiver.  I don't really want to take the time to put it together and shoot some groups before, but that's really the only way to know if it made a difference.  Now my idea is out here, so this will make me get before and after and report it back.

This is probably a month or more off, I'm waiting on the receiver and some tooling.  I just wanted to kick the idea around first.

thanks,
lukus

You'll blow out your chamber and throat with a quickness.

What you want is a rod with a tight fitting patch wrapped, not just stuck on the jag, around a jag.
Then, apply JB bore paste.
Insert the rod just past the chamber, engaging the rifling, and mark it.
Then push the rod up to the muzzle, but do not let it exit. Mark the rod again.
Those are your hard limits.

Stroke the rod evenly up and down the barrel, about 100x.

That will get the bore about as smooth as possible.

What you are seeing is the fact that a .22lr doesn't have enough pressure or speed to actually polish a bore like a center fire. 22 bullets aren't jacketed, they have a copper wash, that copper acts as a bullet lube and as you shoot it the copper and lead are deposited in the rough spots of the barrel leaving a smooth surface. That's why most people will tell you to never use a brush in a .22 unless accuracy starts to fail, because once you brush that coating out of the bore you have to re-season that bore with several rounds to get the accuracy back.

Your high dollar rifles and barrels are usually lapped from the factory and don't have these issues. The bore paste works great for smoothing out some of this roughness but it usually still takes a few rounds down the pipe to coat that bore and get the best accuracy out of it.

I'm seriously thinking about trying something like the Tubb Final Finish kit of .22LR ammunition to see how it works on one of my .22s.