Carbon Prevention

[K22]

You'll going to get many differing opinions - that's the nature of the breast when it comes to cleaning solvent recommendations so I'll add mine.

For many years I used Shooter's Choice MC-7 and was pleased with it in the sense that my groups remained consistent.

However wifey developed a sensitivity to the odor so I switched about a year ago to Bore Tech C4, Carbon remover with a bronze brush followed by C2 copper remover because these are odorless. I was shocked by the amount of carbon C4 removes. The first three passes of patches came out black as coal which I never experienced with MC-7. I don't have a bore scope but the C4 seems to do the job quite well.

Suggest you do a test. Shoot your normal amount of rounds then clean with MC-7 and save the patches. The next shooting cycle clean with C4 then compare the initial patches. I think you be amazed at the difference.

 

[rwj]

+1 on Boretech’s cleaning products!

 

[Drop Port]

↑
"Want to find out what works on hard carbon , go by your local automotive machine shop and get an old piston with a bunch of hard , thick , cooked on carbon and experiment"...

"Simple, but, great idea".

And the reason GM TEC was the go to before it vanished.

 

[Kurt Blasser]

There is probably nothing "lacking" in your cleaning regimen at all. There is probably nothing lacking in your shooting regimen either. You have to shoot 'em to get 'em dirty....that said, the only "prevention" I am aware of that actually works is to leave your guns in the gun safe or rack and don't shoot them.
Carbon gets there from shooting, period, and as you know it doesn't just happen to materialize in the bore because the gun exists. All that said, the other question you should be asking the shooters with the "magic formula" to easily wipe clean every molecule from a bore is "what kind of borescope do you have???"
Running cleaning stuff and brushes down a bore until the patches come out clean looking would seem to be the end of it, and admittedly sometimes it is. But then again, sometimes it very definitely is not. Holding your eye up to the bore while looking at some light source at the other end will tell you if a bullet could pass thru, but nothing more.
I use Shooter's Choice MC-7 for a solvent and JB Bore Cleaner for the tough stuff. I had one nephew that was a real live, honest to god Marine sniper. {everyone either knows a Marine sniper, has a kid that is, or was one themselves...} When he was at Quantico he got to be pretty good friends with the guys that work on the sniper rifles. Just like scope makers, bore cleaner companies would send them boxes of free bore cleaners hoping the Marines would buy their product. There was a 9 month time when he must have brought me 25 or 30 different brands of bore cleaner. I tried them all and most of them did absolutely zero. By the way...I have a Hawkeye borescope.

Edit: many guys will tell you that you shouldn't necessarily clean until accuracy starts to drop, and there is something to be said for that. Also, caution on rubbing too much abrasive type cleaners in the bore, they generate their own dirt...if you keep on rubbing it will keep on turning out black stuff.

So don't leave us hanging! How did the Marines clean their sniper rifles?

 

[Milo 2.0]

You'll going to get many differing opinions - that's the nature of the breast when it comes to cleaning solvent recommendations so I'll add mine.

For many years I used Shooter's Choice MC-7 and was pleased with it in the sense that my groups remained consistent.

However wifey developed a sensitivity to the odor so I switched about a year ago to Bore Tech C4, Carbon remover with a bronze brush followed by C2 copper remover because these are odorless. I was shocked by the amount of carbon C4 removes. The first three passes of patches came out black as coal which I never experienced with MC-7. I don't have a bore scope but the C4 seems to do the job quite well.

Suggest you do a test. Shoot your normal amount of rounds then clean with MC-7 and save the patches. The next shooting cycle clean with C4 then compare the initial patches. I think you be amazed at the difference.

C4 works extremely fast too, it gets what it can in 5 min, I've let it sit for hours with no discernable differences. I do notice jagging it out can be problematic, seems sticky, I therefore brush with some kroil before jagging. Unless it gets completely under copper, it does not do much good there, but then again cleaning more frequently may solve this.

 

[Milo 2.0]

I think we've settled it that shooting yields carbon and there is no prevention. If I could keep Gunslick foam out of my lug abatement area(no clue if this is the right term), or magazine well, I'd use it exclusively. One squirt, let it set, another one more blows blue out the end, one squirt on a paper towel to get some in a brush, 5 passes yields a grey gravy. Another drawback is you really need to get this crap out of your chamber, otherwise your fired brass will do it for you and most do not like that outcome,lol

 

[Clucknmoan]

Then the stuff you are using is doing nothing to remove the copper, Hoppe's #9 smells good and guys like to joke about how "real men" use it for aftershave...but as a bore cleaner it is not all that effective. They do make another product called Hoppe's #9 Benchrest and it is a dedicated copper remover, but as copper removers go it is not all that either.



The gray stuff you are seeing sounds like powder fouling to me. I have seen what sounds like the exact same thing in some of my rifles, but my powder solvent and a good tight fitting {a caliber up as was previously suggested} bronze brush will take it right out. The other stuff in the "first 5 inches" could be just some powder fouling too, but it could also be something else. I have to wonder about these new anti copper fouling powders....they have to contain some sort of substance that sticks to and coats the bore that copper cant stick to. Now if it coats the bore and will stand up to bullets and hot gases passing over it at 3000 fps {plus or minus} I have to wonder, first, what does it look like in the bore?? and just how tough it is to remove????

It’s not powder fowling. Text book ring at the end of the neck, same crap up the barrel. I’d say it took on average 200 strokes with JB to get it out of each barrel.

 

[msinc]

So don't leave us hanging! How did the Marines clean their sniper rifles?

Sorry, I should have posted this info. Never meant by any stretch to leave anyone hanging!!! First off, I don't want to say this is how the "Marines" do it...but this is how one former Marine sniper does it. In the field they advocate a boresnake with some G.I. bore solvent. All he ever did was just run the snake thru until the bore looked clean looking thru the action. He did not do anything aggressive, like to remove copper, mainly I think because they just didn't carry the necessary stuff with them into the field. On the range or while on post it was different, they would do all their shooting on the range for the day and then clean the barrels. He said they would use a cleaning rod with solvent and a brush and scrub back and forth like 25 or 30 times. Repeat and then run patches until they came out clean. If I remember right he kept two boresnakes, one for use with solvent and the other soaked with LSA/CLP type oil. This one was used on the last pull to wet the bore for storage, etc. They were given all kinds of bore cleaner and he said they tried it all, but at the end of the day they pretty much stuck with the G.I. bore cleaner.
That was for the M40's...for the M4's they pretty much did the same thing, but he did say that a lot of the guys bought the Leatherman Mutt tool, mainly because it had a device to scrape the carbon out of the bolt carrier and off of the bolt. He said that when deployed maintenance varied from one soldier to the other on the M4. Some were fanatics about keeping them clean and others not so much. They were almost always told of weapons inspections with enough time to get the weapons clean and made things right when they had to, otherwise they shot the barrels right off the rifles and didn't care.
He told this story of his first deployment to Iraq...he wasn't a sniper yet, just in a mobile assault platoon. They flew in low to their FOB and a few clicks out there was this little town or village. From the air in a CH-53 it looked like the entire town was all children except for a few adults. They surmised that it must have been a place set up for a bunch of war orphans. A few months later they finally made a patrol thru this place and they got the real story. It seemed that Saddam Hussein didn't want the rest of the world to know they had any "defective" citizens in Iraq, so he rounded up all the dwarfs and sent them there to live in hiding. Absolutely no news media people were ever allowed near the place. It was run by one of his brother-in-laws or cousins who was given this job {being the sheik of a town full of dwarfs} as punishment for some prior insult or improper comment. The "sheik" refused to leave and just continued doing his job because at that time Hussein had gone into hiding but was still alive. Many Iraqi's were very afraid of him and believed he would somehow manage to come back and get back into power.
The sheik was one of the nicest people he met there and invited several squads to his house for lunch.
Not much to tell on the cleaning thing, but again, sorry to leave anyone hanging. One thing to remember, it wasn't benchrest shooting...on a man size target a hit is a hit and an enemy soldier with a 308 hole in his upper torso is out of the fight if not dead. If the accuracy opened up due to copper fouling in the field from say 1" groups to 4" groups, as is typical, that didn't necessarily mean an automatic miss. The other thing was that when accuracy fell of and a good cleaning didn't restore it they were simply issued another rifle.

 

[K22]

C4 works extremely fast too, it gets what it can in 5 min, I've let it sit for hours with no discernable differences. I do notice jagging it out can be problematic, seems sticky, I therefore brush with some kroil before jagging. Unless it gets completely under copper, it does not do much good there, but then again cleaning more frequently may solve this.

I've experienced no difficulty "jagging it out" with a firm fitting patch (Pro Shot Patches). I follow Bore Tech's procedure except I use a bronze brush with C4 rather than nylon since I believe the mechanical action of the bronze brush helps remove the carbon more effectively.

After dry patching I run three patches of C2, copper remover, through the bore and let stand for 5 to 10 minutes then dry patch. After testing, I found this to be just as effective as running 12 to 15 passes of C2 with a nylon brush as Bore Tech recommends. Perhaps this is due to using C4 removing all carbon and providing a cleaner surface for the C2 to do it's copper removing job. Anyway, this modification reduces the time to clean the bore which delights me.

I very impressed with Bore Tech's products. I would have never tried them if wifey's nose didn't demand that I quit using that "horrible smelling stuff" cleaning my rifles.

 

[Capt. Oblivious]

Shortstoke kroil down the barrel just as you finish shooting, C4 down the pype when you get home and your halfway there.

For me of you want all the carbon out there needs to be somer mechanical action, be it a brush or iosso/JB on a patch. Just using chemicals I could never get everything back to steel

 

[Nature Boy]

Shortstoke kroil down the barrel just as you finish shooting, C4 down the pype when you get home and your halfway there.

For me of you want all the carbon out there needs to be somer mechanical action, be it a brush or iosso/JB on a patch. Just using chemicals I could never get everything back to steel

I’ve come to the same conclusion

 

[370bc]

So after the carbon is removed, how many shots does it take to foul the barrel out then to return to zero? Would Just coating the barrel with Lock-Ez do the trick?

 

[Jeff A]

Spent a good portion of the weekend scrubbing the heck out of barrels after finding carbon in one. Of course I just had to check the rest.

Obviously there is something lacking in my cleaning regimen if there was carbon in 3 of my barrels. What is everyone finding as the best prevention from getting this to start? Scrubbing with JB or Kroil each cleaning or a solvent like C4 or Lucas?

The best prevention is called a Trigger Lock.

 

[rwj]

The best prevention is called a Trigger Lock.

That’s not fun!

 

[nicholst55]

Sorry, I should have posted this info. Never meant by any stretch to leave anyone hanging!!! First off, I don't want to say this is how the "Marines" do it...but this is how one former Marine sniper does it. In the field they advocate a boresnake with some G.I. bore solvent. All he ever did was just run the snake thru until the bore looked clean looking thru the action. He did not do anything aggressive, like to remove copper, mainly I think because they just didn't carry the necessary stuff with them into the field. On the range or while on post it was different, they would do all their shooting on the range for the day and then clean the barrels. He said they would use a cleaning rod with solvent and a brush and scrub back and forth like 25 or 30 times. Repeat and then run patches until they came out clean. If I remember right he kept two boresnakes, one for use with solvent and the other soaked with LSA/CLP type oil. This one was used on the last pull to wet the bore for storage, etc. They were given all kinds of bore cleaner and he said they tried it all, but at the end of the day they pretty much stuck with the G.I. bore cleaner.
That was for the M40's...for the M4's they pretty much did the same thing, but he did say that a lot of the guys bought the Leatherman Mutt tool, mainly because it had a device to scrape the carbon out of the bolt carrier and off of the bolt. He said that when deployed maintenance varied from one soldier to the other on the M4. Some were fanatics about keeping them clean and others not so much. They were almost always told of weapons inspections with enough time to get the weapons clean and made things right when they had to, otherwise they shot the barrels right off the rifles and didn't care.
He told this story of his first deployment to Iraq...he wasn't a sniper yet, just in a mobile assault platoon. They flew in low to their FOB and a few clicks out there was this little town or village. From the air in a CH-53 it looked like the entire town was all children except for a few adults. They surmised that it must have been a place set up for a bunch of war orphans. A few months later they finally made a patrol thru this place and they got the real story. It seemed that Saddam Hussein didn't want the rest of the world to know they had any "defective" citizens in Iraq, so he rounded up all the dwarfs and sent them there to live in hiding. Absolutely no news media people were ever allowed near the place. It was run by one of his brother-in-laws or cousins who was given this job {being the sheik of a town full of dwarfs} as punishment for some prior insult or improper comment. The "sheik" refused to leave and just continued doing his job because at that time Hussein had gone into hiding but was still alive. Many Iraqi's were very afraid of him and believed he would somehow manage to come back and get back into power.
The sheik was one of the nicest people he met there and invited several squads to his house for lunch.
Not much to tell on the cleaning thing, but again, sorry to leave anyone hanging. One thing to remember, it wasn't benchrest shooting...on a man size target a hit is a hit and an enemy soldier with a 308 hole in his upper torso is out of the fight if not dead. If the accuracy opened up due to copper fouling in the field from say 1" groups to 4" groups, as is typical, that didn't necessarily mean an automatic miss. The other thing was that when accuracy fell of and a good cleaning didn't restore it they were simply issued another rifle.

There are only two substances authorized to clean military small arms bores - CLP or Rifle Bore Cleaner. Most units simply use CLP.