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Hard carbon deposits

  • Thread starter Thread starter Someoldguy
  • Start date Start date

Someoldguy

I have had a devil of a time removing hard carbon deposits from a barrel. A .223 Savage model 12 26" barrel to be exact. Not a premium barrel by any means, but a good place to learn something new for me.

I have no idea where all these deposits came from originally. I bought this rifle used with an unknown round count. It has no fire cracking or obvious throat erosion, but it did have substantial copper and ultimately what I believe to be carbon fouling in it. The copper fouling was pretty straight-forward to deal with. 3 treatments with Bore Tech Copper Remover for 10 minutes each and the copper was gone. What I was left with was deposits primarily in the area between the lands and grooves that had a black or in some areas black nickel appearance. This was NOT the carbon ring in the throat area, but along the length of the barrel but predominately from 2/3rds the length of the barrel to the muzzle. I tried nearly every carbon removal solvent I could find and little to no impact resulted. Shooters Choice MC #7, Butch's Bore shine, Kano Kroil, Sea Foam, GM Top Engine Cleaner, none had any substantial impact even after 2, 12 hour soaks and aggressive bronze brushing. It took 4 applications of J-B Bore paste on a patch wrapped around a worn bronze brush to finally get this fouling stripped out. And if I did not have a bore scope, I can say without hesitation that the fouling would have not been detectable except, perhaps, on the target.

So I'd like to ask the membership here if they have ever encountered such fouling, and if anyone has any idea how to avoid it or what created it?

And before anyone asks, I do not know if it will impact performance on target with this particular barrel. I know it would group 3/4" @100 yds before. I've no idea what it might group now as I have not had an opportunity to shoot it. Just got the crud out a little while ago. But most all the competition shooters here like to keep their bores clean from what I can see, so whatever these deposits were would be bad juju, from what I've read.

Mostly curious if anyone on the forum has had a similar experience. Guys without a bore scope would never be able to see it.

Thanks in advance for any observations.
 
I had it a few times. I think what caused it was trying to shoot multiple matches in a day and cleaning each time. I believe I didn't get it clean, because of not enough time and it built up from there. Every time I had it, was multiple matches and it just built from there. It took a lot of soaking with C4 and a patch wrapped around a worn out brush with Iosso to get it out. Matt
 
My dasher has the worst carbon Ive ever seen. Bought several different products TM works very well as does wipe out version of Carb out. Just takes time to get out. Having a bore scope (hawkeye) makes a big difference
 
It as been my experience that when you run pressures in the 62-63,000+ P.S.I. range and put round after round down the bore, like in an F-Class match, HARD carbon WILL be present and build! I scrub the bore down with Bore-Tech Eliminator, soaking it, scrubbing, soaking etc.. This gets MOST of the hard carbon out>>>>but not all! About every 300-400 rounds, I scrub the dog out of the barrel with JB. Once I do that, my borescope tells me it is SHINNY and NO hard carbon! It is my unvarnished opinion that you can not get ALL the hard carbon out of barrel that has about 100 rounds of "competition shooting", without using JB or Iosso.
 
Some powders are worse than others. Expensive but I'm a big fan of Vihtavouri. As posted by our more learned members, one needs to stay on top of the cleaning and use JB or Iosso when necessary.
 
If you are shooting bullets where a powder of this speed will work well, try some VV 133 in your .223. I have shot a lot of it in a 6PPC and in that application it does not make hard carbon. I have been able to clean my barrels with bronze brushes, cotton flannel patches and Butch's Bore Shine so that they pass bore scope inspections with flying colors. The one time that I ran into the problem that you described I had shot some medium pressure loads of 414 in my .220 Swift. I short stoked a black nylon brush filled with IOSSO up and down the barrel with probably 3" strokes and reversals for about 20 trips up and down the barrel, being careful not to let the brush come out of the muzzle. It worked just fine, and the rifle shot just fine afterwords. Of course I never used that powder again. If I had been more curious I would have worked up the hottest safe load to see if the problem repeated. I do not think that it would have at the higher pressure, because of more complete combustion.
 
urbanrifleman said:
Try Super Slick from Lowes. It removes carbon like nothing I have ever seen.

I do rub it a bit to get it to come off. I scrub the bore with wet patches of super slick and it appears to work very well.
Click to expand...
I assume that Super Slick is a cleaner of some sort.........Can you give any detail as to salts, sodium hydroxide etc. that may be in it please?
 
I am wondering if I am missing something here. My smith told me years ago (before all the different cleaning agents hit the market) to use Hoppes, first, then Sweets, alternating until the Hoppes patch came out clean and the Sweets patch came out white with brushing in between each treatment.

He said that a dirty rifle had layers of carbon over copper, over carbon, over copper. Made sense to me because all the copper isn't in one layer and all the carbon isn't in one layer. Carbon and copper are mixed.

So, if I'm miss informed, help me out here.
 
Knotwild said:
I am wondering if I am missing something here. My smith told me years ago (before all the different cleaning agents hit the market) to use Hoppes, first, then Sweets, alternating until the Hoppes patch came out clean and the Sweets patch came out white with brushing in between each treatment.

He said that a dirty rifle had layers of carbon over copper, over carbon, over copper. Made sense to me because all the copper isn't in one layer and all the carbon isn't in one layer. Carbon and copper are mixed.

So, if I'm miss informed, help me out here.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if your question is directed to me or just everyone in general, but in this particular barrel, nearly if not all of the copper fouling was on top of the powder fouling. I was surprised as well. As I said in the opening post, I bought the rifle used and perhaps someone shot 2 different powders/loads/ bullets that caused the 2 distinct layers. All I can say for sure is what I saw with the bore scope when I cleaned it all out.
 
My Hawkeye tells me that the first layer to come off is the carbon. Next is the copper.

After that, if I did a crappy job of cleaning the previous time, I'll see some black streaks still left. Then I wipe those out. Really tho, those last streaks are in the grooves, and I wonder if some barrels never let them go.

And 100% of the fouling in all my barrels, after the first patching/brushing, is in the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the barrel.
 
Knotwild said:
I am wondering if I am missing something here. My smith told me years ago (before all the different cleaning agents hit the market) to use Hoppes, first, then Sweets, alternating until the Hoppes patch came out clean and the Sweets patch came out white with brushing in between each treatment.

He said that a dirty rifle had layers of carbon over copper, over carbon, over copper. Made sense to me because all the copper isn't in one layer and all the carbon isn't in one layer. Carbon and copper are mixed.

So, if I'm miss informed, help me out here.
Click to expand...
What he was talking about was powder fouling. In these online discussions there is always some confusion on this point. Some refer to simple powder fouling as carbon. What those of us who have some bore scope time in usually mean when we write about hard carbon is something that no liquid cleaner has been able to remove. That requires the careful use of a cleaner that works by particulate action. I say that because I have been taken to task for using the A word ;-) which admittedly for some people seems to conjure up mental images of valve lapping compound. These are carefully designed products that do what they are designed to do well but if one insists on using them incorrectly, cumulative damage can occur, so pay attention to how you use them.
 
Someoldguy said:
I'm not sure if your question is directed to me or just everyone in general, but in this particular barrel, nearly if not all of the copper fouling was on top of the powder fouling. I was surprised as well. As I said in the opening post, I bought the rifle used and perhaps someone shot 2 different powders/loads/ bullets that caused the 2 distinct layers. All I can say for sure is what I saw with the bore scope when I cleaned it all out.
Click to expand...

I was actually just trying to learn something. I guess, when I think about it, that someone could have used a powder that fowled a lot, but was maybe slow enough in velocity to cause reduced copper deposits, then switched to a reverse combination?

I recently bought a bottle of Yamaha Ring Free that is used to clean carbon out of 2 cycle out board motors that I want to try on carbon build up in my muzzle crown caused by using a suppressor. I haven't tired it yet. Maybe something like that would be worth a shot.
 
BoydAllen said:
What he was talking about was powder fouling. In these online discussions there is always some confusion on this point. Some refer to simple powder fouling as carbon. What those of us who have some bore scope time in usually mean when we write about hard carbon is something that no liquid cleaner has been able to remove. That requires the careful use of a cleaner that works by particulate action. I say that because I have been taken to task for using the A word ;-) which admittedly for some people seems to conjure up mental images of valve lapping compound. These are carefully designed products that do what they are designed to do well but if one insists on using them incorrectly, cumulative damage can occur, so pay attention to how you use them.
Click to expand...

I see, I have never experienced hard carbon. That is what I meant by being misinformed.
 
yukonal said:
My Hawkeye tells me that the first layer to come off is the carbon. Next is the copper.

And 100% of the fouling in all my barrels, after the first patching/brushing, is in the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the barrel.
Click to expand...

I find this quite interesting. The hard carbon was most definitely under the copper and predominately in the last 1/3 of the barrel.
Perhaps the previous owner's cleaning method contributed to the situation?
Danged if I know.
 
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