Mike, I mounted a scope on the repro Browning 52C, and before taking it out to the range to zero that scope, cleaned the bore. I have a 20 cal stainless rod with an adapter to accept 22 cal jags & brushes, and it was all I could do to get that rod pushed through the bbl. It was very rough, and full of lead fouling, so I went after the leading with a new 22 cal bronze bore brush. Took quite a bit of work, but I did eventually get rid of the leading. Took the rifle out and put 65rds of a good lot of SK Std+ through it at 50yds, never getting anything resembling a decent group in the process. Took it back into the shop, and found it was just as full of leading as it had been to begin with. Cleaned it again, and did a pretty thorough examination with a Hawkeye borescope. I've never seen an uglier bore - the lands in the leade were rough, there were numerous annular rings throughout the bore, along with a just plain rough finish. I'm certain that anyone who'd taken a look at it with the Hawkeye would've come to the same conclusion as I did - that it was a POS. In my case, having used several Krieger 22RF bbl blanks & having excellent accuracy with all of them, I got on the phone to Krieger and asked if they had a straight cylinder 22RF blank that they could profile to match the factory bbl, with the exception of making it .050" larger in diameter from breech to muzzle. I pulled the OEM bbl and shipped it to them, and in a few short weeks, had the replacement blank in hand.
Now here's the other thing about this Browning repro - the trigger was just as screwed up as the barrel had been - very rough with a ton of creep, even after removing the 'lawyer pin'. While I was waiting on the Krieiger blank, I removed the trigger and mailed it off to Dokey (the handle of a member over on RFC who does nice work on 52 triggers), with a note explaining the problems I was having with it. It arrived back here not long before the Krieger blank did. When I got the new bbl fitted & chambered, I found that he hadn't gotten all the creep out of the factory trigger, but the break was enough lighter than it's pretty easy to shoot, even with some of that roughness. This rifle was advertised as in 'nearly NIB' condition, and in fact, did appear as new, with nary a mark on it. But I imagine that whomever the original owner was, he or she put a few rounds through it, found out how poorly it shot, and how awful the trigger was, and just peddled it. If this is indeed what happened, I wish that instead of unloading the mess on another unsuspecting buyer, they'd have sent it back to Browning for warranty repairs/replacement. But since they didn't, now I've got a pretty nice looking Browning 52C repro that shoots as good as it looks...
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