Originally Posted By: RustydustOriginally Posted By: wklmanI don't do barrel break-in's on any of my rifles. I believe its a waste of barrel life and time. Never seen any reliable proof that a broke in barrel shoots any better then one that is not.
Right there with you. We even have barrel makers such as Krieger that say that it is not necessary.
Please show me on Krieger's site where it says this.
I recently had a new Krieger barrel put on my 300 RUM. Since I have a Lyman Borescope I decided to put together a little "photo diary" of the process. When I get a chance I'll try to post some pictures.
I used the break in method as described below, which I copied from Krieger's site.
The following is a guide to break-in based on our experience. This is not a hard and fast rule, only a guide. Some barrel, chamber, bullet, primer, powder, pressure, velocity etc. combinations may require more cycles some less. It is a good idea to just observe what the barrel is telling you with its fouling pattern and the patches. But once it is broken in, there is no need to continue breaking it in.
Initially you should perform the shoot-one-shot-and-clean cycle for five shots. If fouling hasn't reduced, fire five more cycles and so on until fouling begins to drop off. At that point shoot three shots before cleaning and observe. If fouling is reduced, fire five shots before cleaning. Do not be alarmed if your seating depth gets longer during break in. This is typical of the “high spots in the throat being knocked down during this procedure. It is not uncommon for throat length to grow .005-.030 from a fresh unfired chamber during break in.
My first pictures of the brand new barrel and its chamber, showed a beautiful shiny bore and a very clean chamber job. I cleaned it with a little Hoppes #9 and patched it dry and then hit it with some CLP and patched it out again.
I then fired one round through it and put my borescope down it and my heart about stopped, copper everywhere. So I started cleaning it with Barnes CR10 using a nylon brush and soaking and scrubbing as described on the Barnes bottle. It took a number of soaking and scrubbing sessions to get it all cleaned up.
One thing that I found interesting was, I quit seeing blue on my patches, before my borescope showed all of the copper being gone, I'm still scratching my head on this.
After everything was cleaned up, I went out and popped off another round. Back at the borescope and still quite a bit of copper. But it cleaned up fairly quick, back out for round 3 and again some copper but maybe a little quicker on the clean up.
I am now up to my 10th round fired and I still get a little copper, but it comes out with very little work. I run a soaked patch through once and then a soaked brush about 12 strokes and then let it sit for 10 minutes and then patch it out. At that point the borescope shows no copper.
I'm ready to start shooting some groups at this point. In my mind, the 10 rounds of barrel life that I have supposedly taken off of my barrel, are well worth it. I have no doubt that If I would have went out and simply started dumping rounds down my new barrel, I would have pounded copper on top of copper and ended up with a barrel that never would have lived up to it's true potential.