LOL this is 100% correct in that most people think a barrel is "shot out" because of what they read in the rags or on the internet. Truth be known the Bore Scope does not lie and the main issue is people do not know how to clean the tube properly..... Polluted to death!
Different 6mm Wildcats
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Buffalobob
Well-Known Member
Just to re-iterate what Kirby said--- Go with the heavy bullets and you will get the best terminal results at the longer ranges and accuracy should be very good.
Fiftydriver
Official LRH Sponsor
When I started out with my shop, I was doing mostly general gunsmithing work until the custom building part of my business took off. The 257 Wby was by far the most common chambering that came into the shop with a shot out barrel. Turns out, for some reason, the 257 Wby has a tendency to build up a copper ring about 3-4" ahead of the throat, at least that is what we were seeing with most of these wby rifles. After some serious cleaning to remove around 3 pennies worth of copper, every one of them came back to shoot as well as they had originally.
The sad thing is that I had heard many guys talk about rifles simiilar to the 257 Wby that they had owned in their hunting carreers and they had SHOT the barrels out so fast that the rifles were basically worthless. Sad to think how many rifles were scrapped simply because they were not cleaned properly....... Even worse is trying to reeducate some that just because its a high intensity chambering, it does not nessesarily mean it will be a barrel burner.
Lots of good barrels have been scrapped because they were THOUGHT to be shot out when in fact I suspect hardly any of them were actually shot out.
I had one customer bring in a winchester M70 in 30-06. He said that he had shot the rifle so much that the first three inches of barrel had the rifling simply GONE!!! I had to see this. He said he had the rifle bore scoped and saw the extreme erosion for himself. Well, I scoped the bore and found out that the rifling was not gone, it was buried!!! Apparently he had at one time shot cast bullets through the rifle but did not clean it well, the lead built up because he was shooting them at far to high velocity and then started shooting copper bullets over the lead fouling and it had built up to the point that you could barely see the rifling for the first several inches of barrel.
I told him I could possibly fix the problem with a good cleaning. Took me a week but I got it clean down to the bore. Only problem was that the bore had been in this condition so long that moisture had been trapped under the lead and copper fouling and pitted the bore. The rifle shot fine but fouled quickly because of the pitting.
To bad.
