So, took my 22/45 mk3 apart for its first cleaning after 600 rounds yesterday..

 

No lie, It's now a smooth bore.... 0 rifling visible upon first dissasembly. After about 15 minutes of some hard hard scrubbing with a bronze brush the rifling is now very very faint. Seems like I have a lot of work ahead of me//

 

 

What gives? I clean my .22 rifles every 3-4k if they're lucky and never had any real leading issues... I use the same ammo in everything and I've never seen anything like this.

 

Ammo is federal LRN +100 rounds of minimags.

 

 

Will it hurt the upper (and plastic sights) if i just let the whole upper submerge in solvent over night? I think that may be the only way to really get this clean without hours of scrubbing

Does it affect accuracy?

Plastic and solvents don't mix. Clean the barrel the old fashioned way.

 

However I assure you that no matter how much lead you think you have in your barrel I have you beat. Last Friday I ran into a gun with a NEW kind of over leading. We couldn't run a rod through it, we couldn't run a brush through it, it was THAT bad. Eventually we found the problem

 

The pictures bellow will show you what we found inside the barrel, and yes that was just a sheet of lead, the quarter should give you an idea of the scale

Does it affect accuracy?

 

I don't shoot paper so i don't know if it was keyholing... It might of been unaccurate or it might of just been me..not sure

 

 

Plastic and solvents don't mix. Clean the barrel the old fashioned way.

 

However I assure you that no matter how much lead you think you have in your barrel I have you beat. Last Friday I ran into a gun with a NEW kind of over leading. We couldn't run a rod through it, we couldn't run a brush through it, it was THAT bad. Eventually we found the problem

 

The pictures bellow will show you what we found inside the barrel, and yes that was just a sheet of lead, the quarter should give you an idea of the scale

 

wow

Yikes. And that's why I don't shoot bare lead

Yikes. And that's why I don't shoot bare lead

 

Well, its a .22 so no matter what they say its all kinda bare lead. It should be noted that that gun in theory had less then 2000 rounds through it, but it actually had a series of problems which after 3 of us took it apart and tried to fix it were serous enough to be sent back to the manufacturer. I actually think that gun had serious tolerance problems.

I wonder if mine has any issues, I can't believe that at this low of a round count mine is this bad...

Keep in mind that bore fouling is not really the same as leading. You could just have wax/moly buildup. Take a brush to it, add elbow grease, see what happens. If it is a new gun I wouldn't be shocked if the rifling is really sharp and cutting up the coating.

It's lead,.. it comes out in strips

I have a Mark II that has lead all inside, has been that way for like a year and a half, I have not got around to cleaning it out. It was so bad I couldn't get the end of a boresnake through the barrel, I had to chisel lead out with a ramrod just to be able to get the string through the barrel.

 

Doing internet research, it seems that the easiest way is to buy one of those brass Chore Boy scrubbing pads and wrap bits of it around the brush and then use the brush. Supposedly it grabs onto the lead and pushes it right out of the barrel.

 

Since I am not looking forward to doing the job, I bought chore boy pads, and after a year decided to use them to scrub pans and never got to use them to clean the barrel. Now I need to buy more to try to clean out the barrel.

 

Good luck. People who are into casting their own bullets swear by chore boy pads wrapped around brass brushes so it should work.

havnt had anything like this with my mk3 Target. The rifling is pretty shallow though.

I shot 300rds through my SR22 last week and the lead fouling was worse than what RedBowTie posted. Took me about an hour to get the bore clean. Just a lot of elbow grease and M-Pro7 . When I started, I couldn't even get a rod through. Had to use a pick to to create a funnel into the bore. It's amazing that the thing even shot. But as was said earlier, this was a brand new gun and the rifling is usally sharp to start with.

I have found the "Big 45 Frontier Metal Cleaner" pad to work better than the chore boy SS pads. It really cleans out the bore fast. I have also discovered that by using Tetra Gun bore cleaner and Tetra Gun Lube, along with the Big 45 cleaner, leading over time is significantly reduced. I now use this on all the barrels and it seems to get easier each time I clean them. www.big45metalcleaner.com www.tetraproducts.com