Ever had a round shed in the barrel?

[jonlisha]

Well today i went to pitt2magic's house to help him out with some yard work but ended up leaving early due to bad stomach pain, get home and my girlfriends throwing up sick as well so i guess its time for the stomach bugs to come out!

Well since i couldn't get outside anymore today i decided to clean my guns, now the gun im going to be talking about is the pistol on the left in my picture, its a Charter Arms Explorer II .22lr pistol.

Heres the deal, i swab my barrel and spray some Winchester CLP it it after every shoot, never had any problems with the barrel till today. I was cleaning the barrel with a cleaning rod and an old cut up bandanna i use, well it got stuck about 2 inches in, i pulled it out and looked down the barrel to see what appeared to be deep pitting all in the barrel, i sprayed CLP in it and let it soak then i brushed it out but it was still there. I took a large part of the bandanna and sprayed it with CLP and ran it through the barrel, it was a very tight fit but when it came out the other side it was covered in shredded pieces of led, i checked the barrel and it was clean so i guess what looked like pitting was actually parts of a round that tore apart in my barrel.

So heres my question, do i need to be worried about this? I only use Remington Thunder bolts in this pistol cause thats the cheapest thing it will feed but i have never had this happen to me. What exactly causes it? Also can this damage my barrel at all, i mean this wasn't just a little bit of lead this looked like more than half the bullet had caked up on the walls of the barrel.

Thanks guys.

[jonlisha]

Whoops didn't mean to post this in handguns i meant to put it in Gunsmithing and Troubleshooting, can someone move it there?

[Garufa]

It's just lead fouling. All .22's do it. Nothing to be concerned about. If CLP took out that big a chunk of lead there are better cleaners that will take out even more. Kroil comes to mind.

Seems like I've heard Thunderbolts are notorious lead foulers.

Nice collection BTW. I haven't seen one of those .22's in years.

Edited April 10, 2010 by Garufa

[Westwindmike]

Thunderbolts are horrible for leading!

[Hgunner]

Get a good bronze bore brush or 2. some Shooters Choice and scrub like heck.

Let soak...scrub like heck...repeat. Will not hurt the bore or accuracy.

[Oh Shoot]

Thunderbolts are horrible for leading!

Don't seem any worse than any other lead head round to me.

- OS

[Westwindmike]

Wait till they are a few years old. They start getting rough on the outside when the lube starts to deteriorate. Mine got so bad they wouldn't chamber and the ones that did were horrible for leading the barrel. Remington replaced 2000 rounds of mine and I shot the new ones quickly, before they could go bad.

[Oh Shoot]

Wait till they are a few years old. They start getting rough on the outside when the lube starts to deteriorate. ...

Well, we'll see I guess. I do probably have several thousand of them stashed here and there.

I had some thunderbolts in little 50 round boxes, I guess were from the 80's, possibly 70's, and they shot ok. I think I remember the Thunderbolt brand from when I was a kid shooting them in the late 50's early 60's. 'Course I mainly only used a pump back then.

What's odd is, yeah, the Thunderbolts do have a shiny coating over them, but I have some other brands that look like have no coating at all. Federal Champion, for example, 40 gr. lead heads, don't look like there's ANYthing coating them, and they run fine in my 10/22's.

- OS

[Westwindmike]

Mine were all from 1999. I stocked up for Y2K. All of them went bad. 2500 rounds stored in my safe.

[SavageSig]

I have not heard of .22's going bad. Perhaps you got a bad batch wouldn't have been good to shoot at any point in time. Thunderbolts are dirty, but Golden Bullets are dirtier. When I shoot those, my fingers won't wash clean of that "gold" dust for at least 2 days no matter how much hot water and soap I use.

Coatings are not universal, but the nicer bullets have a waxy lubricant on them. Supposedly disturbing the coating is not good for accuracy. But that is neither here nor there.

How many rounds have been down the barrel since you last cleaned? Do you have pictures of the shards of lead that you pushed out of your barrel? I clean my .22's very infrequently, and I have never seen physical bits of lead come out of my barrel. Very dirty patches, sure, but not chunks of lead. Either your pistol hadn't been cleaned in 3 or 4 decades and a couple of pallets of ammo, or something is wrong.

[jonlisha]

I have not heard of .22's going bad. Perhaps you got a bad batch wouldn't have been good to shoot at any point in time. Thunderbolts are dirty, but Golden Bullets are dirtier. When I shoot those, my fingers won't wash clean of that "gold" dust for at least 2 days no matter how much hot water and soap I use.

Coatings are not universal, but the nicer bullets have a waxy lubricant on them. Supposedly disturbing the coating is not good for accuracy. But that is neither here nor there.

How many rounds have been down the barrel since you last cleaned? Do you have pictures of the shards of lead that you pushed out of your barrel? I clean my .22's very infrequently, and I have never seen physical bits of lead come out of my barrel. Very dirty patches, sure, but not chunks of lead. Either your pistol hadn't been cleaned in 3 or 4 decades and a couple of pallets of ammo, or something is wrong.

I swab the barrel after i get done shooting, i give the whole gun a overall cleaning when it starts to jam. These pistols are real touchy, i mean its accurate and fun to shoot but you really have to treat them right or they will jam every other round.

As for the size of the shavings, i don't have a picture but they were very large, all in all i probably had enough shavings to make a little over half a .22 bullet, they were very thin of course but about 3/8 of an inch long.

My guess is its from several different rounds, see i don't really look down my barrel every time i clean it so thats why i missed it the first time, and i guess with it being in there and me still shooting it just started building up from other rounds.

[jonlisha]

It's just lead fouling. All .22's do it. Nothing to be concerned about. If CLP took out that big a chunk of lead there are better cleaners that will take out even more. Kroil comes to mind.

Seems like I've heard Thunderbolts are notorious lead foulers.

Nice collection BTW. I haven't seen one of those .22's in years.

Thanks, i picked that pistol up from a pawnshop in Cleveland for $120, i think i need to replace the hammer spring cause im getting real weak primer strikes and sometimes it doesn't set the round off, its taken a lot of work to get this gun back into shooting condition. When i first bought it the poor thing was so dirty it couldn't even reliably cycle one round and always failed to eject, now the only time it malfunctions is when i get a weak primer strike which is every other magazine.

All in all its a great pistol, very accurate, very cheap, very fun. I can't find a holster that will fit it though, the thing gets real tiring when i carry it up in the mountains with me.

[Mike.357]

run clp through the bore , get it good and wet in there then leave it sit overnight.

Clean as normal the next day. The lead will come out.

And I never noticed T Bolts leading things up any worse than any other lead round.