Fire Lapping?

OldSavage

OldSavage

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I shoot with a fella who has been having trouble with his Remington VLS and excessive copper fouling. He is thinking about embarking upon his first fire lapping experiment. Anyone here have any experience with this process and knows where to purchase the required materials?

Thanks,
 
Personally I would not do it without knowing more about the rifle. As far as I am concerned firing abrasive down a barrel is going to wear it considerably and shorten barrel life...

Caliber.. What the problem is? Copper fouling in itself is not necessarily a problem... What's excessive? What happens? What has been done? How and what is used for cleaning?
 
Thank you for your response Mr. Sorensen, here is what I know about the situation.

The rifle is a remington heavy barrel in .243 winchester that has been anything but accurate. Recently he has developed a single load that brings the rifle down within the 2 inch mark at 100 yards which is not acceptable by his standards (or mine for that matter).

After firing no more than 10 shots in the rifle there is visible copper fouling, which is much worse than I have yet to see in another rifle. At this point his groups open right up into the 4-5 inch mark. He cleans the rifle religiously with various solvents but takes him a great deal of time to get the rifle clean including an overnight soak in copper solvent. He uses a wire brush, and patches to clean the rifle with a one piece coated road. He does not use a bore guide.

Someone has told him that Fire Lapping should help with the problem but I do not have the knowledge nor the balls to attempt this type of work or even offer my assistance beyond trying to find further information for him.

What do you suggest?
 
What you describe is rather unusual in my experience. I don't know if fire lapping would help... does he have other rifles he is successful with? What bullet and powder is he trying?

...this is really tough to diagnose without actually inspecting. Bedding and the scope/mounts also have to be considered part of the problem...

I would suggest he gets it to someone for more of an evaluation, if the throat is good ... have it professionally cleaned, glass bed the action, float the barrel, do the trigger, check the mounts, re crown it... and try it again.
 
He is a sub moa shooter with his deer and moose rifles, but no where close with his varmit rig (the rifle in question).

I am not sure about which bullets and powders he is using but he has tried many different varieties including handloads, factory and so on.

He believes that the fouling is his problem, or whatever is causing the fouling at least. So I guess he believes he will be able to open the barrel up a little while removing any possible tooling marks and so on.
 
I've used the NECO fire lapping kit for a similar situation and it helped a lot.

As Denis has said, check every other possibility first. Are the loads too hot? Can you see any machining marks or galling in the bore? Also, try wiping the bore with CLP prior to shooting and see if that helps. Cleaning with JB Paste will help smooth the bore over time.

I had an older Savage 112 single shot target rifle. It shot well but fouled quickly and heavily, it drove me nuts trying to keep the copper fouling at bay. So I bought the NECO kit, used it as directed and it greatly reduced the copper fouling. I've since used it a few other times with good results.

One word of advice, don't use lead bullets. What I found was that they seemed to upset when they contacted the rifling and scoured the freebore resulting in much longer throat than before fire lapping. This caused me no problem since it was a single shot long action and I could seat the bullets longer. Since the first time I've used jacketed bullets and have no problem with the throat increasing.

NECO claims that some rimfire competition shooters use the two finest grades of their abrasive as a regular tune up polish.
 
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Use that factory tube as a tomato stake in the garden and buy a quality hand lapped barrel. Get your action trued, action pillar bedded while you are at it. Money well spent.
 
Remington 243

Besides the obvious a bad barrel, it would help if we knew what load he's shooting. In factory barrels the VLD bullets may not stabilize, ie the Sierra 107gr requires a fast twist 1 in 8. Bill
 
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