cleaning pellets

[maxtrouble]

@JDR - I buy directly from him as well. I like to support small businesses and inventors.

These are the only cleaning pellets that work. Soak it in Ballistol and then pull through. I usually start with one or two then move to dry patches.

Felt Buttons & Cotton Patches - PatchWorm

Product Categories: Pocket Field Kit | Tactical Field Kit | Small Caliber Kits Including .177 | Felt Buttons & Cotton Patches | Cleaning Compounds & Solvents | Replacement Parts & Accessories | Sight Paint Kit

patchworm.com

 

[aroundlocks]

Heres what tom gaylord says in his pa blog

"The black stuff JW mentions seeing on his felt cleaning pellets is the graphite anti-oxidant coating found on some pellets so they don’t turn into white dust in six months. It does not harm the gun, and it keeps getting removed and redeposited as you continue to shoot."

 

[aroundlocks]

Hi all
I use roll up filters 5.5mm about £1 for 500 in a box and push through barrel

 

[Hateful McNasty]

Get a spool of heavy thread ( like 1mm)
Double it with a loop and pull whatever .
Patches stote bought or homemade, steel ,brass , copper, bronze, wool patches , Scotch Brite patches.ect.. whatever turns you on .. a spool makes a near lifetime supply of " patchworms". Cheap



You can also add a tag line for back and forth scrubbing if needed ..

 

[DesertSilver]

Cleaning pellets are absolutely worthless. Triple them up and shoot them at the cat for fun. JK. Almost. They don't do crap. I can't believe they're still sold.

Use a pull through or push through patch soaked in goo gone or hopees nine before first use. Start at the breech end. If it's an older rifle with the possibility of Crosman use, brush it out with a bronze brush. Hard lead doesn't patch out easily.

If you avoid Crosman you'll never have to clean the barrel again. If you use Crosman pellets you'll have to sweep out their harder lead deposits every few thousand rounds. Actual cleaning intervals are dependant on the individual barrel. Not a big deal but I'd rather not have to clean the barrel.

I use to shoot at my horse when he would start eating the plums off the tree. I'd put 3 or 4 in my D48 and shoot at him at about 15-20 yards . Doubt if any even reached him but it got him to stop.

 

[RangerPete]

Many years ago I once fired a cleaning pellet through my old D48… gave me the fright of my life
That 1gr cleaning pellet went supersonic in my living room!
Never touched them ever again.

 

[Toxylon]

You can use a q-tip in a .177 barrel being pushed by a pellet for the same results at 1/10 the cost.

Taploading springers, such as my BSF (and many old BSAs. Webleys, Dianas etc.), cannot use q-tips, any more than pulled patches. Any cleaning apparatus other than cleaning pellets that are shot, or a stiff cleaning rod that comes out of the muzzle like it went in, will be hindered by the loading tap, which either blocks the bore or is in line with it, inside the receiver.

I'm not sure what you guys are paying for your cleaning pellets, but I have never considered them an expenditure, and I'm a tightwad.

 

[Sqwirl57]

I am not a tight wad by any means but I still don't like to waste money. I have 3x tap loaders myself and the Patch Worm kits work great. To each their own though.

 

[RScott]

Just a heads up, the dark stuff that comes out is graphite which is benign. Lead will appear as shimmering flakes...if patches don't have these flakes, either the approach is ineffective or the barrel is already clean.

I've been thinking about your comment that the dark stuff is graphite and is benign. But it has me more puzzled than before.

I shoot 25m HV (20 fpe) benchrest. Haven't gotten a 250 in a match but have been close. I am trying to reduce the spreads of my individual shots' POI versus the average POI, i.e., improve precision, in zero/ very low wind conditions. With my current setup, I find average spreads grow after about 130 pellets, all else equal, and probably are growing before that but within statistical error limits. What happens isn't so much that all pellets have higher spreads, but I'll get some "fliers" of 7 to 10 mm spread versus no shots over 5.5 mm spread in a clean, starting-out barrel. With a clean barrel, my spreads typically average 1.6 to 2.2 mm for a 15 shot sequence. With a "dirty" barrel that hasn't been cleaned after 130 shots, the spreads can average more like 2.5 to 3.5 mm

So I pull dry patches through my barrel after every 30 or so shots, and clean my barrel with wet then dry patches after about 100 shots during practice sessions. The patches are inevitably dirty. It takes about 4 wet patches (using WD-40) to remove the "dark stuff". (Also, I lube my pellets with WD-40 as Mike @thomasair has recommended.) I have never seen a shiny fleck of lead in the dry or wet patches*, so I assumed the build-up of dark stuff was increasing the chances of shooting a 7 to 10 mm "flier".

(* I did once see a lead speck on a patch. I was experimenting with treating the barrel and pellets with hexagonal boron nitride (HBN). I got hardly any dark stuff on my dry or wet patches, but spreads were not very good. And then one dry patch yielded the lead speck. I don't use HBN anymore).

Can you help me interpret all this? Could the dark stuff (graphite) build-up be impacting my spreads? Might there actually be lead flecks but I am not looking for them properly?

My other problem is that I seem to need to shoot 10-20 pellets after a wet cleaning before the precision tightens up. I know you've supported the approach of using wax after a thorough solvent clean of a barrel and then not needing fouling shots. But I've not had this success after using wax or with WD-40 patches.

Regards.

 

[nervoustrig]

Firstly I want to acknowledge it sounds like you are making every reasonable effort to control for variables and pay close attention to details that could be influencing the outcomes. It's also worth noting that you are chasing a level of precision that exceeds 98-99% of the readership here, to whom my earlier comments were geared. So it's quite possible you have identified a side effect of graphite that produces growing dispersion...and even if not a universal side effect, perhaps one that affects your particular rifle.

With that said, I will say I am skeptical that graphite alone is the cause. At least not if the symptom is fliers that begin occurring intermittently / randomly (say, roughly 1 in 5 shots or 1 in 10 shots), as opposed to a gradual and persistent degradation of accuracy. Being that graphite is soft and friable, it does not release from the bore and hitch a ride on a pellet all at once the way a speck of lead will do.

Given your methodical approach, may I suggest an experiment? Clean the barrel thoroughly, then load a patch or a mop with powdered graphite (e.g. lock lubricant) and run it through the bore a few times to coat it. Then proceed with a shooting session and see how it responds. Keep everything else the same as best you can, including (especially) the WD-40 pellet lube. If graphite were negatively affecting the results, you can expect the 7 to 10mm spread to emerge almost immediately. Or at least early on, after some number of seasoning shots but well before the 130 count you identified.

 

[RScott]

Firstly I want to acknowledge it sounds like you are making every reasonable effort to control for variables and pay close attention to details that could be influencing the outcomes. It's also worth noting that you are chasing a level of precision that exceeds 98-99% of the readership here, to whom my earlier comments were geared. So it's quite possible you have identified a side effect of graphite that produces growing dispersion...and even if not a universal side effect, perhaps one that affects your particular rifle.

With that said, I will say I am skeptical that graphite alone is the cause. At least not if the symptom is fliers that begin occurring intermittently / randomly (say, roughly 1 in 5 shots or 1 in 10 shots), as opposed to a gradual and persistent degradation of accuracy. Being that graphite is soft and friable, it does not release from the bore and hitch a ride on a pellet all at once the way a speck of lead will do.

Given your methodical approach, may I suggest an experiment? Clean the barrel thoroughly, then load a patch or a mop with powdered graphite (e.g. lock lubricant) and run it through the bore a few times to coat it. Then proceed with a shooting session and see how it responds. Keep everything else the same as best you can, including (especially) the WD-40 pellet lube. If graphite were negatively affecting the results, you can expect the 7 to 10mm spread to emerge almost immediately. Or at least early on, after some number of seasoning shots but well before the 130 count you identified.

What a great and creative idea for an experiment! I'll try it in a couple weeks after our next benchrest match.

 

[RScott]

Firstly I want to acknowledge it sounds like you are making every reasonable effort to control for variables and pay close attention to details that could be influencing the outcomes. It's also worth noting that you are chasing a level of precision that exceeds 98-99% of the readership here, to whom my earlier comments were geared. So it's quite possible you have identified a side effect of graphite that produces growing dispersion...and even if not a universal side effect, perhaps one that affects your particular rifle.

With that said, I will say I am skeptical that graphite alone is the cause. At least not if the symptom is fliers that begin occurring intermittently / randomly (say, roughly 1 in 5 shots or 1 in 10 shots), as opposed to a gradual and persistent degradation of accuracy. Being that graphite is soft and friable, it does not release from the bore and hitch a ride on a pellet all at once the way a speck of lead will do.

Given your methodical approach, may I suggest an experiment? Clean the barrel thoroughly, then load a patch or a mop with powdered graphite (e.g. lock lubricant) and run it through the bore a few times to coat it. Then proceed with a shooting session and see how it responds. Keep everything else the same as best you can, including (especially) the WD-40 pellet lube. If graphite were negatively affecting the results, you can expect the 7 to 10mm spread to emerge almost immediately. Or at least early on, after some number of seasoning shots but well before the 130 count you identified.

@nervoustrig :
I tried the graphite (lock lubricant) experiment you suggested. It did NOT shorten the time to getting the 7+ mm fliers I spoke of in an earlier post. I tried loading various amounts of graphite; I squeezed the lock lube tube into the leade. In one case I could see a "pile" of graphite (when looking down the barrel) before shooting a pellet, and the first shot landed about a foot low and was 300 fps slower than normal. But after 1 or 2 shots, FPS was at normal levels after that and other graphite treatments of the barrel. And I never got the 7+ mm flier observation even after 150 shots so perhaps the graphite was delaying the start of the fliers. And there were hints that the graphite was reducing the standard deviation of my shots. However, most of the graphite testing was done in 2-5 mph winds, so I need to test more - in lighter winds - to see if there is actually a favorable impact from puffing graphite into the barrel. If so, I'll be looking to try various graphite puffing options, and maybe see if that can outperform using WD-40 pellet lube. Only hassle is handling black graphite; in the situation where I loaded a pile of graphite in the barrel, the puff also sent graphite out the muzzle and onto my chrono!