The barrel on my .22 Icon showed good promise so I decided to give it a little attention. First up was to remove the front sight. I was expecting it to put up a fight so I made a simple slide hammer with a scrap of wood. Before warming up the sight to soften it, I gave it a couple of moderate strikes with the slide hammer and it popped right off. Turns out it simply had a brittle adhesive holding it and a flat for indexing.
View attachment 419330 Starting at the leade, I used a generic Cratex point and wet/dry sandpaper to break the sharp step in the rifling. Then I poured a cast lap and worked the bore. There were two tight zones at approximately 25% and 75% of the way from the breech which took a bit of work to blend out. Here's a pic of the lap after the job was done.
View attachment 419331 Then it was time to deal with the irregular factory crown
View attachment 419332 After cutting it back and recrowning:
View attachment 419333 Then cleaned the bore and reinstalled the barrel and pulled some patches with Johnson's wax. Waited a bit for the solvent to evaporate from the wax, then grabbed the Norma 17.6gr domes to shoot some test groups. It seems to have responded nicely. The first 3 groups at 30 yards measured 0.22", 0.36", and 0.19". Average of 0.257" or 0.82 MoA.
View attachment 419335