Muzzleloader Fire Lapping

Here's a little something I found browsing around Internet . Myself when I pick up a new muzzleloader I usually put chrome polish on a cotton patch and running up and down the barrel till it turns black, shoot it 100 times and consider it broken-in I thought I would just throw this subject out there and see what everybody had to say.

http://www.beartoothbullets.com/tech_notes/index.htm

 

[Deadeye]

Some barrels need it and I don't know why it wouldn't work to use the chrome polish for a patch lube for those 1st 100 shots but unless I feel some roughness in a barrel I probably wouldn't do it and if I felt roughness in a new barrel I'd be sending it back. I just got an Issac Haines flinter together Sat. Not finished, just to the point that it is shootable. Cleaned the metal scraps out from drilling the hole for the touch hole liner, ran a patch down the barrel and went out and shot it, only at 50 yds. but holes were all touching. Spit patch, no swabing between shots. Getz swamped round groove barrel. I don't believe this barrel needs anymore breaking in. :winking:

 

[Stumpkiller]

I use J&B Paste (usually used for lead removal - it's a VERY fine abrasive) and a double or triple cotton patch thickness over a bore-sized cleaning jag to lap my new barrels. FLITZ or automotive cylinder-lapping paste would work, too. If the patches tear - a sign of machining burrs and/or sharp lands - I keep at it until they don't. I think 25 or 30 'swipes' usually does it for me. Just enough so that the patches don't tear when fired (I clean the barrel very well before test firing to remove all abrasives). Using a jag on the ramrod you can feel where the snags are and concentrate on just the rough spots. Fire-lapping is kind of a brutal, short-cut way to go about it.

I have a pitted, nasty old Finnish M39 (a Remington made WWI Mosin-Nagant rebarreled during WW2 by Sako) that is an absolute door-stop of a barn clunker. I lapped the barrel as above and it shoots 3" groups at 100 yds, even with the miserable service iron sights, creapy two-stage trigger and a bore that looks like the face of the moon.