I posted some pictures of what seems to be cooper fouling in one of my rifles earlier today and I was asked why I'm not cleaning them after every outing. Got me wondering what people do after a range day. Do you clean your rifle barrel after every outing or do only clean a rifle barrel occasionally.
Personally I only do it occasionally. I find that a fouled barrel is more accurate on the first several shots. After I clean a rifle thoroughly it seems to need a couple of shots before the accuracy settles in. This is a particular PITA with hunting rifles.
So that's my questions. Which camp do you follow in? Clean after every range trip or not?
Copper fouling accumulates after so many rounds if you don't use a cleaning method that targets the copper residue in the bore. Copper-specific bore cleaners, foaming bore cleaners, etc. You can throw Hoppe's 9 or whatever else the gun store sells at copper fouling all day and the patches will still come out blue/green.
I clean each of my guns when I feel they need more than a wipe down with oil. There's no magic solution or rule that applies for every gun. The only time I stuck to a strict cleaning schedule was when a I owned a JM Pro - Jerry Miculek in his video on cleaning the shotgun said to clean the shotgun every 400 rounds, so, I did, and the gun never had an issue.
While there's a lot of topics that gun people can agree on, the ones that people will never agree on are cleaning regimens or methods (edit: there is one exception, and that's the immediate need to remove corrosive salts when shooting corrosive ammo, but how people go about that varies from Windex to boiling water to cold water to a corrosive-salt-specific bore cleaner). The one trend I do notice is that sometimes people tend to stick with whatever they learned when they first got into guns. Veterans tend to stick with CLP-type products because that's what they used in the military. People who got into guns through family often stick with what their family member used. But eventually, people go off on their own and experiment and have different requirements than what dad or the military did.
In some peoples' minds, the only right answer is to always clean a gun after every time a projectile goes down the barrel. In others', the answer is never. Find what works for you and realize that there is no one answer.
