Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Everyone-Kroil & JB paste-advice needed

If you're making your own batch of Ed's red, you might want to try substituting Naptha for the Kerosene. Works the same without the funky kerosene odor.

Naptha is fine, but one reason I prefer Kerosene is it tends to work longer without evaporating. When I use Ed's Red, I like to leave it on as long as possible.

When I get done with my deer rifles, I give them a once-over with Ed's Red and then let them sit a week or two. Then I clean them until I get a clean patch and then put a little Ed's Red back in for storage. When I pull them out in the summer, there's always a bit of black residue that comes out with the clean patch I run through before shooting my test rounds.

There are a lot of bore cleaners out there that if left in for weeks work remarkably well.

You guys all seem to obsess more about bore cleaning than I do. I used to. Now it’s pretty much just run a wet brush through a few times, then a wet patch or two, then a few dry patches. If the rifle’s going to be put up for a while a couple patches with Eezox.

Acetone might be hazardous, but it is not yet classified as a carcinogen.


https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/tfacts21.pdf

Well, I don't obsess over cleaning very much.

When the big deal about cleaning after so many rounds started around 30-35 years ago, primarily due to benchrest shooting techniques starting to become with group-obsessed hunters. One loading manual even included "cleaning intervals" for the best accuracy in various cartridges, which was unrealistic because it can vary not only due to individual barrels but the powder used.

But it did cause me to start recording how many shots my rifles typically could be fired without cleaning, without the groups starting to open up. Of course, this varied considerably. One example is the most accurate factory rifle I've ever owned, a heavy-barreled Remington 700 .223 Remington, which when it had far less than the several thousand round it's fired since, would put five shots with 50-grain Nosler Ballistic Tips into an average of 1/4" at 100 yards. That was with the then-new Ramshot TAC powder, which is so cleaning-burning that the rifle would regularly go 500 rounds without cleaning and still shoot the same-size groups. The only thing cleaning did was open up groups for 10-15 shots, until the bore "fouled" again.

So I only clean barrels when they need it, which means when groups open up. Which is why I quit cleaning my CZ 452 .17 HMR years ago. All cleaning ever did was open up groups for 10-15 rounds, just like that .223. But I also know a local guy, a little older than me, who cleans all his rifles after every time he fires them. I doubt he's ever tested whether it made any difference in accuracy....

It's also why after first experimenting with Dyna Bore-Coat I recorded how many shots were fired before groups started growing. The rifle was my .338 Winchester Magnum, which before DBC tended to start shooting larger groups after only 15 rounds. After installing DBC it would around 75-80 rounds....

Interesting.
It's also weird. Acetone was a major constituent of nail polish remover.
When I was a little kid, Mom and Grandma used to go to a beauty shop near their old neighborhood.
When I was too small to care or do anything about it, they'd take me along.
After a time, after I was in school, they stopped going. They said that cancer had taken all the women that ran it.
They blamed it on the nail polish remover.

I just always took it as gospel.




Mr. Mule Deer:
It used to be that I was told never to go to sleep on a dirty gun. I suppose folks did it that way in the days before things got less corrosive. I finally got the message 20 years ago when I started hunting deer multiple days in a row. Now, I wipe my gun off with a oily rag after use, but don't clean the barrels from the time the my deer rifles come out of storage for the summer, until after the end of season. These are rifles that see less than a dozen rounds through them over 4 months.

Here is my question: Do you recommend that end of season cleaning or would you suggest I stop cleaning and wait for a reduction in accuracy.

If you heard it at the beauty parlor, it must be true.

Well, it is not the only time I've heard acetone is bad stuff.

Nail polish remover is still acetone.

Another thing about acetone in Ed's Red: If you have any rubber parts on a synthetic stock or rubber grips on a pistol, do not get any on it as it will attack the rubber. So, either remove the stock or grips if rubber before cleaning, or leave the acetone out of the mixture.