Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors crusty 30-30 barrel

Ive seen George call a lot worse than conservative but I like the idea. I came home today and melted some soft lead, plugged the bore 1.5" in and poured a slug. The slug shows no rifling for 1/2".

Sure cant hurt to to try touching up the existing end of the barrel and shooting it.

Is there anything to the brass screw/lapping compound method? Any more bubbaish ideas? Ive got a number of pipe wrenches to work with.

Call me conservative, yeah, I can live with that, but I wouldn't cut anything else until I had the crown recut. Redoing the crown cures a lot of ills and heals many faults caused by neglect or too much cleaning from the muzzle end. The last 1/16 of an inch or so of barrel affects the flight of the bullet as much or more than the previous 23 and 15/16ths.

Maybe the key words here are "disappears at the muzzle". I bet there's a lot of cleaning rod wear, and that'll play billy hell with accuracy. While the bore is pretty bad, I would at least cut it back to where the rifling is strong and try out some more jacketed loads.

. . . Cleaning a heavily leaded bore is just as tiresome as cleaning a heavily copper fouled bore. Super hard cast bullets (say bhn20 hardness or better, cast of linotype or monotype) could well work pretty good, but are worthless for hunting purposes. They won't expand, behaving much like a full metal jacket . . .

I agree with Gnoahhh w.r.t. the rifling at the muzzle. If you don't want to cut the bore, just counterbore it about 1.0" to 1.5". The length will be "factory", you won't have to re-sight it, and it should shoot "minute of deer" or "minute of bad guy" all day for the rest of your life.

Or chop it to 16.5" - trapper, baby! How cool would that be?

For cleaning, I've used a home-made electrolytic bore cleaner with outstanding results:

http://thedolk.com/borecleaner/index.html

A helpful hint -- run a patch wetted with acetone down the bore to degrease it. The electrocleaning process will go much faster.

Other hints: I use a Swede 96 Mauser cleaning rod as the cathode (the rod in the bore that collects the fouling) and a 6V lantern battery. The electrolyte I use is 50:50 water:ammonia. Ammonia has a high pH and contrary to a lot of interwebz legends, high pH liquids will not corrode steel. I've even used full-strength household ammonia (which is only about 3%) on really fouled Mosin-Nagant and Kar 98k bores and had them come out shining. I duct tape the funnel to the muzzle, and use a rubber stopper that will plug the chamber with the bolt closed snugly. I wrap a few layers of electrical tape around the Swede cleaning rod every 8" to 12", and especially make sure the tip of the rod contacting the rubber stopper is wrapped, as well as the rod in the area of the muzzle. You do NOT want the rod to touch the bore because it will short out, spark, and drain the battery.

This process is nothing more than "reverse plating," or "electrocleaning." The fouling will be dissolved from the lands and grooves and "plated" onto the steel rod. For this to work, the steel rod MUST be connected to the negative terminal of the battery, and the battery positive is clipped to the rear sight, preferably.

Hydrogen gas will be evolved from the water, so don't smoke and try not to spark the connections.

Every 10-15 mins, disconnect the wiring and remove the cleaning rod and wipe it down. It will be COVERED with a dark sludgy paste. After 1 hr, break the whole thing down, drain the bore, unplug the breech by tapping the stopper with the cleaning rod, run some dry patches and check the progress. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.

This won't take a bore back to factory new, baby-butt-smooth, but it will pull out any fouling and give you a clean surface with which to start your own fouling process.

Noah

Very Interesting Machine, and Neat information that you have Shared. Thank-you.

How-ever i really would hate to be using this out-side especially when a thunderstorm may be near. Could act as a lighting rod.