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Now children, don't make me send you to your rooms.....

Pics of the throats of my 243AI, 300Win, and 257Wby are all very "cringeworthy" regarding wear and fire-lapping lizzardiditty. But, they shoot fine, so I keep shooting them.

After seeing them on this forum, I picked up one a while back. More than anything, it confirmed what I though were quality barrels really are where it counts, on the inside.

When I got my scope (same one) I immediately checked all if my rifles. Nothing great to report until I got to my Rem 788 in 223 rem. The bore looks just terrible. I scrubbed and cleaned the heck out of it and the gun quit grouping. I quickly found out the gun needs a fouled bore to shoot accurately. As some one mentioned before do not go by just the appearance of the bore. The 788 shoots under 1" if I do my part, but If I have cleaned it I need three fouling shots to set things right.
Sometimes it is better to not know what a barrel looks like as long as it shoots.

m1892 (and others),

I have encountered plenty of barrels that did not shoot worth a darn until fouled--and the number of shots required to "foul" them sufficiently has varied considerably.

One was a custom, cut-rifled, hand-lapped .300 H&H barrel from a maker who had never "failed" before. My normal procedure with a new barrel is NOT to fire one shot, then clean, then repeat--and anal retentive technique developed by benchrest shooters to break in barrels BEFORE their first match. Instead, I clean down to bare steel after each of the first 3-4 range sessions, usually a dozen or two rounds rounds--which does the same thing.

This rifle did not shoot worth a darn during the first range session, around a dozen rounds, whereupon I cleaned it. It did not shoot worth a darn during the second range session, whereupon I cleaned it again. I think it was the third session, when I handloaded a bunch of bullets and powders to try find what it WOULD shoot, that it finally started shooting well AFTER more than a dozen rounds. It turned out the barrel would should great from 15 rounds after cleaning through 100 more, before accuracy even started to fall off slightly.

The bore looked perfect in the bore-scope, but it was apparently TOO smooth.The barrel-maker finally told me that he'd polished it with a much finer paste than he'd ever ever used before. Which is yet another reason I do NOT pre-judge a barrel's accuracy from looking through it with a bore-scope.