Recently purchased a new Bergara B14 wilderness ridge carbon. The manual recommends a few things that I would love to get opinions on.
First it recommends an initial cleaning before firing the rifle. We all know cleaning the barrel can mean different things to all people. Surely a light cleaning would work well here. Would love y’all’s thoughts.
Secondly, the break in process is as follows. For the first 5 shots clean after every shot. For the next 50 clean after every 10. What forms of cleaning would yall say makes sense here? Bore snake vs patches? What kind Solvents if any. Would this change any depending on copper monoliths vs traditional lead?
Finally, does it make sense to sight in / test various loads for accuracy while breaking in? Or would that be a waste of time until after it’s broken in?
Would definitely do a light cleaning of the barrel before shooting it for the first time. It’s not as common as it used to be, but many rifle makers would often ship their guns with a light coating of some form of lubricant or protective Coating in the barrel and you don’t want that in there when you start to shoot. There’s also always a chance that some styrofoam or other plastic, Etc could get jammed in there during the packaging and shipping process.
As for the break-in process, man that’s a tough one. Huge debate about that online if you look around. Many many respected gunsmiths, Etc say it makes absolutely no improvement. Eric Cortina says that Barrel companies have told him that if he sends them back a barrel there is nothing they can do to determine whether or not he did the appropriate break-in process or not. There are a number of companies that don’t recommend doing that at all.
But then part of me says, well why would the companies recommend doing that kind of a procedure? It’s not like they’re selling cleaning equipment or ammunition. They’re the ones who built the thing and they know how it’s put together better than anyone else.
Big thing I’ve decided to do is just not go nuts with shooting for the first 20 or so rounds. Especially for a hunting rifle. Shoot two or three shots and then let the gun cool down completely before going again. Do not just rack ammunition through it and through it, and through it, and get it hotter than you know where. It may be a complete fallacy, but another other, completely non-gun related products that are involved with high heat applications have a similar break-in procedure.
I wouldn’t do anything different based upon mono versus standard lead bullets.
For hunting rifle, I go ahead and start doing accuracy testing after about the first 20 rounds are through. I don’t want to wait till 200 rounds or so before starting that. Heck, many people never shoot more than 200 rounds so they’re hunting rifle for its entire lifetime.
Cleaning before shooting - yes, run a few patches through to make sure there isn’t any grit or whatnot in there.
Barrel break in - just shoot the gun, barrel break-in rituals are a myth, several barrel manufacturers have said the only reason they keep those instructions around is to stop people from bugging their support staff with questions.
