ORIGINAL: cayugad
Also if you say crud ring.. hows your breech plug? When I shot that powder the accumulation of hard to remove crud in the breech plug made cleaning that rifle just about as time consuming as with other powders. I swear that breech plug took me about ten minutes to get it to MY standards.
I hear ya. Some hard stuff does accumulate on the breech plug. That's why the BP is the first thing I remove. Then I place it along with the breech assembly (firing pin, breech block) in a clean parts bath to let it soak while I clean the rest of the rifle. By the time I get to those parts, the hard stuff is pretty well softened up. A large majority of it is easily removed with a rag and some q-tips. The rest is easily disposed of with an 1/8" drill bit and a .22 bronze bore brush. Very, very easy.
As for the rest of the breech area that accumulates primer fouling... Some spray solvent on a q-tip makes small work of that. Regular q-tips suck! I use the q-tips I get from work on my guns. They're military hospital grade cotton swabs that are tightly spun on a wooden stick. Perks of working in an Armory.
