SwampCollie

I'll bore you (pun intended) with a little bit of the 'why' behind this concept first:

When your shotgun barrel was made, they took a steel cylendar and ran a boring tool down the middle to ream out a 12 gauge hole (readers digest version). They did a bit of touching up and what not, but if you look down the thing, you can still plainly (especially on your 870) see the original tooling marks from where the metal was cut away. These small pits and lands attract and hole fouling, plastic residue from the wad and all sorts of unsavory stuff. It is a real witch to remove it and takes a lot of elbow grease. Most folks never (and I mean never) clean their guns good enough to know it exists, it takes a real scrubbing to even loosen the stuff up enough to be seen. The bore snake might do a good enough job to pass inspection, but trust me... its NOT really clean!

The only way to prevent this, is to eliminate those tooling marks. Enter: Bore Polishing.

There are a couple of ways you can go about this... some are cheap and effective, others are more scientific and costly.

1) (First Class) - You can bring your gun to a gunsmith, ask him to polish your barrel and lengthen your forcing cone and hand over some legal tender in exchange for his services.

2) (Business Class) - There are a number of products on the market designed to do exactly what we are talking about. A company named Flex-Hone (designed for removing machining and tool marks from the inside of engine blocks) makes a product uniquely called the Flex-Hone; the idea being that engine cylenders and shotgun barrels really ain't all that uncommon after all. The Flex-Hone is, for lack of a better description, a special drill attachment that litterally polishes and smoothes the inside of a shotgun barrel. The device itself looks like a regular bore brush that has some sort of infection, or has started growing coral, as there are several balls of compound on the ends of the bristles (this is what does the work). The whole lot is attached to the end of a flexible (hence flex hone) twisted metal rod that attaches to a common high speed drill. Pick up some flex-hone oil and get to work. There are detailed instructions available with some simple websearches. Just google 'polishing a shotgun bore', and you'll find plenty of useful info.

3) (Coach) - For the rest of us (and I'm probably finally going to break down and order a flex-hone this year anyway). I have always used JBs Non-Embedding Bore compound. I take a stout aluminum shotgun rod (usually just two sections), and screw a bronze brush into the end. Then I wrap two patches around the brush and coat it up with JBs. I chuck the whole works up into the DeWalt and being VERY careful not to hit the walls of my barrel, let the big dog eat in smooth even strokes for about 2-3 minutes. Clean out with oil patches. Then repeat the process with JBs Bore Bright. You'll notice a huge difference right off the bat. Its not exactly scientific, and if the barrel starts to get hot... you need to keep the thing moving.

FWIW: I immediately noticed HUGE improvements across the board with my patterns... and not just out of my turkey guns. Waterfowl loads, buckshot, target loads.... all of them... nice and even.

It makes your guns immensely easier to care for as well. I can shoot a box of target loads and you can't hardly tell my gun has been fired by looking down the bore. None of that crap has anything to stick to.

I give a lot of my choke tubes the same treatment. A good custom tube will already be polished when you take it from its originial package.... thats part of why you pay a premium for it.

Good luck. Take your time.