Originally Posted by
andrewstj
I have been seeing some stuff about barrel conditioning, nothing detailed, just some mention of it. I have an 8 year old Knight Disc extreme .50 cal stainless barrel. I did not do anything special with the barrel when i bought the gun, just worked up a load and hunted. The gun is accurate and clean. Question? should I do something now to condition the barrel or is it too late or not important at this time? I am shooting Blackhorn and 250 and 300 gr. Thors. Thanks for the help.
You can condition any metal and conditioning a barrel is not uncommon. It certainly is not as simple as the frying pan example, but all metal has pores and the pores of the metal can be filled with various substances including fouling and/or oils.
For years I used a the infamous bore butter and it did reduce the fouling from t7 and nearly got rid of the the famous "crud ring". I even used it in my trap shotgun chokes to help reduce the plastic fouling in them...
Today there are products on the market that preform this conditioning with better results and have less reaction with the heat and compression of explosion of powder.
Western Powders offers a product called Montana Extreme Bore Conditioner... Another product that works very is Slip 2000 as well as Ezoxx - and of course I am sure there are others.
I have been using Xtreme BC for a long time now and it certainly has helped my bores with the reduction of fouling and ease of cleaning.
http://www.montanaxtreme.com/product...oreConditioner
The other one that I use is Slip 2000.
http://www.slip2000.com/allconditionslube.html
You can help your bore... not a magic thing and will not happen over night but, conditioning can be done as long as there are pores in metal.