Annoying rust coloration on my patches.
 

I have cleaned this rifle (Traditions .54 caliber Deerhunter) the same as any other rifle I have owned and never had this problem before. I can't seem to get it to go away. The cleaning patches keep coming out with a brownish color on them. The sabots I have been using are orange in color. Could they be leaving a plastic residue behind causing this coloration to be on the patches? When I shine a light down the bore it looks shiny and no sign of rust. I just can't believe it to be rust, but as a precaution I am soaking the barrel in EVAPO-RUST. Could the color be coming from the orange plastic sabots?

Same deal with my traditions, i think its flash rust. To soaking it in windex to remove any moisture and then oil it up.

Dyna tek bore coat! LOL it prevents these head aches.

Looks like rust to me.

I don't see hou you could be getting color from the sabots Pluckit. I've shot all kinds of sabots, red, green, blue, orange. Never got sabot color on a patch.

A day after I cleaned my .32 Pedersoli I get patches with light rust color like that, even though I flushed it well and oiled it. Just for the heck of it, I ran a very wet patch of Liquid Wrench down the bore and let it sit for a couple of hours. Then I started patching with dry white patches. They came out a little darker than the one in your picture, but after about five patches they were coming out pretty clean. Then I ran a very wet LW patch again and let it sit. Darn if the first patch didn't come out rust colored again. But after three or four more dry patches there was no more sign of brown.

This is weird, because my Remington Genesis I had that was also made by Traditions was like this. That gun really turned me off from both blued barrels on a muzzle loader, and from Traditions. That gun had to be made of the cheapest metal ever. It also showed signs like this and I could never get patches to come out clean, and then the next issue I had is after shooting it for a little over a year, the bore was full of deep scratches which I'm guessing had to come from the ram rod. I've never seen a gun barrel scratch so easily. It just seemed like it was crappy steel to me.

That being said, a friend has it now, and last time we went to the range together we tried to shoot it with Speer Deep Curls in Harvester Crush Rib Sabots as the regular black ones were too tight and Pyrodex loose powder and it was shooting all over the place. I'd never shot that combo in it, and I'd always shot pellets. So we tried some pellets and got the groups down to 3" or so for the last group which is good enough for hunting. We want to shoot it some more though to make sure that last group wasn't just a fluke and that it's actually at least shooting that well. I'm starting to wonder if the scratches in the barrel are really affecting the accuracy now, or if it just doesn't like that design. When I had it, I'd shot pellets and Fusion bullets that are very similar to the Deep Curls and it shot them great, so I'd think it shouldn't have been that much of a difference.

I have seen that rust color before on patches. If you have a clean patch before you apply your gun oil and you make sure to coat it good, that should not happen. Sometimes I get that or a small black circle will appear. The black circle is the jag head picking up oil saturated fouling.

This is only a guess on my part as to the orange patches. I sometimes think that the oils we use to preserve our barrels leach out from the pores, scratches, and any crevice or deformity, all the tiny particles of fouling that we somehow miss in the clean process. Face it, what's the odds we got every speck of fouling out of the barrels. These gather in the oil and then as the oil drifts downward to the breech it sits there. When we run a patch it picks up the excess oil, now saturated with the fouling specks that may have turned orange, and it comes out with a patch like that. You might notice that a couple more patches after those and they come out clean. Why, because the pool of oil has been removed.

Why do some rifles have this more often then others.. again speculation. But I believe that it is the quality of how well the bore is polished. The better barrels have less deformities, there for they should come cleaner. Also Gander had a good point. Some people use bore conditioners. These bore conditions clean and seal the bore. Which would then inhibit again, these fouling specks from sticking and later flowing with the oil.

I would give that barrel a good JB Bore treatment, and then use a bore sealer like Montana Bore Conditioner and treat the barrel. Even if it don't help, it will not hurt. And again, this is just my opinion. I might be way out in left field on this.

With a blued barrel, it is critical to get the water out of it after cleaning. The worst flash rusting problems I had was when I was cleaning with hot water back in the 90's, which I no longer do.

I use only a BP solvent, brush and patchs (Butch's or TC #13), followed by a water displacer (Birchwood Casery, WD-40, Remoil) and wipe until dry. Then store in a low humidity cabinet or safe (20% RH or less). I do not use oil, except sparingly (a drop or two) on locks.

i have had that problem before, i came to the conclusion that it can be caused by a combination of certain powders and certain oils and what I had was a stain rather than rust.

My rifle is bad about flash rust when using boiling water. You can't move fast enough to keep it from happening. I now just use hot tap water and it seems to have taken care of that.

I started using hot water from the tap instead of the boiling water also. I don't get any flash rust anymore. I swab with alchohol to make sure I get all the moisture out before I oil.
The products for treating a bore have my interest.