Wednesday, May 19, 2010

I was recently brought to my attention just how much fouling

can hide from you. Remember the Sistema project gun? I'd put in a better barrel, and the other day while looking for something else(which stayed in hiding) I found the original. Which looked pretty awful inside; I'd given it a thorough scrubbing but pits don't go away. Well, just to see if there was much fouling hiding in them I dug out the Foul-Out and set it up.

If you're not familiar with it, this is an electronic cleaner: you clean the bore to get rid of powder fouling and any loose general crud, degrease, and plug the breech with one of the supplied plugs. Then you put some o-rings on the cleaning rod to insulate it from the barrel walls and set it in the bore, then add either the copper or lead-fouling solution, hook it up and turn it on. The idea is it pulls the fouling from the bore and plates it on the rod; works pretty well.

Mine's an older unit so it doesn't work as fast, so I left it running while I did some other stuff. After one hour you turn it off and change the fluid, and look at the color: if the stuff has an orange tint, it's pulling rust off the bore and you HAVE TO flush it out and scrub with bore cleaner and a brush to get it all out, then degrease and continue with fresh cleaner. If you leave it running or don't clean the bore and change the stuff it CAN actually cause pitting. After an hour the solution was still the normal blue color, so I just hit the bore with a brush to get out anything loosened; and DAMN, a lot of crud came out! So I dried it, refreshed the cleaner and started it back up.

It took a total of about three hours for the 'clean' light to come on. Yes, there's pitting in there, but it seems not as much as I'd thought; some of that was actually really bad old copper fouling, and the bore looks remarkably better than it did. It's nowhere near new, but very usable.

If you're the tinkering type, Og has a post on his homemade electronic cleaner. And there's a link in the comments to Fr. Frog's place with his findings on such methods and solutions. I'm going to copy this paragraph on power supplies:
The Outers FoulOut operates at a very low voltage (.3 V - three-tenths) at the cleaning electrode. Higher voltages can start to etch the bore, and even at the lower voltage the Outers can do so if there is rust in the bore. While the simple designs given here can be used safely there exists the possibility of bore etching due to their higher voltages. This is a particular concern if you use the Outers solutions. The electrical problem with all the home-brew series current limited (by the short indicating lamp) devices is that they apply voltages that will start taking iron into the solution, according to the FoulOut patent information which has expired. This aspect of the circuitry deceives those without electrical backgrounds. They look at the batteries or the wall adapter voltage used to operate a FoulOut and assume it must be safe to apply that much voltage between the barrel and the rod. Not so. The voltage regulation schemes inside a FoulOut are designed to hold a 0.3V limit regardless of how many volts the power supply has.

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