I have a couple rifles that foul ready bad. I am firelapping them to smooth the bore and make cleaning easier. Today I fired 6 lapping shells in the 35 Marlin. I tried 4 grains of Unique, but bullet speed was too fast. I plan to drop back to 3.3 grains. Has anyone else fire lapped a 35 Marlin? Does this sound about right?

My plan is to fire 6 lapping shells, then clean the gun. As the bore gets smoother, it should take less cleaning patches to clean the bore. Last night, I used 81 patches to clean the copper fouling and burnt powder from the bore. I am hoping for an improvement tonight.

81 patches! I thought I had problems with 50 patches. Is that mostly copper? If the bore wasn't properly cleaned for a long time, you may have layers of copper and hard carbon. The way I handled that was to use Hoppes Benchrest copper solvent until it almost stopped working, then gave it a good dose of J-B compound to scrub out the carbon layer. Then the Hoppes cound get at more copper. It takes time, alright.

I haven't lapped my .35 Remington, but I used 4.0 grains of Red Dot in the .30-06 and 3.0 grains in the .303. Unique is slower than Red Dot, but the case capacity of the .35 Remington is smaller, so 3.0 to 3.3 grains of Unique should work.

Bye
Jack

I started with CR-10 copper cleaner. The way the instructions read, you use 4 patches per application. I did 5 applications (20 patches) to get all the copper fouling out of the barrel. The rest of the patches were used to get the burnt powder out of the barrel. This is one of my favorite guns, but it had gotten to the point that I would not shoot it because I did not want to clean it. I am ordering some 200 grain BT cast bullets. I hope to take a black bear with it this fall.

3 grains of Bullseye with a 148 grain wadcutter works to lap a .35 Rem.

Whatever you do, get all of the copper out first, or it's a waste of time, at best.

Soak with copper solvent a few cycles, then scrub with a brush, and repeat as necessary till all the copper is gone....

Hoppe's Benchrest is slow, but the advantage is you can leave it in for a couple of days, and be sure the copper is gone.

If you can get your hands on a can of Wipe-Out bore cleaner with the new Wipe-Out Accelerator, you should be able to clean those bores without a lot of scrubbing. Stuff really works for me. Just follow the directions on the can.

When I got my DCM Garand back in the 80's, it fouled just as badly. It took me three patches of Iosso Bore Paste, 20 strikes each, plus 10 patches of Sweet's 7.62 to get all copper out. What a pain.

If you have a friend with an Outer's FoulOut, get him to run that electrolytic cleaning gadget with its copper electrolyte in your bore after you've done your normal cleaning. If you've shot lead as well as copper, you may want to have him repeat with the lead solution, just to be sure you are clean to start firelapping.

I firelapped the Garand. Back when I did it, the idea of firelapping was fairly new and scary. I used 150 grain FMJ bullets pulled from M2 Ball ammo. I was using a graded abrasive firelapping kit at the time. Two things occurred: First, as with many military Garand barrels, the bore was noticeably constricted around the contouring for the lower hand guard. It took 20 rounds imbedded with 220 grit compound just to open up that long restriction. By the time I had finished using the other grades (another 40 rounds), not only was the restriction gone, but a single patch of Iosso bore paste and 10 strokes, followed by two patches of Shooter's Choice completely cleaned it. No more Sweet's required.

Nick