Barrel Break in for New Grendel

[sta500rdr]

I just received my upper from Alexander this afternoon and damn I am excited. It looks awesome. I cannot wait to shoot this rifle. I opted for the Schillen barrel upgrade and I want to make sure to treat it right. Is there any special procedure that you guys would recommend for breaking in my barrel my first time at the range?

I have heard that you swab the barrel and then swab it with windex between shots the first 10 rounds or so. Is this recommended?

[LR1955]

I just received my upper from Alexander this afternoon and damn I am excited. It looks awesome. I cannot wait to shoot this rifle. I opted for the Schillen barrel upgrade and I want to make sure to treat it right. Is there any special procedure that you guys would recommend for breaking in my barrel my first time at the range?

I have heard that you swab the barrel and then swab it with windex between shots the first 10 rounds or so. Is this recommended?

STA500:

Here is what Shilen says. "Shilen, Inc. introduced a break-in procedure mostly because customers seemed to think that we should have one. By and large, we don't think breaking-in a new barrel is a big deal."

http://www.shilen.com/faq.html#question10

If a barrel company states you need to break in their barrel, it means they didn't give you a good barrel to begin with and expect you to basically fire lap it at your expense when they could have lapped it with very little effort themselves.

Bottom line -- shoot your rifle and clean it as you normally would at the end of your shooting session.

LR1955

[bwaites]

I just received my upper from Alexander this afternoon and damn I am excited. It looks awesome. I cannot wait to shoot this rifle. I opted for the Schillen barrel upgrade and I want to make sure to treat it right. Is there any special procedure that you guys would recommend for breaking in my barrel my first time at the range?

I have heard that you swab the barrel and then swab it with windex between shots the first 10 rounds or so. Is this recommended?

What...You trying to start a fight? LOL

The break in process causes more headache and heartache than perhaps any other issue. I'm with LR1955; shoot it and clean it the way you would any other time. Make sure you do run a patch through it on the off chance something is hung up in the barrel or there is a sharp edge, but I highly doubt that you will find a problem with a Shilen barrel.

[roto-prop]

Your Barrel treat her right

sta500rdr Congratulations on your new upper!! I am waiting for a barrel from Satern Machine for my 6.5 Grendel build. This will be my first custom cut barrel and I to have been looking into barrel care . Like you I want to try my best to make sure that I am going to treat my new barrel right. I have done some light barrel polishing in the past with production barrels from manufactures like browning and remington using a little J-B on a cleaning patch passed through the barrel a couple of times then cleaned well before heading to the range for the first time. Guns shot well doing this but I can not say if it truely had an affect in the actual acurracy due to no before or after comparisons but these were just your normal production guns nothing custom or top end. But here is a link that has some very interesting things in it written by an experianced gun smith machinest he talks about when the throat is cut the reamer is spinning around the same as a drill bit that has the effect of creating some very fine cross grain only in the throat area. and the rest of the tooling running length wise down the barrel in the same deriction the bullet would travel. When the machinest crafts the barrel then laps and polishes it the throat area cut by the reamer is not polished with the rifling and it is the first dozen or so rounds fired that polish the throat right at the mouth. It is my understanding that this can cause a small amount of copper fouling in the barrel carried from the throat area down into the length of the barrel. When the next round is fired that remaining copper is pressed into the bore of the barrel. It is my understanding that is why a barrel should be cleaned after each shot for the first dozen or so shots or until the copper fouling in the barrel is no longer present after each shot. It is also my understanding that when this is done to a good quality new barrel it will help to enable the barrel to have less fouling problems later enabling the barrel to shoot longer between cleanings. ANY HOW I am by no means a expert in this area but I do have thirty years under my belt as a mechanic and the reasoning of the machinest that wrote the artical seems pretty sound to me . Here is the link if you would care to read it. http://www.kriegerbarrels.com/Break_...246-wp2558.htm Or another view http://www.6mmbr.com/GailMcMbreakin.html

[LR1955]

What...You trying to start a fight? LOL

The break in process causes more headache and heartache than perhaps any other issue. I'm with LR1955; shoot it and clean it the way you would any other time. Make sure you do run a patch through it on the off chance something is hung up in the barrel or there is a sharp edge, but I highly doubt that you will find a problem with a Shilen barrel.

Bill:

If the barrel maker itself states that such a process is completely unnecessary and does absolutely nothing to improve performance or life cycle -- I think that the process doesn't need to be done.

LR1955

[bwaites]

LR1955, I agree 100%.

Barrels, while expendables, have a finite life. To spend money "breaking them in" just seems ludicrous, after having spent money to buy a custom barrel!

Lets see, spend a extra couple hundred bucks for a custom barrel, then spend a couple hundred more getting it broken in!!!

Not on my life!

[RStewart]

Just shoot it.

[sta500rdr]

Thanks for all the input guys! I have never gone through a barrel break in in the past, but this is my first Schillen barrel and I wanted to make sure I treated her right. In the past I have always had good luck just going out and shooting a new barrel. I am very excited about this set up, its my first grendel and tomorrow will be my first time shooting such a beast. Thanks again guys!

[skyfish]

My own feeling are any high quality hand lapped barrel should be ready to go. I may run one or two shots and check with a swab, but that's it. Production rifles may need a bit more, as they are not(to my knowledge) hand lapped.

If Shilen doesn't recommend, sounds like your ready to go.

I do always clean well before the 1st shot. Any oil, rust inhibitor or particles left after manufacturing. We want a range report!

[davidj]

I just received my upper from Alexander this afternoon and damn I am excited. It looks awesome. I cannot wait to shoot this rifle. I opted for the Schillen barrel upgrade

How long did it take after ordering? I await the same setup.

[sta500rdr]

It was about 1 month exactly from order to delivery. I got everything but the hi-cap magazine. They said they should be available at the end of april. I didn't figure that was too bad of a turn around.