Ohh yes the good old borescope, a guaranteed way to induce anxiety and fear in the even most confident of shooter.
One look down one of these and you will be feeling fear a trepidation of the lifespan left in the barrel and disbelief in the possible groups you have achieved for years with your favourite most trusted rifles. Not that I have experience of this or anything.........
A couple years ago I had an operation and was house bound basically for at least 1 week, so the mind wandered to maybe I should empty out the cabinets and give everything a proper deep clean as I'm stuck indoors. The mind wandered even more to some retail therapy and maybe I should invest in some new cleaning bits and a borescope to check my work before and after. This will be a nice rewarding job! purchased new brushes, cleaning fluids etc etc and a digital borescope to plug into the laptop. all arrived a few days later and i set to work on the shotguns, full strips and deep cleans. excellent job well done.
now for the rifles, get the rimfires out of the way 1st, full strips and rebuilds and bore the lot, they were not to bad better than I expected, moderators were nasty but a nice strip and clean in the ultrasonic did the job on those. excellent job
Centrefire time, at the time I had a .270 stainless Howa i got brand new, .243 midland unknown round count very 2nd hand, .223 tikka varmint I got almost new with less than 1 box of 20 through it and a old marlin 336 30-30 from holts so unknown everything and very 2nd hand. now I already had an idea of what to expect to find in this, a perfect stainless barrel, a perfect tikka barrel and some very worn manky .243 and 30-30.
lets start with the perfect stuff, the proper accurate known life span stuff, in went the borescope, to my absolute horror, the .270 has fire cracking and pitting, the tikka has fire cracking, pitting even some rust spots full of copper and carbon. ok calm down maybe the cracking, pitting and rust is dirt. clean them and re check, deep clean commenced. hours of patching and soaking, out came all the dirt and copper as evident by the patches strewn over the kitchen floor.
right that's clean patches now lets have another look, shock horror cracks, pits etc. these rifles must be scrap. the groups I get must be a fluke of some kind. i think some range time needed to do some testing is required when I'm back up and about.
Then the horror of what I'm going to find in the less accurate and more unknown (old) rifles left to clean hits. these must be totally beyond use and totally worthless scrap metal. in goes the bore scope to the .242, fire cracking some pits and dirt! lets look at the 30-30, this should be an experience. what is this i see, no cracks, sonly one or two pits and marks. lots of copper and carbon. lets get these clean, maybe it will all show up after. again patches and cleaner all strewn over the kitchen floor until the patches ran through clean.
in we go again to find clean bores, the .243 has the same cracking and pits as before but now with more shine and no copper, the 30-30 is what can only be described as the cleanest most perfect unmarked bore of the whole lot of the centrefire rifles in the cabinet.
I did that range time, I confirmed the .270 and the .223 are sub moa rifles, the .243 is a lover of 80 grain and will do moa or just over and the 30-30 is 1 to 1.5 moa.
Basically, shoot the bloody rifles, clean them and shoot again. what they look like is irrelevant and you wont like what you see or see what you expect.
Buy a borescope at your own risk and enjoy the heart palpitations and night sweats at your peril.
