Half Hearted Cleaning

Recently I got a Douglas barrel from the West Virginia barrel maker over by Charleston. They’ve been making barrels since 1948. They make contoured barrels to fit your factory stock, and truck axle 1.25" pipes, too. I opted for a svelte .900" muzzle for my 6mmBR.

(And I was the one to write with a marker on the barrel . . .)

I thought I was just about out of Varget around the time the barrel got to me, so for the first run of a few hundred rounds I decided to try 6.5 StaBall. It is pretty much a direct replacement for H4350, and I shot with a few guys who’d shown me H4350 worked well in their BRs, so why not try it?

One thing about this ball powder was that it was almost too easy to meter - if that’s a thing. I enjoyed measuring powder out of a Harrell powder measure/dropper. It could be set so close to perfect that the trickler rarely got used. I tried two different charges, stuck with the second, and kept loading til 300.

The barrel was new so I cleaned at 20. Then I cleaned at 20 again. Then I cleaned after the next 10. Done with that I just kept shooting, groups, steel, close up and far away. A 900 yard plate doesn’t move much when a 105 starting out at 2820 taps it!

It was time to swap barrels again, so it was also time to clean again. Winchester’s 6.5 StaBall is pretty dirty. Everything was black. The inside of the barrel. The muzzle. The “muzzle device”.

Like usual, there was a rush to get barrels swapped, cleaned, down the road. ThorroClean was used to clean the bore. “Half Hearted” as the title claims is the effort it takes to clean a barrel well with ThorroClean. It is that effective.

Because I usually forget to take pictures as proof of my efforts, this time I took enough to last til the next time. Douglas Barrels calls their rifling “Ultra Rifling” and here are some shots of that. The barrel cleaned up real well, real quickly. You could feel how smooth the bore is on each pass.

Is this Douglas Barrel accurate? Yes it is. I was shooting triangles off cattle gates with rear tripod support, hitting every one I shot at - seven out of seven - and I hate triangles, and diamonds, too! Every group I shot before I pulled the barrel off made one hole without me being real careful. Except once. I’d swapped from a suppressor to a brake, Corson Piper’s Demigod ⅝-24 brake, and rechecked my zero.

The first round made a hole right at the tip of the target’s diamond, so I put the Razor’s reticle’s dot on that hole and put nine more right through the same ragged hole. I was being kinda careful that time. So, yeah, Douglas shoots clean, and dirty, too!