Best way to season a bore?

Whats the best way to season a new bp rifle bore? One person told me you could remove the barrel and slather it down with bore butter inside and out, the bake it in an oven at 200deg for about 2 hours. The concept is that the pores in the steel open up and allow the bore butter to seep in and season it kind of like seasoning an iron skillet. is this true or just a bunch of malarky?

Turkhunter said:

Whats the best way to season a new bp rifle bore? One person told me you could remove the barrel and slather it down with bore butter inside and out, the bake it in an oven at 200deg for about 2 hours. The concept is that the pores in the steel open up and allow the bore butter to seep in and season it kind of like seasoning an iron skillet. is this true or just a bunch of malarky?

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Never heard of that and have no idea if it's true...I've accumulated a number of muzzleloaders over the years and have never done anything unique to season a bore.
I do use Natural Lube 1000 as my bore lube and patch lube 99% of the time...but I clean my rifles squeaky clean with steaming hot soapy water and hot water rinse after every use as I don't want any buildup of anything in the bore whatsoever.

Malarky. You don't Season Steel, you season cast iron. Just clean it, shoot it, and lubed it after cleaning.

Best way to season a ML is to use it every season....Winter, spring, summer and fall :wink:

I agree with Roundball. There is no such thing as "seasoning" a blackpowder barrel. That, if anything, is just an old wives tale.

Barrels are made with new metals and as such, need to be treated and maintained with new metal products made to care for them.

I gave up on hot soapy water a few years ago. I now start the cleaning with running an alcohol patch down the barrel to get out a lot of the "big stuff". Then I use CVA Barrel Blaster This is easy to use and a can last for a boat load of cleanings.

I follow up the CVA barrel Blaster with a patch soaked with Break Free CLP

I don't have any rusting problems with these products.

Dave

Malarky!

HD

YOu don't season anything steel. You season Cast Iron. If you don't know the difference, you should not be handling any gun!

Seriously, this nonsense was started back when T/C first began making guns, and put out a booklet talking about seasoning the barrel. Warren Center had no idea what he was talking about. But thousands of those booklets were sent out with guns, and thousands of people, who should know better, have tried to season their steel barrels. What happens is that the groove cake up with residue lube, and eventually the accuracy of the barrel begins to drop off. Then the guy sells the gun, or the barrel and buys a replacement gun or barrel. Some smart shooter buys the " shot out barrel " for pennies, cleans it out, and then as a LIKE New barrel again. He just hopes that the guys who " stuck Him " with that warn out barrel never sees him shooting it again in a match, much less beat the guy with it.

This question comes up here on the forum several times, a year, so don't feel like you are imposing on any of us. Clean your barrel well with soap and water. When you dry it use a good oil product like ballistol to preserve the barrel from rusting while the gun is stored. Store the gun muzzle down, so that any oil runs down and out the barrel, not back to the action where it can spoil the wood. I happen to use Bore Butter to portect the bore of my barrels, but the guns are stored in a closet in my home, in a heated, dry place. I don't have much of any problem with rusting with any of my equipment stored there.

Everyone has an opinion and here's mine. When you season a cast iron skillet you coat it with a grease of some kind and heat it. This takes several times and gets better with age. But you can un-do this by washing that skillet in SOAPY water one time. All you do to keep this coating in place and working like it should is rinse it out with warm water and DRY it. I was taught a long time ago to use patches with natural grease or grease/beeswax combos. To clean I remove the barrel, unscrew the nipple and /or cleanout screw, put the rear of the barrel in a bucket of warm water and run a rod with a patch up and down the barrel until it's clean and slick. Then dry with dry patches, run a lubed patch in and out several times to lube the barrel and put it up. If you use solvents or soapy water to clean the barrel it strips off and seasoning you have put on. I have been blacksmithing and welding since I was about 12 years old and was taught that you can season or blacken any steel. I was taught that when you finished a piece of work and wanted the steel be black and more or less rust resitant you dip it or wipe it with a rag with used motor oil on it with the work just hot enough to smoke the oil. With cooking utensils, such as spoons or forks, you use grease instead of motor oil. To test this, take a piece of mild steel. This is similar to ML barrels. Polish it to a shine. This will be a similar finish to the inside of a barrel after rifling and finishing. Heat it with a torch or stove eye until crisco will barely smoke. Put some crisco on part of it and let it cool. Rinse with warm water and wipe dry. Then repeat. You will notice the color of the steel darkens a little each time you do this. Now you will see that the water beads up on the seasones part but will stick to the unseasoned part. If you wet both areas and let it air dry you will see that the seasoned area does't rust as fast. Fowlings will do the same. I deeply believe that nearly any steel can be seasoned and you won't change my mind. But I'm not trying to change your mind. Thanks.

David Box said:

Everyone has an opinion and here's mine. When you season a cast iron skillet you coat it with a grease of some kind and heat it. This takes several times and gets better with age. But you can un-do this by washing that skillet in SOAPY water one time.

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I can't speak for anyone else, and I certainly don't know how you seasoned your cast iron, but I have never removed the seasoning on any of my cast iron pots or wok by washing them once in hot soapy water. It would take quite a bit of hard scrubbing to remove the seasoning, as it is baked on.

As for the original question - you season cast iron, not steel.

Dave, we are in a minority here, but I agree with everything you said, right down the line. And, it's not because I've taken somebody's word for it. Plus, since cast iron is so open-pored, aside from ruining the season when washing with soap, some soap gets in the iron and will taint your food as it boils out again when cooking.

To those who are adamant that steel cannot be seasoned: What is taking place when a carbon steel knife stains?

Oxidation

TC bore solvent followed by hot soapy water rinsed under hot running water and dried immediately with as many dry patches as it takes(to prevent flash rust - and it happens in a hurry), set in front of hot fireplace or wood stove to "air out" and then a slathering of bore butter. Works great.

To those who are adamant that steel cannot be seasoned: What is taking place when a carbon steel knife stains?

OXIDATION!!

Brik847 said:

TC bore solvent followed by hot soapy water rinsed under hot running water and dried immediately with as many dry patches as it takes(to prevent flash rust - and it happens in a hurry), set in front of hot fireplace or wood stove to "air out" and then a slathering of bore butter. Works great.

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:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

:wink: Salt and pepper.You will have to suck on it though, don't try biting it. As far as seasoning the metal-the cast iron comments are right on. You actually put a residue coating from the oil onto the cast iron-primative teflon! This coating in reality is not very slick and is certainly succeptible to acid and soap, therefore making it less than desireable for the bore.

shortbow said:

To those who are adamant that steel cannot be seasoned: What is taking place when a carbon steel knife stains?

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"Discoloration" is not seasoning. You may be confusing rust (oxidation) with seasoning. We don't rust cast iron to season it. :wink:

Shortbow, and Dave. The difference is that when a frying pan is seasoned, its heated in an oven to 500 degrees. When a blacksmith douses a completed work in oil to give it a black finish, the item is often near its melting temperature, but is almost certainly heated to more than 500 degrees. When does anyone heat a barrel to 500 degrees before " Seasoning" it????

I make my own vent picks, using a propane torch to heat soft coat hanger "steel " hot enough to forge on a small anvil. When I have them finally shaped I heat them up and spray them cool with WD40. If I have some oil open around, I have poured that in a small dish, and just dropped the picks in the oil. Same thing you are talking about when blackening knives, axes, or other parts.

Part of what you get is SCALE. There is NOthing consistent in the thickness of scale. I measured my first Bowie Knife with a micrometer, after it came out of my first heat treating effort covered in scale. The numbers were all over the place. As slick as my picks come out, I would never consider the coatings to be uniform on them, nor consider doing the same thing to the inside of a barrel.

So, I politely disagree with both of you about seasoning a steel barrel. Long years of experimenting with every way to get more accuracy out of barrels indicates that they work best when they are clean, to the bare metal. Polish them, to the point of using a lap in the barrel between matches, but crudding up the barrel is no way to get it to shoot.

I did experiment with both Black Chrome and normal ' white " chrome plating the bore. No question it fills the pores of the steel, and makes the barrel easier to clean. But Homer Dangler, a long time famous gun maker, did some before and after testng, and he found no improvement in accuracy with the chromed rifled barrel. When I talked to the plater, he was not surprised. He told me that while the plating is measure in 10 thousandths of an inch, there is no way to guarantee that the same amount of chrome is layered on all parts of the barrel.

Chrome is too brittle to polish, or lap, or burnish, so there are limits to what you can do with it. Chrome plating seems to make the most sense to use in cartridge chambers, and in shotgun barrels, where keeping crud out of the surfaces is paramount to the best performance. This is particularly true with Semi-auto firearms.

I for one have to say seasioning works as others do.

It is important to remember that the season in a rifle barrel is sort of like and not the exact same thick course stuff on a frying pan. Every time you shoot the barrel any seasioning on the barrel is being polished at 7,000 lbs of pressure at 2000 fps.

Chinese steel woks take a season if you do not beleive me go and look in a Chinese take out restrurant and ask to look at one of the woks in the place. Hand hammerd steel is the prefered stuff if available.

I am not trying to be insulting here but
There are a lot of people here who have not been able to get seasioning to work for them so they would be a poor source of information on how to do this if that is the case.


There are some people who seem to think that you do not clean a seasioned barrel well and that sooner or latter the rifle groves clog up.

Yes this would happen if you do not clean the gun but you should clean with hot soapy water with just a bit of soap.

I prefer just a little Ivory bar soap

Every time I clean my rifle I put a bore light down it and make sure the rifleing is clean and correct. Then I lube while the barrel is still warm.

You still need your Jag and bore brush to break up built up fowling and such. And a bore light that slides down the barrel in my humble opinion is a ablosute must.

The purpose of hot soapy water is all of the folowing and more.

It melts the bore butter (or other natural lube) in the rifle helping reduce or get rid of the bore butter build up some people seem to have with their cold cleaned gun.

Try a experiment take some bore butter or Crisco or whatever and run some on a plate. Then run the plate under cold running water in your sink. The colder the water the harder the bore butter. Also no amount of scrubing will get that stuff completly off.

Now take the plate and put it under the water and turn off the cold and on the hot. After a while as the water starts to warm you will find the lube starts to soften and as it gets hotter
the stuff will melt and float away.

Notice I said melt and not disolve like with a solvent. The addition of a little bit of soap in the pail of hot water will add a little bit of grease cutting action to the hot water but not enough to wash off the seasioning. It could also help cutting salts from the powder.

Then you flush with clean hot water to remove traces of soap and then dry and lube you barrel.

Hot water cleans better than cold water IMHO.

It also speeds up drying of water so you can natural lube your gun sooner.

I must disagree with your statement on using warm water on a iron skillet, I know that people believe in just running a little warm and the heating the skillet up to dry it. All of my life my parents have scrubbed their skillets with steel wool with soap and lightly coated them with olive oil or Crisco after drying them on the stove. I have seen skillets that have been rinsed with water and I will not eat any food that has been prepared on them. Think about all of the food still in the bottom of that skillet.

My grandparent only used iron cookware and they always had clean iron skillets.

What passes for seasoning modern ML rifle barrels is nothing more than coating the exterior of the bore.

As someone who has looked at the granular structure of steel through high magnification, I can say that the diameters of any pores that might be in modern steel barrels are so insignificant that they were not visible under high magnification.

IF seasoning a modern barrel is a reality, the seasoning agent would have to be so thin to penetrate the surface of the steel that it would almost have to be in the form of a vapor.

You folks who believe you are seasoning your bores are merely coating the surface of the bore with some form of grease or grease/wax mixture.
Those who use the yellow miracle lubes are merely slathering chapstick in your guns.

IMHO, based on my experience and research, a good oil, or very light grease are much better preservatives for modern ML barrels.