Fire Lapping a .22 Bore

[imschur]

Superior Shooting Systems, The folks behind the "Final Finish" centerfire rifle ammo have also produced a .22lr rimfire version of their bore polishing/lapping ammo.

I know their .308 version gets a lot of praise I wonder how this .22 product fares.

[bdavison]

Ive never used the firelapping methods before. Something about firing a grit round down a barrel just makes me cringe. I cant believe that a polishing compound fired down the bore wont remove the edges of the rifling. But its a process that's been used quite a bit. To each his own, but I wont be using it.

[FS2KSTD]

The lapping compounds are so fine on that system that it would literally take 1000's of rounds to even start to damage the rifling edges. The system only uses 100rds and they progress from "coarse" to "super-fine", so it'd be unlikely that it could cause any damage to a good bore.  :confused:

[Microgunner]

I've fire lapped several rimfire barrels and truth be told, none realized any accuracy improvement over the pre-lapped groups. I believe fire lapping rimfires (or plug lapping for that matter) is a waste of time. I don't even think competition shooters lap their rimfire barrels, or even clean them very often.

[FS2KSTD]

Agreed Micro ... I can't say I'd fire-lap any of my guns, rimfire or otherwise. I might try it on a bore that had some issues, just to see if it cleaned it up any?  :confused:

[bdavison]

There are many other options for improving accuracy as well.

Such as Re-crowning the barrel or Free-floating the barrel

[SGW Gunsmith]

Fire lapping .22 rimfire bores with the grit impregnated lead bullets has been known to move the leade area just ahead of the chamber forward, sometimes more than ¼ of an inch. Consider this before you do ANY lapping in a .22 rimfire bore. The rifling to bore height is only 0.0020 to 0.0025 of an inch and that's less than the thickness of a sheet of computer paper. Lapping will easily ruin a nice bore, if over-done.