Best way to polish a shotgun chamber

[Super-Dave]

Is there a good way to polish the chamber using a dremel tool?

[TMUSCLE1]

Wrap steel wool around a bronze brush and go slowly...that's the best way to do it.

[Super-Dave]

yes but couldn't you use the dremel tool and polish it so it is super smooth?

[oneoldsap]

Saturate a bore mop with J-B bore brite , put it on a short rod , put in cordless drill and spin away . Takes a little time but it will shine like a new penny !

[Dfariswheel]

yes but couldn't you use the Dremel tool and polish it so it is super smooth?

Yes you "could" but while the metal will be shiny it will also be "lumpy".
Small polishing heads are intended for polishing small areas. When you try to polish a larger area, the small diameter wheels leave an uneven surface.
This means that the chamber will have a sort of lumpy surface that may actually cause extraction problems.

To see what this looks like, use your Dremel to try to polish a large flat surface. It'll not only look like hell, it'll be uneven.

The best way is the electric drill and some 0000 steel wool wrapped around a worn bore brush.
If you don't have a drill, use the 0000 wool wrapped brush by hand.

[jgcoastie]

Go buy a few thousand rounds and shoot it all...

That oughta smooth the chamber a bit...

[Super-Dave]

Why not use 1000 grit sandpaper instead of wool?

[Dave McC]

Might work, but the results with 4/0 are good and with little risk to the chamber specs.

[Super-Dave]

Wouldn't smoothe 1000 grit sandpaper done by hand be less risky than using0000 steel wool with a drill?

I would think the sandpaper by hand would be less likely to throw the chamber out of speck and actually make the chamber smoother than 000o steel wool.

[oneoldsap]

My bore-brite procedure actually works and doesn't leave a mess like steel wool will , and provides nice even pressure all the way around . I can only lead the horse to water , I can't make him drink !

[bcarver]

I have done it with steel wool but the mop and paste sounds better.
I would not use sand paper or a dremel. The trick is even pressure across entire chamber.

[Pahoo]

Wrap steel wool around a bronze brush and go slowly...that's the best way to do it.

May not be the best or only way but it's the way I do them and am very conservative about how hard or long I work it. You don't really need a mirror finish. After that, seems like routine usage will maintain smooth operation. Oh, I use 0000 steel wool in this process. I also keep and eye out for any burrs in the bevel inlet and for some reason, have seen a few at the six oclock position.



Be Safe !!!

[troy_mclure]

i like mothers on a brand new mop. get it spinning with an electric drill.
i really slop the mothers in there, and refresh it often. it will get mirror smooth.

[Super-Dave]

If I just shoot a mess load of shells that I know will not stick in the chamber will this smooth out the chamber enough to prevent the cheap winchester shells from sticking?

If this will work, how many shells do you think needs to be fired to accomplish this?

[Gator_Weiss]

Before you choose a method of "polishing" you have to first see what it is you are faced with. WHY are we polishing the chamber? Why do we want to do that?

If it is corrosion, the lighter colored "crystals" in the corrosion are often abrasives. Moving those corrosion crystals under any pressure at all will ETCH the surface of metal. If it is rust, we are dealing with iron oxides that are softer than corrosion crystals, and often if it is light rust, we dont really need to polish, just clean the surface metal. If it is rust in the extreme, then we have several steps to take. If it is propellant residue, then we probably dont want to polish at all, because we simply want to clean the surface. If it is a protectorant, such as preservatives similar to cosmoline, then again, we dont want to polish, only clean.

If you have determined that you are going to "polish" and have your reasons for it, you need to either consider letting your gunsmith handle that task, or consider that in polishing, there is a lip in the farthest reach of the chamber that must remain intact in order for gas pressures in the bore to work uniformly up the barrel. It is a "throat" of sorts, and it's edge and symetry have to be intact.

1. Begin by giving the chamber an extreme cleaning with a common chamber brush and standard solvent suitable for shotgun powder. Get all of the material out of the chamber that you can in this manner. Soak the chamber thoroughly with solvent several times. Let it sit a bit, and brush and swab. Thoroughly clean it in the normal way.

2. See what material is left in the chamber. If there is light pitting, then you might consider leaving it alone, as plastic hulls do well enough in a lightly pitted chamber.

3. Inspect for cracks and faults in the metal that would render the shotgun barrel unsafe. You can to this visually, but remember that the naked eye or even an eye with a magnification tool wont always find a chamber crack. It takes professional equipment, and sometimes Xray to do that. You can find the obvious cracks without equipment. The others - the ones you cant see - are just as dangerous as the obvious ones.

4. Using an oversized chamber mop, attach it to a mandrel of some kind....or perhaps a cleaning rod. Set this into a drill chuck. Clamp the barrell into a bench clamp, protecting the surface of the barrel with either lead vice cap material, or bits of innertube or rag material if you have nothing else. DONT OVERTIGHTEN THE CLAMP - SHOTGUN BARRELS ARE THIN AND OFTEN SOFT.

5. Obtain a block of a compound called "tripoli" which is a buffing compound that comes in bar form. You will find it along side of red, white, and black buffing compound. It is dark brownish red in most cases. Start your drill motor. Hold the buffing compound, and for less than a second each time, "touch" the bar of compound to the spinning over-sized mop, TWICE only. You need almost no compound at all on that bore mop. Traces only.

6. Ensuring you have an oil-free chamber (clean it with a little alcohol on a patch, and then dry it thoroughly) begin buffing the inside of the chamber with the spinning mop. They key to this is to do it lightly to the touch or as was pointed out by one person, you could make "lumpy metal." We dont want to grind, here. We simply want to lightly spin the mop around the surface of the chamber until we get an even looking light-reflective sheen. We are not "honing" here. We dont want to hone, because that is litterally grinding the chamber surface away. We are just lightly polishing the surface, and no farther than that.

7. After polishing, flush the chamber with alcohol, and immediately (before rust can form) clean the chamber and the barrel again with an oil-based bore cleaner such as CLP. Cleaner-Lubricant-Protectorant. Get all traces of tripoli and polishing residues out of that chamber and barrel.

If you put too much tripoli on the bore mop, it will cause too much abrasive to be in the chamber, and it will cause wax-like deposits in places in the chamber that will prevent the compound from evely polishing the surface. This leads to places that are being over-polished and other places that are not polished at all. You only need trace amounts of tripoli. No more than that.

If you are cleaning regularly, you should never have to polish a bore or a chamber. There are shotguns in this world that date back to 1900 that are still showing bright bores and chambers. Cleaning and proper storage are the key.

[xm21]

Gator what is this "lip" you refer to in your post?If it is the forcing cone you are talking about polishing it ain't going to hurt it any.

[the rifleer]

I have never done this, but what if you used a brake cylinder hone?

Its designed to smooth and polish brake cylinders, which about the diameter of a shotgun shell chamber.

I have no idea if it would work, so don't blame me if it fails miserably.

[oneounceload]

Try really hard not to screw up your gun SuperDave - good advice has been given - some 0000 steel wool on a brush, oiled up and used with a cordless drill on a low rpm will work wonders

The EASIEST solution? Don't shoot those POS cheap Winchester Universal shells - spend an extra $.01 each and get the Federals

[Super-Dave]

unfortunately, I have 1000 #7.5 shot winchester shells that need to be shot.

However I do have other ammo. I just need to get rid of this winchester in an honorable way.

But I still want my shotguns to be able to fire any factory produced shells in 2.75"-3" hulls. It is just not right that a pump gun should have problems with factory ammo. I can live with automatics being ammo sensitive but for a pump gun to be ammo sensitive, this is just unacceptable.

[Super-Dave]

will shooting the heck out of a shotgun with shell that do not stick eventually smooth out the chamber enough so it can use the cheap winchester shells?


If so how many rounds do you think you need to fire to accomplish this with a remington 870?

[rbernie]

I have never done this, but what if you used a brake cylinder hone?

Its designed to smooth and polish brake cylinders, which about the diameter of a shotgun shell chamber.

I have no idea if it would work, so don't blame me if it fails miserably.

This is what I used on my 870 Express 12ga chambers, and (given some discretion about not removing too much material) it worked quite well. My 870 Express chambers were full of machining marks that 0000 steel wool didn't really address, and the brake hone was the best way to clean it up.

I cannot find a brake cylinder home that will work on the smaller 20ga chambers, and for those I use a 20ga 800-grit chamber hone that I bought from MidwayUSA. The 800-grit hone takes a lot longer to smooth out the chamber appropriately but it's a lot harder to remove too much material, either. They also make a 12ga 800-grit chamber hone if a brake cylinder hone is too aggressive for your tastes.

It is just not right that a pump gun should have problems with factory ammo.

I agree, but it's not entirely Remington's fault that the cheap Winchester ammo doesn't have bases that are sized to spec.... Also bear in mind that the promo (cheap) hulls in use today don't have brass bases - they use plated steel bases that simply do not behave as do the traditional brass-based hulls.