[Unclenick]

I'm not suggesting he actually clean between each shot to develop a load. I just mean he wouldn't wind up with the same load and that it would not be less accurate under that circumstance because of lack of copper. I know three people who actually do develop loads that way. In two instances it is because they intend to hunt with a clean, bare barrel, and want to know how it will shoot in that condition. In the third, the guy doesn't hunt much anymore but feels that gives him a barrel break-in while developing a load at the same time. He uses only hand-lapped custom barrels, so copper build-up won't be a big issue for him anyway.

I am also not willing to call cleaning "abuse". It will be if you do it badly or stupidly, but it's not necessarily that easy to do damage through cleaning. The retired Marine Scout Sniper I took a class from had us clean every 10 rounds, as that is what he'd been taught in his training. There are a few M24's in the hands of other Scout Snipers that have been reported to be shooting well after 15,000 rounds, which is far longer than most match shooters keep stainless steel 308 barrels (about 3500 rounds), so there may be some unrecognized benefit. I don't know that, but feel like keeping an open mind about it after reading about those long-lived barrels. I'd have thought the throats would be gone, but I guess not.

There was also a test by members of the Garand Collector's Association, IIRC, to check the damage done by segmented steel military cleaning rods. It took them 66,000 strokes to get a muzzle wear gauge from a 3 to a 4. I think the takeaway is, don't use segmented rods and do use a bore guide. You can do damage, but it takes some effort.

The approach I've described numerous times is to open the action, point the muzzle down and pump spray enough Bore Tech Eliminator into a barrel to get it to coat the bore by running down until it gets to the muzzle. If I do this at the range before the carbon has time to harden and then plug the breech and muzzle for the trip home, a normal barrel that doesn't foul especially heavily is essentially clean by the time I've made the hour-long drive back to the house. One or two wet patches with five minutes in between then finishes the job.

Incidentally, I don't consider fouling shots to be required to lay down copper. Fouling shots seem to mainly be for powder fouling, and their effect seems to apply equally to bores that copper foul easily and those that don't and also equally to shooting lead bullets. It seems the powder offers different friction and material resistance to a bullet than a bare barrel does, but a couple of shots will usually reach the point that powder fouling is pushed out by the next bullet about as fast as it was laid down, so you don't see further POI shifts. A few purists want a few more fouling shots than that, but I see that as a waste of time, for the most part. But only you can know your barrel, so YMMV.