Unfortunately I don’t have an extra scope that’s not in tikka rings.
The cleaning that I did on Sunday was using boretech elimintaor. First patches, then a soaked brush for 20ish passes, then patches until patches came out clean. What do you recommend?
I’m fairly patient, so was not dealing with much mirage since I was allowing the barrel to cool between five-shot strings. I use this scope at 16x for zeroing at 100.
All mounts seemed tight. Scope rings and action screws were checked after first bad group. Suppressor also tight.
I need to thoroughly inspect the suppressor. It’s a 30 cal bore and a 6.5 bullet. A baffle strike seems unlikely, but not impossible.
I would run a couple patches of bore tech c4, let it soak for half a day, then hit it with a bronze brush for 10-20 passes, don’t use nylon make sure it’s a nice tight new bronze brush. Patch it dry and use some copper solvent, eliminator will work, for another short soak. Patch dry. I’d also use the c4 on the chamber and freebore area.
At the same time I’d pull the barreled action, check torque on everything and reassemble to known values.
If that dosnt work and you a scope change dosnt fix it, I would just be looking at a new barrel.
Atleast that’s what I’d do. Hopefully a serious cleaning gets it back to acceptable.
I had a 6.5cm do almost exactly what’s happening, when I was experimenting with not cleaning. The problem ended up being remedied by a serious clean with soaking, specifically in the freebore area, and the barrel went on to last another thousand rounds till the end of the season.
Good luck, frustrating for sure. The game is as much about confidence too, barrels are relatively cheap in the grand scheme, I won’t waste much time on one that’s giving me a hard time.
