What’s going on with this GAP rifle?

Took it to a mom and pop smith. He was set on it being the lands but I just couldn’t believe it. Brought it home and just cleaned the snot out of it with a drill, nylon brush, and some bore solvent. Bergers and Hornady 108’s chamber now with no markings or any resistance. We’ll head to the range with a bunch of cleaning gear just in case.
 
So the smith never borescoped it or cast the chamber for measurements? He just guessed at it and took your money?
 
So the smith never borescoped it or cast the chamber for measurements? He just guessed at it and took your money?
He didn’t take any money. He took it to the back briefly, and I assume borescoped it, but it was definitely difficult to get him to move beyond “short chamber”. Nice guys, just kinda down home gunshop guys I think.
 
He didn’t take any money. He took it to the back briefly, and I assume borescoped it, but it was definitely difficult to get him to move beyond “short chamber”. Nice guys, just kinda down home gunshop guys I think.
Teslong.
 
Give GAP a call and see what they think. Thinking it would be odd for a rifle to leave GAP with a bad chamber. Get some JB or IOSSO bore past and scrub the throat out, should cure the problem. Has the rifle been shot suppressed?
 
Give GAP a call and see what they think. Thinking it would be odd for a rifle to leave GAP with a bad chamber. Get some JB or IOSSO bore past and scrub the throat out, should cure the problem. Has the rifle been shot suppressed?
Give them the serial number and they should be able to give you the chamber print.
 
Yes I have emailed and called GAP, haven’t heard back yet. As of right now it seems to be functioning normally after about 20 good minutes of brush/drill/solvent cleaning. Heading to the range Saturday I’ll post an update. I’ll also update if I hear back from gap.
 
Back to the range, whole box of bergers in about 1” group. No problems at all.got through about half a box of Hornady, also grouping well and then I got a tight bolt close. Go to eject the round and it pulled it. Got the bullet out and 5 very evenly spaced engravings in the bullet tell me it’s gotta be a tight throat. Called GAP, they were pretty surprised but agreed with me, offered to fix it if I shipped it to them, but being shipping is pretty expensive both ways I told them I’d have a local smith just touch it with a reamer and they figured that’d be fine.
 
If you don’t want to get a borescope so you can stop guessing, send it back to GAP. If you have a local smith touch it and that doesn’t fix the problem, GAP is off the hook. Have them do it. Especially if your smith is the guy you already took it to who seemed reluctant to even start at the start.
 
You need to see what it looks like with a borescope for multiple reasons.
#1) A LOT of smiths that build prs rifles cut the chamber like it is a benchrest gun. I have had some that will shoot that good (benchrest good), but they are not "field guns" where you can shoot out the barrel and never clean.
#2) 6mm cartridges that are that overbore and sometimes even dashers and bra with tight chambers have a lot of changes and problems with fouling. I have been through several 243 Ackley barrels and a bunch of Dasher barrels. I have been given some bra and dasher barrels that people said were "burnt out" at under 2000 rounds. To a man, those barrels were cleaned religiously and there was "definitely no fouling or carbon ring." No bore scope was ever used. Fouling is HARD. When I looked in the borescope I found a shitload of fouling. I used thorroclean and iosso to clean them to bare metal and they went back to shooting acceptably. They were not screamers and they fouled faster from the abuse, but they would shoot average or above for what they were. I let my kids shoot them at one day matches and was very grateful for the free half barrel. When I first bought a borescope, I was new to prs and running a 243 Ackley in a sendero contour. At 1700 or so rounds it stopped shooting. I had cleaned every 200 rounds religiously including JB in the throat. The first 2 barrels had made it 2500 rounds before going over 1 moa. I pulled and replaced the barrel. After I looked with the borescope, I realized it was excessively fouled. I cleaned it to bare metal, and it went back to shooting around 1 moa. I'm still using it on a spare hunting gun because the countour is heavy for hunting and light for prs.

The moral of the story is, 6 CM is a lot of fouling and pressure down a small hole. The fouling is probably a lot harder to remove than anyone imagined. It was probably chambered fairly tight by gap. In my experience, these need to be treated one of 2 ways. Clean every 200 rounds religiously (with borescope) and monitor velocity increase across round count, or get it dirty with 200+ rounds, reduce the load to handle it and run it to 1000-1500 rounds. Then pull the barrel and throw it in the garage. If you want to shoot without cleaning, you are going to need more throat clearance. Raw precision will suffer and I have no idea how much more clearance you will need to never clean, as I have never experimented with it.

I will say that the barrels I have had that will put 10 shots under 1/2 moa while shooting prone from a bipod have all had crazy tight freebore diameters and fairly generous neck clearance. The more you open it up or push out the round count between cleaning, the more the groups trend toward 1-1.1 moa even with top end components and high quality barrel blanks.

The general consensus that I have seen is to chamber for precision with the need to clean more, especially in overbore 6mm. If top end precision is not a concern, or if you are not going to clean, you can open up the freebore some. It seems like pretty sloppy chambers that are perfectly concentric will do 1-1.2 moa with good ammo. Unless you are cleaning (at least some) or throwing barrels away early, you are not going to see any better accuracy than that with a tight freebore barrel, and you are going to have problems with rifle functioning like you are experiencing.

The first thing I would do is buy a teslong borescope, so you can see what is going on.
 
I'd 💯 eat the shipping back to GAP or at a minimum have the original seller split it with you. Nothing worse than trying to save a few bucks and then still having issues with no more chance of OEM support. Sounds like a short chamber combined with a little carbon build up.
 
You need to see what it looks like with a borescope for multiple reasons.
#1) A LOT of smiths that build prs rifles cut the chamber like it is a benchrest gun. I have had some that will shoot that good (benchrest good), but they are not "field guns" where you can shoot out the barrel and never clean.
#2) 6mm cartridges that are that overbore and sometimes even dashers and bra with tight chambers have a lot of changes and problems with fouling. I have been through several 243 Ackley barrels and a bunch of Dasher barrels. I have been given some bra and dasher barrels that people said were "burnt out" at under 2000 rounds. To a man, those barrels were cleaned religiously and there was "definitely no fouling or carbon ring." No bore scope was ever used. Fouling is HARD. When I looked in the borescope I found a shitload of fouling. I used thorroclean and iosso to clean them to bare metal and they went back to shooting acceptably. They were not screamers and they fouled faster from the abuse, but they would shoot average or above for what they were. I let my kids shoot them at one day matches and was very grateful for the free half barrel. When I first bought a borescope, I was new to prs and running a 243 Ackley in a sendero contour. At 1700 or so rounds it stopped shooting. I had cleaned every 200 rounds religiously including JB in the throat. The first 2 barrels had made it 2500 rounds before going over 1 moa. I pulled and replaced the barrel. After I looked with the borescope, I realized it was excessively fouled. I cleaned it to bare metal, and it went back to shooting around 1 moa. I'm still using it on a spare hunting gun because the countour is heavy for hunting and light for prs.

The moral of the story is, 6 CM is a lot of fouling and pressure down a small hole. The fouling is probably a lot harder to remove than anyone imagined. It was probably chambered fairly tight by gap. In my experience, these need to be treated one of 2 ways. Clean every 200 rounds religiously (with borescope) and monitor velocity increase across round count, or get it dirty with 200+ rounds, reduce the load to handle it and run it to 1000-1500 rounds. Then pull the barrel and throw it in the garage. If you want to shoot without cleaning, you are going to need more throat clearance. Raw precision will suffer and I have no idea how much more clearance you will need to never clean, as I have never experimented with it.

I will say that the barrels I have had that will put 10 shots under 1/2 moa while shooting prone from a bipod have all had crazy tight freebore diameters and fairly generous neck clearance. The more you open it up or push out the round count between cleaning, the more the groups trend toward 1-1.1 moa even with top end components and high quality barrel blanks.

The general consensus that I have seen is to chamber for precision with the need to clean more, especially in overbore 6mm. If top end precision is not a concern, or if you are not going to clean, you can open up the freebore some. It seems like pretty sloppy chambers that are perfectly concentric will do 1-1.2 moa with good ammo. Unless you are cleaning (at least some) or throwing barrels away early, you are not going to see any better accuracy than that with a tight freebore barrel, and you are going to have problems with rifle functioning like you are experiencing.

The first thing I would do is buy a teslong borescope, so you can see what is going on.
OP. Read this and then read it again. Very valuable info. The borescope has been mentioned several times.
 
Thinking to many rounds down the bore to be a chambering issue. Carbon issue or throat is starting to erode would be my WAG. Scrub with JB bore paste would be my next move.
 
CLR kills copper fouling. Clean it out within 10 mins, isopropyl alcohol will neutralize any the harm clr can do to steel. 95% of the carbon, which layers copper the carbon then copper etc....happen in first 10" of chamber and barrel, you'll get copper fouling down the tube, especially towards muzzle but I have not found that to be very detrimental to accuracy.

I use clr soak, patch with clr, iso to neutralize, the get a tight patch on jag with thoroclean. I scrub the piss out thr first 10". Yes I reverse stroke in the barrel, I do it with nylon and bronze brushes, I don't see any I'll affects of this. I go through 1-2 barrels a year, and get normal expected life for their application.

Saami 6cm, 2435 fb diameter, possibly worn reamer, means closer to 2432, Slightly oversized bullet, it's gonna hand up.

I use reamers with 001 over bullet diameter for freebore OD, or even 0015 over. 004-005 neck clearance as a standard for me, maybe more on bigger magnums.

If you want to run a 6cm over 3000fps, it's gonna foul up, run 108-112gr bullet in the 2800-2900s, clean powder like H4350. But why run a hot rod case slow? Good question! Run a smaller case in that velocity for more efficiency, like the 6gt 35-36gr H4350 runs 2900, 6cm will be 10% more charge.

I love the 6cm as a hunting cartridge, but not many guys use it for match stuff anymore, they've all gone smaller case, or went to 25 or 6.5mm running heavies at 2650-2800fps.

Honestly I think you just have a very tight chamber, and minimal fouling is severely exaggerating this problem.
 
IMG_6572.png
This was just nylon brush cleaning. Pretty much black and carbon covered all the way around the freebore.
IMG_6573.png
This is after about 30 minutes of drill, brass brush, and solvent. Just about mirror finished on 90% with a couple of small carbon marks
 
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