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Ryan Nafe

Fellas,

My guess is that this will be old news to most of you, but I wanted to make a note of something I’ve discovered in recent months.

For a long time, really my entire shooting “career” from age 8 until now, I always used cheap brass multi-piece cleaning rods and Bore Snakes for cleaning and maintenance.

Well, a few months back I decided to purchase a J Dewey cleaning rod, model number 30C-36. It’s a one-piece, nylon-coated one with their ball bearing handle.

All I can really say is, “Wow.” This has made such a huge change in my cleaning routine for my rifles, I really would never have guessed it would make such an impact. The ease with which this rod allows patches and other things to follow the twist of the rifling is amazing.

Between this quality tool and Nathan’s writings about maintenance and protection of carbon steel barrels, I am now fully confident that I can use rifles with carbon steel barrels to no ill effects, outside of the extremes of highly corrosive environments like coastal/marine places. This isn’t to say that stainless isn’t an advantage, just that I’m now much less concerned about carbon steel for my own uses.

Have any of you had similar experiences when switching from basic, cheap, less-than-ideal tools to something that was designed from the ground up to be an optimal tool?