People’s attitude to cleaning rifles ranges from a mania bordering on religious zealotry to a casual wipe-over with an oily rag.
Whatever your approach, most of us have accumulated useful bits and pieces over the years. And that includes bore guides, to keep the rod and brush moving along the bore axis and avoiding chamber wear.
Double rifles have always been the poor cousin when it comes to bore guides – at least, I could not find any. It is true that the barrels are often shorter than bolt action rifles. Also, you do not need to guide the rod through the receiver to clean the barrels.
I use a fibreglass rod originally designed as a ramrod for a blackpowder rifle for cleaning my two doubles. The rod does not have the fancy ball bearing handle of other rods, but its greater diameter (11mm) means it does not flex when pushed through the barrel with the large jags used with these rifles.
But I never found any bore guides. I did read one suggestion on the Internet of taking a fired case, pushing a piece of dowel into it to fill the case half-way and then drilling out a hole to allow a rod to pass through it. It was an interesting idea, but I doubted my shop skills were up to it.
So I turned to David Bonwick at the Shooting Shed, who makes a whole range of useful accessories, including a range of custom bore guides for bolt action rifles. His shop skills being infinitely greater than mine, I soon had two guides, one for a .470 and a second one for a .600.
Both guides fit neatly into the chamber and keep the rod centred.
To use it, I first insert the rod though the guide, then attach the jag. Rod, jag and bore guide then go into the chamber. This approach means I need to clean the chamber separately, but that is no great problem.
The guides do the job well, but I wonder if it makes the job a bit more fiddly than it needs to be for little extra gain? Perhaps there is a reason that the Brownells catalogue (which has just about everything you could ever wanted to own, and plenty of things you did not even know you needed) does not have double rifle bore guides.
But that is not the point of rifle projects. Sometimes it is just interesting to try out new things – and my double bore guides are an excellent example of that. I shall continue to experiment with them (and see if David sells many of them!)
