Strange colour on cleaning patch?

[bellofello]

Hey everyone. I was cleaning my Remington 700P in .308, after firing 5 shots at the range. The first patch came out dark as normal, not excessively dirty or anything.

Next patch through had some bluey green mixed in to the darker colored powder. Following patches continued to be blue, and powder was getting less as normal with each patch. The blueish green continued.

Maybe this is a dumb question and the blueish coloured stuff is just copper?

I was shooting Winchester ballistic silvertips off the hop, this was the first time out with copper jacketed bullets (cheap core-lockt Remington)

The patches pictured are 3rd and 5th pulled through.

 

[LAZY EYED SNIPER]

What sort of solvent are you using?

If it's Hoppe's #9 or a multi-purpose solvent, it may take quite a bit of elbow grease to get rid of the copper fouling. It's best to use a solvent specifically made for removing copper. Foaming bore solvents tend to work really well. The greenish color comes from certain chemicals in the your cleaner causing oxidation as it reacts with the copper. If you're using any copper cleaning tools this could also be giving you a false positive as the small amount of material left behind by the brush or jag will react to the chemicals the same way. I'll usually start with a powder solvent, then cleaning patches, then copper solvent, more patches, and finishing up with another run of powder solvent. I'll repeat as necessary until I get down to bare metal and the patches come out clean.

 

[bellofello]

At first I was using hoppes#9, switched over to CLP the last few patches to make sure it wasn't just the hoppes.

I've been planning on heading up to my local gun shop to get some copper specific solvent.

I haven't used and brushes or jags yet as I haven't sent a lot of rounds down range with this rifle. At most it has only seen 10-20 shots fired each outing at the range. It only has around 100 rounds through the tube.

Thanks for verifying!

I'll make sure to grab some copper specific stuff soon. And a boat load more patches. I burned through ones that came with my Otis elite pretty quick

 

[LAZY EYED SNIPER]

As far as copper solvents go I'm partial to Barnes CR-10...

 

[bellofello]

Thanks, i'lll look into that on my next outing.