By Joe Berk
I’ve been using Patch-Out and sometimes its accompanying Patch-Out Accelerator for the last year and I’ve been pleased with it. Hoppes No. 9 wasn’t cutting it for me, as I found out when using my borescope. No matter how may times I ran a patch with Hoppes through a rifle bore after firing jacketed bullets, I found a whole bunch of copper streaking remained in the bore. In casting about on the Internet, I learned bench rest shooters were using Patch-Out, so I thought I would give it a try.
Patch-Out offers two products for removing copper fouling: Patch-Out (shown above on the left) and the associated Accelerator (shown above on the right). You don’t really need the Accelerator unless you are in a hurry, and most of the time I am not (my hurrying days are in the rearview mirror).
The idea behind Patch-Out is to wet a patch with it and run it through the bore. If you’ve got the time, wait a few hours hours and repeat. The first patch that comes out of the bore will be black, which is mostly carbon fouling. Subsequent patches (after waiting a few hours between each swipe) will be blue (as seen in the photo above). After doing this several times, the patches will become less and less blue. The blue color is due to a reaction between the Patch-Out liquid and the copper in the bore. As the patches come out lighter, it’s telling you that the copper is just about gone. I’ve not had a patch come out completely white (there’s always a hint of blue), but I suspect that’s due to minute bits of copper that have worked their way deep into the bore’s microscopic cavities.
If you run a second patch wetted with the Accelerator right after running a Patch-Out patch through the bore, the Accelerator accelerates the chemical reaction between the Patch-Out liquid and bore copper. You can doe this every 15 minutes and cut the bore cleaning time considerably. Sometimes I’ll do that; most of the time I just wait a few hours between Patch-Out patches and take a day or two to thoroughly clean a bore.
One caveat: Patch-Out doesn’t work on lead (nor does Hoppes). In fact, nothing (other than a stiff bore brush) will take out lead. Lead has to be physically scraped from the bore, which is what a stiff bore brush does. For copper fouling, though, Patch-Out works. It’s all I use anymore, and when I’m done, I’ll run an oiled patch through the bore to protect against rust.