. . . you get a lesson in humility. I have a very, very accurate .22 with a Lilja barrel that was installed by gunsmith John Blauvelt, of whom you will read in the June issue of Field & Stream. John gave it a tight chamber, because the less slop there is in .22 rimfire chambers, the better they shoot.

But after a while, the rifle wouldn’t extract the fired brass. So I went whining to John, and asked him to see what was wrong with the extractors. It turned out there was nothing wrong with them.

“Do you clean the gun?” he asked.

“Of course I clean it.”

Well, he put the bore scope up its bore, and lo and behold, there was a disgusting ring of lead and burned powder near the front of the chamber. It had not been removed even by regular cleaning with a bronze-bristle .22 brush.

It turns out that tight-chambered .22s often suffer from this type of loathsome deposit, and the way to get it out is to take a 6mm phospor-bronze brush and scrub the hell out of it. A .22 brush won’t do because it doesn’t fit tight enough. I gave the .22 the treatment and it throws cases like it was new.

(The coda to this is that, after resisting for a long time, I finally broke down and bought my own bore scope. But that is a subject for another rant.)