This month, we have a range of cleaning products from KG Industries. I’ve sampled some KG products before and some of them I really like so let’s have a look at what we have.
KG 1 Carbon Remover
I mentioned benchrest at the beginning of this article. In 2001, I went to the World Championships in New Zealand. When we arrived, we got the customary ‘goodie bag’ which, amongst other things, contained a bottle of Butch’s Bore Shine. I’d never seen Butch’s before - I’d smuggled a bottle of my favourite bore cleaner (which I won’t mention) in a Head Lice Lotion bottle in my toilet bag! I figured this would fool the NZ customs but, as it was the time of the foot & mouth epidemic in the UK, they were more interested in confiscating my shoes!
Anyway, first job was to try the Butch’s on my nice clean barrel. Wow – a bit of a shock, as dirty patches came out of my ‘clean’ barrel. What I thought was a clean bore was anything but. The Head Lice Lotion went down the toilet! I’ve used Butch’s ever since and, like Sweets, it’s my benchmark for cleaning fluids. However, Butch’s is a carbon remover though it does contain ammonia, so it will bring out a little copper. You will see more Butch’s at a benchrest match than any other cleaner.
So, how does the KG 1 compare? I gave my barrel a good clean with the KG then another clean with Butch’s to see if I could get any more carbon out. I couldn’t. The barrel was clean – clean enough for me anyway. The KG 1 has no smell of ammonia so don’t expect it to remove copper.
KG 12 Big Bore Cleaner KG 12 is their copper solvent and, a few years ago, at IWA there was a stand pushing KG products. The vendor had several glass petri dishes, each containing a different copper solvent. All the well known names were there. Immersed in each dish of solvent was a copper coin. Over the four days of the Show, the coin immersed in the KG 12 visibly dissolved – almost all the detail had been etched away – impressive. Needless to say, the coins in the other dishes were pretty well as they were when dropped in. Now I don’t know to this day whether the guy on the stall was stupid or he hoped that the rest of us were! Most of the copper solvents of course need a catalyst -
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Gun Cleaning products from KG Industries
by Vince Bottomley
oxygen (or air) - to make them work. Immersing a coin in the fluid effectively cuts of the supply of oxygen. But why did the KG work? It contains its own oxygen – in the form of H2O – or water! As it happens, the Pro Shot Copper solvent does the same.
You can easily repeat the test yourself – drop a bullet in Sweets and nothing happens but put a drop of Sweets on a bullet and it turns blue within minutes. Is there any advantage to using a non-ammonia based copper remover? There is a line of thought that if ammonia is left in a bore for too long (how long is too long?) it could cause pitting. I can’t see why you would need to leave it for longer than fifteen minutes and that length of time certainly won’t cause a problem. But, is the KG 12 a good copper solvent? Yes, it is. It is very good but the problem I had with it was knowing when all the copper was out of the barrel. With other copper-solvents, your patches keep coming out blue – as long as there’s copper in there but the KG12 is a yellow colour and my patches went in yellow and came out yellow! Is there any copper in there? Only way to find out – try some Sweets. The patch came out free of blue stain so I decided to try some Bore Tech Eliminator in there. Sure enough, after 15 minutes, I could see a trace of blue – albeit faint - on the patch.
Is the KG better than Sweets? For me, it is probably as good but, I still reckon that Bore Tech beats the lot. Don’t forget – use a stainless-steel jag or an aluminium one (Bore Tech sell them for the sceptics!) if you are running your own tests, otherwise you will get a blue stain off the brass jag.
KG 2 Bore Polish This is one KG product I’m never without in my cleaning box. I discovered it many years ago and now use it regularly.
It’s called a ‘bore polish’ and it does exactly what it says on the tin. I look at a lot of barrels with my borescope where the owner is having a problem, so he wants to know what the bore looks like. Is it fire- cracked, coppered-up etc. Often, the bore is good, copper free but looks a dull grey – rather than highly polished. This is the ideal situation for KG Bore Polish.
Make up a tight-fitting patch on a brass jag, give the bottle a good shake and soak the patch in Bore Polish and give that bore a really good workout – stroking it
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