Interesting coments about cleaning. I-too have gone a couple days, sometimes three before cleaning at Rendezvous but I generally don't mention it.

The reason I don't talk about it is this basically amounts to abuse in certain barrel steels that aren't of the harder alloys. 12L14 and L1011 come to mine as being suseptable to early rusting is not cleaning quickly and properly.

Proper ball/patch combinations will eliminate the need to clean or wipe often. With good combinations, the 100th shot is as accurate as the second. In my rifles with the ball/patch combinations I use testing wiping between shots and shooting 'dirty' I see better accuracy shot dirty. Just recently, I was testing my 14 bore rifle at the range and after shooting off well over a pound of powder, never wiping, I put two shots onto a fellows 100 meter target to test the 100 meter sight. The sight leaves were filed-in back in 1986 when the rifle was built by my Brother. My hunting load put two balls touching just above and to the right of the bullseye. The elevation might have been the way I was seeing the sight picture on the orange aiming point, or perhaps a bit of wind or even due to the lot # of the powder used today in comparisin to the powder of 1986. They were still in the 'kill zone' of even a very small animal like a ground squirrel standing upright.

Due to the success of some friends of mine with cloth patched undersized round balls in their duck guns, I've loaded up a few for testing from the 16 bore Husky, but so far, haven't tried them on target. For those with undersized moulds for their rifles and smoothbores, patched balls might be another answer to take up windage and also carry lubricant for keeping fouling soft. Soft fouling wipes out with each shot with proper combinations so that there is only 1 shot's fouling in the bore at any time. This is important to accuracy, as the bore's condition always remains the same, never changing.

Shot to shot consistancy results in accuracy as a reward.