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What do you suggest the proper break in procedure is for a new rifle? I have read several procedures over the years and don't know which is correct. Is there a different break in for blued VS stainless?
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Here’s the short answer: If you clean your barrel every 10 shots or so for the first 50 rounds you can rest easy at night and, no, there’s no need to differentiate between stainless and blued barrels.
Here’s the longer version: The idea behind breaking in a barrel is to somehow prepare it so that it delivers a lifetime of service and woe unto the shooter who doesn’t perform the procedure exactly according to what the manufacturer says. Some gun and barrel makers go as far as saying their warrantees are void if the proper procedure isn’t performed. Hogwash. (I’d prefer to use a more colorful term here, but kids might be reading.)
As you’ve noticed, there’s little agreement among these techniques for breaking in a barrel and that right there should be a clue that perhaps this isn’t as rigid a science as some have made it out to be. (In fact, one barrel maker confessed to me that the only reason he ships his barrels with specific instructions for breaking them in—which he made up arbitrarily—was to stop the phone calls from customers who used to bug him for the information before he had a “break-in” process at all.)
In practical terms, breaking in is done to add a bit of honing and polish to the interior of the bore and to smooth out any rough spots that occurred during the making of the barrel by depositing some copper fouling along its length. But without knowing the condition or quality of the rifling of your barrel before you start you can’t tell how much breaking in you should do—or even if the barrel will benefit from the process at all. If your barrel has a particularly bad blemish, excess copper can build up, which is a bad thing. But there’s no guarantee that any “break-in” process will alleviate the issue. The only answer in that case is to never let your barrel get too fouled.
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