There are some situations where more is definitely better: eating your grandmother's homemade sugar cookies, days spent shooting with your buddies, and smoother shotgun bores! Well, maybe you can get too much in the way of grandma's cookies, but I'd argue with you about time spent shooting and the smoothness of a shotgun barrel bore. Most of the time when you look down a shotgun bore everything looks pretty darn good. The bore is generally bright and shiny. It couldn't get much better than that, right? Wrong!

The Flex-Hone, which is composed of hundreds of small abrasive balls mounted on individual nylon bristles, and Flex-Hone Oil allow you to polish a shotgun's bore easily with an electric drill.

Appearances Can Be Deceiving
The appearance of a shotgun bore can be deceptive. Looking through it everything seems to be darn slick. You don't see pits or scratches, so logic says it has to be smooth. Well, yes and no. To look though a bore most of us hold the barrel up to a light. That's great, but much of what we are seeing could be the reflection of the light rather than the actual surface of the bore.

Glare from the light can hide a lot of surface irregularities. These irregularities can range from tiny scratches and pits to built-up carbon, lead, or plastic fouling. All of 'em, even the smallest scratches, potentially have very negative consequences. Moisture can collect in pits and scratches and can lead to rusting. Even the slightest roughness can accelerate the build-up of fouling. Fouling in turn can further mask continued rusting. If fouling is severe enough, it can lead to higher pressures and contribute to patterning problems.

Even a new barrel may not be as smooth as it should be. Over the years I've seen a lot of new barrels with visible reamer or machine marks. This roughness will invariably lead to excessive fouling as plastic from the shot cup is scraped off and built up with each successive shot.

Reid says to position a marker flag on the Flex-Hone shaft at the breech end of the barrel so that the Flex-Hone does not pass over barrel ports or a screw-in choke tube.

The bottom line is that the shotgun bore should be as smooth and slick as we can possibly make it. The smoother the surface, the less fouling will build up. That'll make cleaning easier and faster, and it'll even make patterns a bit more consistent.

When I first started gunsmithing, polishing a shotgun bore could be quite an undertaking--in fact, it was a royal pain! It would entail casting a lead lap inside the bore then coating the lap with a fine abrasive. The lap was pushed back and forth, being very careful to stop short of the choke and the chamber. It seemed to take forever. I also made up mandrels made of wood (or metal), attached strips of cloth-backed abrasive, and spun them inside the bore. That was a bit faster, but it still took a long, long time.

Some shops that specialized in shotgun work modified honing machines originally used for the automotive trade. This really made the process faster, easier, and more precise. However, those machines were far too expensive for most of us toiling in small shops.