What the Eye Can See

A Look Inside Your Bore

About 10 years
writer Jim
showed up at a
shoot in South
truckload of
very
instrument
like something
space

ago, outdoor
Carmichel
prairie dog
Dakota with a
rifles and a
interesting
that looked
from the
program.

The author using the Hawkeye to examine, in magnified

It was a long,
thin, stainless
detail, the inner walls of his rifle bore.
steel tube
attached to
several cables with an eyepiece and a television monitor. It had a built-in lighting
system and various optical attachments as well. Its purpose was to study--up close and
in magnified detail--the interior of a rifle's barrel.
For the next two days we were torn between shooting prairie dogs and studying
grooves, lands, corrosion and fouling through Jim's optical marvel.
The single aspect that really stands out in my mind was our steady destruction (all in
the interests of science, of course) of the bore of a brand-new .220 Swift. The rifle was
fresh off the rack when we arrived. For two days we shoved box after box of hot factory
ammunition through it, and it was questionable which suffered the most, the prairie
dogs or the rifle.
Each night we would put the long tube of the borescope into the barrel through the
chamber and study how the steel was being gobbled away by hot loads in an alreadysizzling bore.
It was, truly, a revelation--not only in terms of what a steady diet of red-hot
ammunition will do to steel but also of the valuable information that can be gathered by
a serious scientific instrument like a borescope.
The first mention I can find of such a piece of equipment is in the 1978 Gun Digest in
which A.M. Wynne wrote about a borescope made by a company called Willrich.
Because of the limitations of conventional photography at the time, he was unable to
produce any actual images of the bore itself taken through the scope (although he did
describe, in detail, what he saw through it in the study of two dozen different rifles).
The scope itself was a modification of the device doctors use to look in your eyes and
ears. It had a long tube that projected light down into the bore and a system of mirrors
that projected the image back to the optical eyepiece. The lighting system required a
battery pack with cables.
Today the serious rifle nut who really wants to study his bore can do so much more
easily, and with considerably more technical sophistication, using the Hawkeye
Borescope from the Gradient Lens Corporation of Rochester, New York (home of Kodak
and the optical capital of America).

The Hawkeye was the brainchild of Gradient's chief engineer. At the time, the company
was involved in consulting on several defense projects, and the engineer (a devoted
rifle shooter) concluded that some of the equipment they were using could be adapted
for use on his favorite subjects. The resulting product was successful enough that today
the Hawkeye Borescope is the sole product of Gradient Lens, an independent small
company with about 15 employees.
The Hawkeye is considerably simpler than either Wynne's borescope from the 1970s or
Jim Carmichel's from 1996. The basic model consists of two stainless steel tubes of
slightly different diameters, one of which slides over the other. Light is projected down
one tube and reflected back to the eyepiece through the second. By rotating the outer
tube, you can get a 360-degree view of a bore or follow one groove or land as it rotates
as you pull the borescope out of the bore.

The eyepiece
is similar to
the familiar
medical
instrument,
but Gradient
goes one
better and
also offers a
right-angle
adapter to
allow more
comfortable
viewing. Light
is provided by
a small
flashlight that
screws into
the eyepiece
and also
serves as a
handle. With
no battery
pack or cables
and no
television
The
Hawkeye
Borescope
with
right-angle
viewing
lens.
monitor, the
whole outfit
packs into a handy little carrying case that can easily be taken to gun shows, gunshops
or anywhere else you might want to look at the bore of a rifle.
The Hawkeye does not end there, though, and right away it should be pointed out that
it is not cheap. The standard instrument with right-angle eyepiece, which I have, sells
as a package for $995. This model has a 17-inch tube, with an outside diameter of .188
inch--small enough for a .20-caliber bore but not a .177. The 17-inch length allows you
to examine up to a 34-inch barrel, assuming you have access from both ends.

1) Walnut shells needed; apply within: This .308 case badly needs a good tumbling.
2) AR inferno: Dramatic heat checking and corrosion show evidence of harsh overuse,
which could only be appreciated by Olin employees.
3) It looks like this .357 was fed cast lead first with a copper-jacketed chaser.
4) This is not a photo of the California treasury. Corrosion and rifling wear are evident in
. this AR-15 barrel and gas port.

The basic model with rigid steel tubes now comes in four different sizes, from the
smallest diameter at .073 inch to the largest at .25 inch, in lengths ranging from two to
33 inches (not all diameters are available in all lengths, however). The tinier borescope
will accommodate the smallest rifle bore but is available only in shorter lengths (two to
eight inches).
There is a version with a flexible tube made of fiber optic cable, also in different
diameters and up to 70 inches long.
A video attachment is available that connects the instrument to a television monitor for
easier viewing, and this can also be turned into a digital video file; this system costs
several thousand dollars.
A more recent development is a camera adapter that allows you either to create still
digital images or video file up to 30 seconds long. There are adapters in different
diameters that fit various cameras without retractable lenses, but a much more
convenient option is to buy a package put together by Gradient that consists of a Sony
Mavica digital camera, a bracket and all the bits and pieces necessary to make digital
images. These can then be downloaded to a computer, printed, transmitted on the
Internet, posted to a website--anything you might want. The whole digital-image
package, including the Sony camera (but not the borescope), is $1,325.
Obviously, these instruments have a wide range of technical applications, not just rifle
barrels, and many of the models and variations are intended for other uses such as
automotive and machine parts. Anyone interested in acquiring one should visit
Gradient's website (www.gradientlens.com) to see all the variations and technical
specifications, which are far too numerous to list here.
For shooters, the obvious use of the borescope is to study rifle and shotgun bores, to
see how much corrosion there is or the level of cuprous fouling, or to pinpoint the exact
location of a rough spot that collects fouling. On a shotgun, you can study the
chambers, forcing cones or chokes.
Without a borescope, the problem with looking down a bore to see how fouled it is, or
how corroded, is the same as trying to look at a polished wooden table at a shallow
angle. The light reflects off it in a glare, and you cannot even see the grain of the wood.
If you look at a rifle bore at the muzzle at right angles, you will see distinct copper
fouling in a red smear, yet if you look down the bore, it will appear shiny and clean.

1) Ridden hard and put away wet: Age and use with corrosive primers show on the
. bore of this antebellum .30-caliber percussion musket.
2) "And just what are you growing in your rifle, Private?" Simple neglect in a .243
. results in fouling and rust.
3) This old Mauser barrel shows the kind of pitting that can result from
mixing
. corrosive primers and neglect. Note the worn land.

The borescope allows you to view the lands and grooves up to 17 inches down from the
muzzle or up from the chamber and see what is really there.
Sometimes it is news you would rather not have. Looking at the bore of a cherished old
rifle and finding that its rifling looks like the badlands of South Dakota is not terribly
heart-warming. However, it is a great aid to efficient cleaning since you can spot the
exact location of a rough spot that collects copper and concentrate your cleaning efforts
right there rather than repeatedly scrubbing a bore that, for the most part, is already
clean.
For serious target shooters (or gunmakers who build varmint and benchrest rifles), the
borescope is a great help in breaking in a new barrel. With the barrel completely clean,
you can fire one shot and then study, inch by inch, the entire length of each groove and
land and spot any rough areas. These can be thoroughly cleaned before continuing with
the shot-by-shot, constant cleaning regimen of breaking in a new barrel. The process
becomes both quicker and more thorough.
The borescope has other uses as well. It can be used to examine the interior of a
cartridge case to look for the beginnings of a case separation or to examine the interior
of a loading die that is giving you trouble.
When you consider the number of tubular objects that play such an important role in
rifle shooting, it is a wonder we were ever able to function without such a method of
studying bores.