The high-volume rifle shooter’s dream come true!
Missing a prairie dog because of a copper-fouled barrel is not a life threatening event. Missing a Radical Islamic Jihadist (“RIJ”) who’s shooting at you is.
Copper fouling is the deposition of copper jacket material on the lands and grooves of a firearm’s bore. It is accumulative, and builds up in thickness with every shot fired. All of the consequences of copper fouling are negative, and some are dangerous. As copper fouling builds up, accuracy goes out the window and chamber pressures increase, potentially to destructive levels. Copper fouling is the bane of all high-volume rifle shooters, especially those wearing our country’s uniform. When the fighting is hot and heavy, soldiers don’t have time to clean barrels.
Recognizing all of this, the U. S. Army and its technology partners developed an additive for gun powder that greatly reduces the rate at which copper fouling builds up. What that additive is, and how it works, is not widely known outside the military, but Hodgdon Powder Co. figured it out because in 2012 they introduced CFE223.
CFE223 is a spherical rifle propellant that incorporates in its formulation what Hodgdon calls “Copper Fouling Eraser” (CFE). In its marketing materials Hodgdon states, “This ingredient greatly deters copper fouling. It contributes to longer periods of top accuracy with less barrel cleaning time.” According to Hodgdon, it’s the same stuff the military added to its small arms propellants to reduce copper fouling.
On Hodgdon’s website there are photos of two new AR-15 Match barrels sliced in half lengthwise to show the bores. The captions state that one barrel fired 200 rounds loaded with CFE223, while the other fired 200 rounds loaded with “other propellant.” The former appears to be completely free of copper fouling, while the latter looks heavily fouled. Hodgdon notes that CFE223 will not remove existing copper fouling, so its necessary to start with a clean barrel.
CFE223 yields top velocities and accuracy in many popular rifle cartridges, including the 17 Rem., 204 Ruger, .222 Rem., .223 Rem./5.56mm NATO, .223 WSSM, .22-250 Rem. 22 PPC, 6mm PPC, 6mm BR. .243 Win., .243 WSSM, .25-35 Win., .250-300 Savage, .257 Roberts, .25 WSSM, 6.5mm BR, 6.5mm Creedmoor, .260 Rem., 6.5mm Swedish, .270 Win., 7mm-08 Rem., .30-30 Win., .308 Win. and many more.
It’s not that we don’t trust Hodgdon—heck, I’ve known the whole family for over fifteen years, and they’re all straight-talking, conservative Kansans—but the proof is always in the pudding. If anything, we suspected that Hodgdon’s 200 round claim may understate the effectiveness of CFE223, so we decided to do out own testing to see how many rounds we could fire before accuracy was significantly degraded.
I loaded 500 new Federal .223 Rem. cases provided by Federal with Sierra’s notoriously accurate 55-gr. FMJBT bullets, propelled by Hodgdon’s maximum recommended charge weight of CFE223 for that cartridge/bullet combination.
