Everyone knows the 'should you ever clean your .22' debate and people complaining about accuracy drop off after cleaning their 22. and needing to put a dozen rounds through it before consistent accuracy returns.
According to the Anschütz manual for my 1416 I should clean it once after the first 1,000 rounds, then one every 5,000 rounds. For all intents and purposes every 5,000 rounds might as well be never cleaning it for most people...
Straight from the horses mouth but I don't seem to be seeing the results expected.
On the debate of cleaning or not, for the last 8 visits to the range I did 4 visits shooting with a clean barrel, followed by 4 shoots with a dirty barrel.
All shooting with the same ammo, doing 75 - 150 round per trip to the range and the clean barrel is consistently working better for me.
Dirty barrel, I'm getting decent groups with varying spread from the start, all the way through the day without any change. Groups size tends to be due to shots stringing out
Clean and cold bore, I'm getting my best groups straight off the bat. Average groups shot fresh are consistently a few mm smaller than average dirty barrel groups and group shape is round instead of shots stringing out.
Won't be the same for everyone, but just sharing the experience for anyone interested in whether or not to clean their .22. Might be worth you're time trying yourself rather than rely on popular opinion.