Metalwork is not really my thing so forgive the novice question if this is stupid.
My understanding of lapping paste is it basically rubs off a layer of the metal your working on. The same as sanding wood basically, except for metal you're obviously taking back to a clean new surface.
If you're polishing the silverware fair enough. For lapping a barrel though, this must be steadily increasing the internal diameter of the barrel then...
Doing it once as part of breaking in a barrel I can see, but I read some people doing it for cleaning periodically too.
Surely that's bad?
Must shorten the life of your barrel significantly?