Do you guys think I got the barrel clean enough?
Actually with most .22 rifles you are better off not cleaning so often. The bore must be lubricated with the lube provided by the cartridge and bullets. You will almost certainly do better after firing a few "fouling shots" to get your bore lubed with the ammo you're using. I know my accuracy picks up tremendously after I shoot about 30 rounds though the bore. Most people will say that's too much but I have paid very close attention to this over time. I've also won 15 of the last 17 competitions I shot in.
Here's where it really gets tricky. If you shoot 20 rounds of one type of ammo then start shooting another type of ammo (brands, velocity, bullet design, etc. all play a part) the different lubes used by different gun makers or even by the same gun maker on different rounds you will lose accuracy for a good while. The different lubes can combine to be more like glue than lube especially when you throw in powder residue. You'll either need to clean the bore completely and foul it with the ammo you intend to use or you can shoot even more fouling rounds to allow the current ammo to lube the barrel and drive out all the lube from the previous ammo. It generally takes about 50 rounds of fouling ammo to achieve this.
I've seen ammo go from shooting .75" groups at 50 yards to shooting .25" groups at the same distance after getting the bore fouled correctly. The only time I actually clean a bore is when I start to have accuracy problems or with a semi-auto I sometimes get feeding problems. But the feeding problems are more connected to the action being gummed up than the bore being fouled. I do clean the action more often than the bore which most people will say is exactly backwards. But I know it works to do this.
Top level shooters don't do things like I do AFAIK (I'm not one of them so I really am not sure). From what I hear they clean like you are cleaning. But they are using bores that are cut to very tight tolerances and they get accuracy problems pretty quick with burned powder residue etc.. Keep in mind that they swap barrels after just a few hundred rounds sometimes and they will sometimes go through several barrels before deciding on one they like. I do know some top level shooters and they have told me these things.
Another thing that hasn't been mentioned here is lot numbers. Every batch of ammo is different. The same brand and type of ammo can vary a great deal from one production run to another. Sometimes it makes a huge difference. Top level shooters will go through testing of lots of ammo trying to find the good stuff. Then when they do they buy it by the pallet. Being a top level shoorter is NOT cheap as you no doubt see.
For the most part one brand and type of rimfire ammo will be pretty close to other lots of the same ammo at least for ammo us mere mortals use. But there's no guarantee that the top level brands of ammo will even be consistently good. I have some Eley Tenex that has never grouped that well in any rifle I own except for one but I actually sold that rifle. It wouldn't shoot anything else well at all.
So picking the right ammo is sometimes more art than science. First finding the ammo that works best with your rifle is the main thing. That gets most of us the accuracy we want. If you want to win contests finding the right lot number on the boxes of ammo your gun likes is the next step. It is not easy to do that BTW. It generally involved calling retailers and wholesalers all across the country to find the ammo in large quantities. BTW even centerfire ammo off the shelf does the same thing. You will need to buy the right lot number of ammo for that too unless you do what most good centerfire shooters do which is make their own ammo. They are essentially sidestepping the production issues of rimfire ammo by limiting the powder, the primer, and the bullet and the way it's all put together. It's not economically feasilbe to do this with rimfire though. It's more complicated to make than centerfire and it's much cheaper to buy off the shelf. And it's harder to make it consistent the way I hear things about reloading rimfire. Very, very few people do that.
What I do when I buy a new rifle is to buy up a couple of boxes of all the major types of ammo I see around all the time then I start testing remembering to foul the bore with every type of ammo I test. Once I settle on a good type I start looking for different lots of that ammo. I pick one of those and try to buy up as much of that lot as I can which is usually not easy to do. I keep my eye on what lots work well as I buy ammo for my rifles over the years and I always try to go back for more of any lot that works well. I have some success at this but it's not a given that it can even be done. But I can usually buy ammo that is the best type for my rifle.
One last thing. Ammo makers change how they build ammo after a while. When they do that with the ammo your rifle likes you will likely have to start all over from scratch looking for the right type of ammo again. It is a real pain to do that. I generally keep a lot of different types around from when I've done previous testing though so I don't have to buy new ammo every time. Sometimes I find a good type in the stuff I have put back but then find it's been changed too.
Again buying ammo is an art. Good luck. I will say that the best ammo I've found by far is Gold Medal Ultra Match. Be aware that there are imitations of that ammo made by the same company (Federal). They have ammo out like "Premium Gold Medal" which is NOT the same thing as Gold Medal Ultra Match. First off it cost about 10 times as much to get the good stuff. That's the first giveaway. Americans won in the Olympics with Gold Medal Ultra Match. But it has also gone out of production now. I still find it because it hasn't been gone that long and not many people are willing to pay the price ti brings. I pay about $18 a box for it (50 rounds). It often costs more than that but I don't buy it when it does. I have a good supply in my safe now anyway. Heck the ammo costs more than the rifle ever will. That's something else people should know when they take up shooting.
I'm just joshin about it though, what comes around goes around I believe.