How To Tell If A Barrel Is Shot Out
Every now and and so I publish figures on the average life of barrels. I go most of this information from gunsmiths who modify barrels a lot, and give their all-time estimate. But they are guesses, and that's all they are.
A .308, I take stated, should requite y'all 5,000 rounds of excellent accuracy. One High Main F-Form shooter whom I asked said iii,500 rounds, and a dreadful, error-filled book by a Navy SEAL sniper said 10,000, just no one I spoke with argued the five,000 figure.
Which brings us to my .308 F-Class rifle, which I began shooting in contest in 2016, and through which I shoot virtually 1,000 rounds a season. All of these are fired in the heat of the summer, in strings of 22 to 25 rounds, three strings in a day, which ways that subsequently each string, the barrel gets hot enough to make a heifer. So, at the last friction match of the 2019 season, my barrel had three,500 to 4,000 rounds through it.
Butt burn down-out, when it comes, shows up suddenly. One day it'southward fine, the next day you become fliers. I've burned out a .25/06 barrel, a 7mm Weatherby, a .280, and probably another .308. All of them followed this design. In the case of my F-Grade gun, the barrel chose to die during a friction match.
My first string, at 300 yards, was OK. The second cord, at 500, was fine until I put 2 shots in the seven ring. (To put this in perspective, if you lot get a 9 in F-Class, yous contemplate hurting yourself. A seven is beyond thinking.) "WTF?" I said, and put information technology down to a K Senior Tremor. (Grand Senior is my NRA age classification; information technology has a overnice ring to it, merely is otherwise pretty depressing.)
Then, at 600 yards, the aforementioned matter happened. Two shots went into the 7 ring, this fourth dimension high. I accepted them philosophically and bit my adjustable comb very hard.
All four shots had looked practiced going abroad. There was no air current to speak of. The odds of four bad handloads were nil. And then finally, I did what I should take done in the showtime place and stuck my borescope into the breech. At that place was no rifling left for roughly an inch ahead of the lede.
Looking up the bore from the breech with your naked eye will not tell you lot anything; a borescope is the only way to see the awful truth. Nor will looking from the front end do whatever skillful. Barrels fire out from the breech. The rifling at the muzzle of my match rifle shows hardly any habiliment at all.
Barrel life is determined by a number of things. First is the pulverization charge relative to the diameter of the bore. The more powder yous fire, the sooner your barrel will die. A .300 Weatherby, which has a .308-diameter barrel and burns around 80 grains of powder, has about half the barrel life of a .308 that burns xl grains.
Pressure gets into the mix. The higher your pressures, the hotter the pulverisation flame, and the faster the steel erodes. Friction from the bullet has no result at all. If it did, bores would fire out fastest at the muzzle where the bullet has reached its total velocity.
Stainless steel is supposed to last longer than chrome-moly, and it probably does. Deep-cut rifling and fewer lands and grooves help. (Six is standard, but during Earth War II, some .thirty/06 barrels had only two lands and grooves, and they shot fine.)
But most important is how the burglarize is used. Prairie-domestic dog-rifle barrels have short lives, every bit practice competition rifle barrels. Some large-game-rifle barrels, which are shot only a few times a season, last nearly forever.
The intelligent shooter resigns himself to the fact that a barrel is an expendable item. I know contest shooters who buy them by the half dozen, if they go a good price, and screw a new one in every season.
Jim Carmichel, when pestered nigh barrel life, used to tell people: "You should have the good luck to shoot enough to burn one out." When Jim went on a prairie-dog safari, he would pack his motor home with rifles and ammunition and end the chase when he reached "…10 thousand rounds or half a dozen barrels."
Melvin Forbes tells people: "Right at present, Douglas [Barrels] is making new ones, whether you tell them to or not, and I can get you one in a day." This is the correct attitude.
Most gunsmiths accept a working relationship with a particular butt maker, or several, depending on how much you desire to spend. Most butt makers offering a dizzying array of tapers, a choice of stainless or chrome-moly steel, and some offering replacement barrels for particular rifles with just most all the piece of work done. All the gunsmith has to practise is unscrew the burnt-out tube, spiral in the new i, and headspace information technology.
Right now, in that location are a lot of very good barrel-makers, and a number of peak ones. The very good guys fall in the medium-priced subclass, and the superlative ones cost coin. Here is a list of makers in both price ranges whose tubes I've used over the years and been more than happy with: Lilja, McGowen, Douglas, Shilen, Montana, Bergara, and Schneider.
In the stop, it doesn't matter what I say about barrel life, or what anyone else says. When yours is burnt out, it'due south burnt out, and you can exist served notice at the worst possible time. I plant out in a lucifer, and it price me points that I could non afford to lose. If y'all're a hunter, the exhaustion may announce itself by a bullet sailing over the dorsum or nether the chest of an animal you've worked your butt off for.
Picket your targets. Fliers that accept no obvious caption may mean it's time to play Taps for that tube and become to the gunsmith.
Source: https://www.fieldandstream.com/story/blogs/gun-nut/is-your-rifle-barrel-shot-out/
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