river_boater wrote:FJ540 wrote:Because he shoots them out.Barrels are a wear item.
I've often wondered about that. My 6550 was manufactured in 1987 or 88. The barrel is original as far as I know. It was originally owned by the Utah State Highway Patrol. I have no idea how many rounds they put through it, but I have fired thousands. I haven't noticed anything that would indicate the barrel is worn-out. I've heard 25,000 rounds is the magic number, maybe I just haven't hit that yet.
You will be well past the reasonable accuracy life of any barrel before 25k. The problem is throat erosion and your chamber gets a tiny bit longer everytime you fire a round. After thousands of rounds, it can get a lot longer. This is a quantifiable number that can be measured with a cheap and simple to use tool. If you shoot a lot, it's a good idea to measure your chamber when it's brand new and then compare every so often to see how much it is eroding. Some bullets can be pretty sensitive to the distance they jump(or jam) to the lands and the rounds you loaded to jump .010" when the barrel was new might be jumping .050" after you put a bunch of rounds down range.
My first service rifle barrel(PacNor 7.5 twist) went 6700 rounds before I replaced it with a Krieger. At that time, I don't think I was a good enough shooter at 600 to be able to tell if the barrel was the problem, or if I was, so I probably left the PacNor on too long. Now I am a good enough shooter and I can tell when a barrel is losing accuracy. The Krieger has about 3k rounds on it and still shoots great at 600, but I stopped shooting that particular rifle in 2010. As Rip stated, out past 300 is where things start to fall apart on high round-count barrels. I bet the PacNor barrel would still clean a 200 yard target if I put it back on a rifle.
