Home Forums Hunting & Shooting AR and Tactical Rifles 223/556 Guru's

A friend of mine sent me a youtube video of a so called expert that said if you shoot 556 ammo in a gun built for 223 you could be causing damage to the gun and possibly endagering yourself because the 556 generates 10,000 cpu's of pressure than the 223. I question that because I have a colt H-Bar that is stamped 223 on the magazine well and the barrel is stamped 556. Also have a DPMS that is stamped 223/556 on the Magazine well. Can anyone tell me what the actual difference is?

Bart

The stamp on the mag well means nothing, only what the barrel is stamped matters.

.223 is safe in a 5.56 barrel.
5.56 is not safe in a .223 barrel.

It has something to do with pressure, neck/case length, Haitian voodoo and the direction water drains in a toilet south of the equator.

What he said, best thing to do is google it up, there are pages of the information on it. AR-15.com has several stickys on it.

Most rifles today will have a 5.56 chamber to cover all, older rifles were made in both chambers.

but if its a wylde chamber it will shoot both

Here ya go. Yes there is a difference in pressure rating between the 5.56 and the 223, but as you can read here, not enough to blow up a rifle.

http://www.luckygunner.com/labs/5-56-vs-223/

The issue I have with the linked article is that there is no real data, only words and opinions.

I�ve talked to professional ballisticians, guys who use million-dollar labs to measure ammo for their ammo manufacturing bosses. (You know, those guys with the computers and transducers than can measure pressure by the thousandth of a second or finer.) They have reported some instances of 5.56 ammo in .223-chambered pressure barrels demonstrating peak pressures at or above 75,000 PSI. That is the pressure of the proof load each rifle gets tested with at the rifle maker�s, before shipping.

The article I linked also used words and opinions, but it backed them up with actual Pressure tested data with charts and graphs. Not the same old same old, "I talked to so-and-so and he said" rhetoric.