Originally Posted by ChrisF

A while back, I called Boots Obermeyer for one thing and ended up talking with him about a bunch of things. One of them was cold embrittlement of 416R stainless steel barrels. Apparently there were a few cases of barrels failing in extremely cold weather.


Chris,
The only ones I'm aware of were a batch of Sako and Tikka barrels that had some fail and that was traced to bad metallurgy from the steel mill. They happened to be stainless but it was the substandard steel, not the stainless part that was the problem. I'm not a metallurgist or a barrel maker so my expertise on it stops there.

There are tens of thousands of stainless M7 remingtons and M700 mountain rifles with pencil thin barrels running around in cold weather and they're not blowing up. There were also a bunch of stainless M70 featherweights built and they're not blowing up. Hart, douglas, pac-nor, Lilja, etc have made a bunch of skinny stainless barrels and I've yet to hear of one failure in cold weather. Anything can fail if stressed enough but from a layman's perspective the overwhelming evidence from the decades they've been on the market is that skinny stainless barrels in cold weather aren't a problem.

These makers are free to set their own rules and we're free to purchase from someone else who will make what we want. In my admittedly non-expert opinion it's a solution in search of a problem.