Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles What’s with the lack of SS rifles?

It seems like all of the manufacturers are ditching stainless steel for some form of “weather resistant” finish. Is it really that much cheaper? Does stainless steel wear out tooling faster? What’s the deal?

My biggest question is whether the bore is protected at all?

Betting barrels are still stainless under the weather resistant coating.

I was looking at that. The two 700 AWR rifles I have are stainless with cerakote. The Weatherby “Weathermark” i just bought is just cerakoted carbon steel. Same with my TC Encore FX muzzleloader. Looks like a bunch of the M70 “extreme weather” rifles are now just cerakoted carbon steel.

I think a lot of manufacturers are cheaping out, figuring most guys will think the gray cerakote is stainless.

The bore is not protected at all.

Yep....^^What he said ^^.....Hb

For most manufactures it's a race to the bottom with materials and labor shortcuts. Rifles are being made at times with robotic means, cheap plastic stocks, crappy bottom of barrel materials. There's an upside in that technology has allowed for amazing machine tolerance but that's kinda the only upshot I can think of. What's up with rifles wearing plastic bolt shrouds? Some parts need to be made of proper materials.

All those new rifle editions wearing coatings that don't protect the bore (being the most critical surface) are like fake Super Sport packages on a Chevy with a 6cyl under the hood. Looks cool, but doesn't do much where it counts.

Stainless may be harder to come by.

Stainless is crazy high right now. Our stainless steel cost almost 3 times as much as it did a year and a half ago. Depending on the alloy, stainless can be tougher on machine tools as well

Yes, yes, and no.

Nitride is the only “coating” I regard as an acceptable substitute for SS. A bazillion Glocks can’t be wrong.

Stainless steel costs sky high, and with the spike of interest and marketing blitz behind new “super” calibers and lightweight camo/black stocked hunting rifles, the bronze/gold/brown/black cerakote craze has followed.

Lesser quality materials, more hype, raging market…equals higher profit margin.

Doc_Holidude

You would lose that bet on 90% of the barrels out there.

This is the reason right here.

I much prefer a stainless barrel. If I made rifles I'd only offer stainless and save money by reducing item numbers. Of course I'd offer 3" minimum mag boxes on short actions, 3.9" minimum on long actions, faster twists, and trigger tech rem compatible triggers on everything. It's amazing sometimes how slow and out of touch rifle companies marketing departments are. Remember how many years it was you could rarely find a decent recoil pad on a rifle.


Cerakoted exteriors are symptomatic of what's wrong with our culture as a whole. Looks is all that matters anymore. What's on the inside doesn't matter, functional performance doesn't matter. It's like when I toured a bunch of multi million dollar homes in Utah. Stucco and stone all the way around the exterior, inside was the cheapest home depot cabinets, cheap trim, $1/ft tile or cheap vinyl plank, cheap poly carpet. But on the outside they looked like high end homes. So much available today is cheap junk you can hardly find quality even with an unlimited budget. Ignorant consumers need to demand better. When I do find something quality I stock up because odds are its going away.

Bb

Can anybody tell me what they used to protect the bores of chrome moly steel barrels?

Must be good stuff because the bore on my 700 BDL rifles always clean up nice and smooth. Same goes for most of my older shotgun bores.

CM bores didn't rust if they were cared for before and after a hunting trip or trip to the range.

If you Dyna-bore the coat the bore is protected from rust. If you buy a barrel from say Shaw, the cost of ss is about the same, maybe cheaper than a chrome Malloy with a bluing.
I’m looking at getting a 264 Win Barrel and it will be stainless. But rust isn’t an issue here. I imagine it might be in Kodiak Island.
There’s also a coating from Dyna-bore you can put on the exterior of the barrel and it’s supposed to be great at rust protection.

What is a lack of SS rifles? Never heard of it

Most stainless barrels are 416 which has quite a bit of carbon in it. Check your stainless barrel with a magnet and it will stick pretty good. It's not like the 300 series.

With that said, 416 is not all that corrosion resistant.

Tony

If you find a original weatherby Vanguard SS it will be 410 as will the Mark V's .