Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Is my barrel toast?

BTW I've seen more than one barrel that will show no blue or green with strong copper solvents, yet still have copper in the tube... it takes abrasives like JB or FLitz to get the barrels really clean and one that had a bulge like that, continued to shoot once you got it clean again.

Jeff

Yes, barrel life is a concern with the 243. The capacity of the .243 WSSM is essentially the same as the .243 Win, so it should be no worse. The .223 WSSM are the real bad actors. I considered the 25WSSM but target quality bullet selection is quite limited in that caliber. I came across this post at the link below which gives a formula to calculate barrel life. My .264WM comes out at about 800 rounds -- which probably is about right. The .243 comes out at about 1400 rounds with the heavy hunting loads, and just over 2000 with ligher (34-35 grains of powder) target loads that I would plan to use. I would go with a 12 twist and stick to the lighter bullets.

http://yarchive.net/gun/barrel/barrel_life.html

The other part of the story is that I inherited my father's Browning 264 which has a brand new barrel. I've put about 20 rounds through it, and the last 5 shot group was 1.5", so it should be fine for a hunting gun. If I'm going to spend more $$ I would like to come out of it with something that has accuracy for informal target shooting, and be more pleasant to shoot. My shoulder is still telling me about those 20 rounds from Monday of this week!

Ron

Jeff, I did not want to admit to my barbaric gunsmithing methods, but I did use Turtle Wax Polishing Compound on the barrel. The Barnes CR-10 which has ammonia was working, but far too slowly for my taste. After the polishing compound treatment, it cleaned up quite quickly. I figured I did not have much to lose with this barrel!

Ron

How did you take those pictures? Did you use a Bore Scope?

It would be nice to have a borescope, but no. Since the area was about 2 1/2" from the end of the barrel, you could reasonably see it. I just put a white piece of paper at the chamber end, with a strong flashlight on it. I then used a tripod and my digital camera in macro mode. I was hoping to get better, but that was about as good as I could do.

Ron

Little trick a buddy showed me to view the diffraction rings in a barrel off the rifle.

Take an empty case with no primer and insert it in the chamber. Hold the barrel up and sight through the bore (through the primer hole) at a light source. Move the barrel in and out until the diffractions rings appear. They should be perfectly round. If there is a bend or bulge in the bore you will see a distorted ring where it is.

After some practice you can do this without the empty case...but the case helps you to look straight through the optical center of the bore.