Well, here's my take.
Manganese phosphate is a crystalline structure conversion coating for cast iron & steel; it offers no addition to the base material for any kind of wear resistance, & next to no corrosion resistance & I deal with it commercially, as with various other high tech coatings.
It does carry & hold oil to a better degree than any of more dense coatings like NIB, Cr, PVD, DLC & Black Nitride..................but all those coating offer various degrees of pretty high coefficient of friction reductions. Phosphate offers none & actually increases COF.
They work just fine though, & the chrome bore where the gas rings ride is a robust solution. My biggest complaint, by far, is that cleaning the bolt stem is a royal bitch compared to the other coatings discussed above.
IME with various phosphated BCG's, BCM makes the smoothest, most nicely phosphated surface that I've seen & all their stuff is high quality, IMO.
Current technology for NiB coatings as well as all the others mentioned above have all developed to a point that any flaking or cracking being a rare occurrence, as far as I know, from personal use & seeing others use them & being on several forums like this that discuss these things, ad nausem.
I have 3 chromed BCG's, one with a chromed bolt, 1 with a phosphate bolt & 1 with a PVD coated bolt...................all have held up just fine. That KAC offers an upgraded carrier that they terms the Krud Kutter, says a lot.
But PVD / DLC is by far the slickest, smoothest coating I've seen & there is a very apparent & noticeable difference in the smoothness & feel of manually running the carrier back & forth in the upper via the charging handle. The next smoothest is a plain, uncoated, polished SS carrier from JP Rifles...............is's smoothness has to be felt to be appreciated.
But if I could always get a DLC coated BCG, when I want it, at a reasonable price & in a design that I like, I would never use anything else.
And then there is Black Nitride & when done right, as are those from RCA, it is very slick & smooth as well with excellent wear resistance.
All these coatings wear far better than phosphate, with NiB at the low end & with the most visible wear at about the same round counts that the others still show no sights of wear.
As to the bolts themselves, MIL-SPEC is Carpenter 158 steel with phosphate coating.
There are plenty of other commercial bolts made from 9310 & lots of claims of it being superior to C-158, especially for breakage.
And that maybe true.............for the very best & correctly HT'd 9310.
But C-158 is proprietary & not nearly as readily available, & from the limited number of sources that it is available from, everything that I can find, says that it is far better controlled & held to consistent QA standards.
9310, by contrast, is available everywhere, & it's inevitable that given the many sources for the product & the variety of the HT sources, that there is much more variability that will creep through than with the more rigidly controlled C-158.
So if I buy a 9310 bolt, I will only buy from a fairly high end & highly recognized source & hope they have done their homework, but I really prefer to buy C-158, regardless of the coating.
Also on bolt design, if you really want added strength against breakage, HMB defense makes a bolt design with a blind cam pin hole with greatly strengthens the bolt at its weakest point. Young Mfg. was making bolts to that design as well, but seems to not being doing so anymore.
The 2 best bolts that I've used are a Young / HMB design, Cr plated, & PVD coated bolts from JP Rifles. Both are 9310, both have performed well & held up well.
Pay your money & make your choice, no shortage of stuff to choose from, from super budget, to outrageous.
MM
Great info. I'm glad you mentioned a few of the ones I have. The RCA's I have are very smooth, and wearing well. That black nitride coating is slick and tough!! One on a Noveske, and the other a different build. Both BCG's holding up very well, and looking almost like new, even though they may have a few thousand rounds on them. I also like how TWR keeps bringing up the NIB on the BCG in question. If he says it's good, I'd buy one. I like that coating, when it's done right. And trust me, I've seen some that were not.
I have a BCG from RTBA, of all places that is NIB, and it still looks like new. I think I have almost 10,000 rounds on that BCG as of right now. Love the NIB on that one. They advertise it as "UCT'S EXO NIB coating". The same process WMD uses. Like TWR said, just wipe it off with a rag, and it's good. I generally clean it with Rem oil, and call it good though.
One BCG I bought a couple years ago was a huge disappointment and was NIB coated. That was a Fail Zero, and it was a total POS. So, guys saying that coating is not good, or it "flakes off", may have had a bad experience from a sub par BCG manufacture, like Fail Zero.