gopher slayer

I assume you mean by crap shooting a semi auto you're referring to "spray & pray" or just a lot of rapid fire burning the rounds up.

I've got a BAR in 30-06 but don't shoot it any faster than I would a bolt action, and always allow for a little "barrel cool" time when working up loads or practicing a lot at the range.

firstshot
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Make your first shot count!

Military rifles (namely .223) see thousands and thousands of rounds, and many are fired through a hot barrel. The M-16 A2 is expected to hold 3 MOA, if not it is replaced. This is not ideal for a target shooter but would due for a plinker. Match shooters replace their barrels at 3000 rounds or the first slight sighn of accuracy loss, but these same barrels which usually still yeild MOA accuracy would be perfect and have many thousands of rounds of life left for an average shooter. As with anything there are extremes but don't listen to the hype about barrel burn out unless you shoot thousands of rounds a year you should never have to worry about it.

Dad gone man, you can almost hold 3MOA slinging a rock by hand. I would hope the Marines can hold that with 5000 rounds maybe. Most on this page are looking for something a tad tighter. The magic 1MOA comes to mind. You can get 3MOA with a 200 dollar el cheapo rifle. No problem. Making that gun into a 1.5MOA rifle, is not that difficult with some time but might have to double that price. Cutting that in half to .75MOA is a challenge and usually expensive and much extra care has to be taken. I maybe just talking for myself, but thats what most of us here are striving for.

Nothing but the best that the lowest bid can offer! The 3 MOA is the extreme, an indicator for replacement, the NATO ammunition is also factored into this. NATO's requirements are not very demanding of the manufacturer. Most A2's will hold much better but with iron sights few notice as long as the rounds strike center mass on a human torso sized target the misson is accomplished. I guess my point is that if you start with a quality barrel holding .5 MOA, many thousands of rounds later the performance may slowly degrade to 1 MOA, depending on the purpose of the weapon that is not horrible. Until you are capiable of shooting better groups then your rifle/barrel can hold there is no sense in replacing the barrel.

The official testes on the A2 with the latest barrel twist (1:9 vs the A2's origional 1:7) shows over 6,000 rounds fired before any detectable spread in group size and over 10,000 rounds fired before a "noticable" differance was recorded. Quality ammo was used (produced by Winchester USA) NATO SS109 (U.S. M855) Ball, 62 gr flying at about 3,200 FPS at the muzzle (20" test barrel). They did have varying results using this round in the older slower twist barrels (1:12 had accuracy problems, bullet lacked flight stability) and with the faster 55 gr. in the 1:7 twist barrels (barrel errosion occurred sooner than with the 62 gr / 1:9 setup). Still noticable group spread did not occur until after 6,000 rounds.

All that said and making a statement based on these test results; an average shooter should get at least 6,000 rounds from a quality barrel with close to new accuracy. Some slightly less, some more depending on the rate of twist, bullet weight, and speed.