Lube on Jacketed bullets

[akinswi]

I was just curious if you smeared a little of the same lube you use for cast bullets on lets say one of my 168 match kings will it be better on the barrel than no lube. The bottom line is after 10000 rds down the barrel doesn't anybody think there will be a diff.

I know shooting lead bullets basically never wears a barrel out but somethings i dont want to shoot lead casted bullets out of example would be my m1 garand, but I dont want to wear the barrel out, there has to be way to get a lifetime of shooting with copper jacketed bullets with out wearing out the barrel.

I shoot 1000 rds to 1500rds a year out of my M1 10 years that 10000 to 15000 rds.

[Bart B.]

I would not put any lube on jacketed bullets. Without knowing how it might squeeze up and possible cause a bulge in the barrel, I don't think it's worth it.

Schutzen match rifles shooting lead bullets with black powder typically had a 10,000 round barrel life before accuracy was degraded enough to be noticed.

Rimfire 22 barrels go about 30,000 rounds these days for barrel life in the hands of the best shots.

M1 and M14 service rifle shooters producing the best scores rebarreled them somewhere between 3000 and 5000 rounds; that's when they noticed accuracy was not up to what it was with a new barrel. For combat purposes and general service use, they and the newer 5.56 NATO ones are now considered worn out at about 10,000 rounds.

Depending on how well one's marksmanship skills enables them to shoot and what their expectations are, barrel life will have a wide spread of numbers from its user. Burning powder erodes the barrel at the origin of the rifling. The more powder that's burned for each shot and the smaller the hole in the barrel, the shorter barrel life will be.

[akinswi]

3000 to 5000 rds is not much im assuming they are using criterion barrels, which arent cheap

[TATER]

Having ones Cake and eating it too.. Oils do not compress, Don’t do it..

Look into Plating with molybdenum disulfide (Moly) or Hexagonal Boron Nitride (HbN) also known as ‘White Graphite,
Bullets must be impact plated for both. There are horror stories of improper applications though,
I have been using HbN with one rifle for a few years now, So far I like it… Moly on a few rifles too. No problems.
Is it increasing the life? I would like to think so, But………

[Jimro]

If you want to increase useable barrel life your choices are hard chrome or nitriding the bore.

Otherwise you are just left with relatively soft steel (for ductility) verses high heat and pressure.

Jimro

[Snyper]

3000 to 5000 rds is not much im assuming they are using criterion barrels, which arent cheap

Keep in mind he's talking about those who scrap barrels when they go from 1/4" groups to 3/8" groups.

MOST folks will never "wear out" a barrel in their lifetime

has to be way to get a lifetime of shooting with copper jacketed bullets with out wearing out the barrel.

Most of the damage to a barrel is from flame and powder erosion. so lubing jacketed bullets won't make a practical difference in wear

You can try moly coated bullets to help make it easier to clean the barrel, and may slightly reduce wear

[Sure Shot Mc Gee]

Winchester Supreme Elite Ammunition have a Lubalox coating. Nosler/Winchester/ or Combined Technology make the bullet Winchester use's for such ammo.

You can powder coat your own without to many problems incurred.

[oldpapps]

I remember reading, I think it was in one of the Hatcher books, about match shooters, in the 1920's, dipping the bullet tips in grease before loading them into the weapon's magazine. This was not approved. Something about blow-ups.

More to the point.
Lubing the exposed portion of the projectile would be a dust and dirt collector. I would see this as both messy and grinding away at the bore.
Lubing the projectile in contact with the case mouth would reduce the bullet pull. Consistency would be lost.
Any lube coming in contact with the propellant would soon be degraded.
Lube rubbing off in the chamber would make for some interesting head thrust pressures. That would make a good way to test for the strongest actions, any that survived would win.

My opinion is the lubing of jacketed bullets would only have detrimental results.

I believe that a lot of damage and wear comes from excessive and or improper cleaning.

Under normal operations, searching for a somewhat reduced loading (that still gives the needed accuracy) and using it will lengthen the usable life of a barrel. A major over-bore cartridge is going to have a shorter life than a mildly loaded cartridge.

I soft load for both of my Garands and use the same soft loading in my 03A3. These are not my hunting weapons and I no longer shoot any competition. They are my babies and are treated well. This doesn't mean that I would want to be on the far end of these loads.

Load with care,

OSOK

[reynolds357]

Lubralox is worthless for barrel protection. It keeps the bullet from corroding and makes a nice pretty loaded round in the factory nickel plated cases. As far as performance, it is worthless.

[akinswi]

Is there some research that shows Lubralox is not any better than a normal copper jacketed bullet just curious to your statement.

[Unclenick]

Originally Posted by akinswe

3000 to 5000 rds is not much im assuming they are using criterion barrels, which aren't cheap

No. Nothing different about Criterion barrels in this regard. It's normal for the temperatures and pressures for .308 Win. Some years ago for Precision Shooting Magazine (this was 1998, IIRC, the year before Criterion Barrels was founded), tests were done at the Sierra Bullet Company by Kevin Thomas using .308 Winchester barrels installed in their test gun receivers for routine bullet testing. Chrome-moly steel (any brand) were done at about 3,000 rounds and stainless ran about 3500 rounds in those tests. Cryo-treating the stainless got 4000 rounds. Unfortunately he didn't try the cryo experiment with chrome-moly barrels, where it might have shown more benefit.

If you shoot a .30-06 Garand with the typical load levels most use for that rifle, like 47 grains of 4895 under a 168 grain SMK, which are running under 50,000 psi, you get more like 5000 rounds of life. Same for lighter .308 loadings.

It's all about temperature and pressure. They both affect how fast heat penetrates the bore surface and that is what does most of the damage to a throat over time. The heat cannot penetrate more than a couple of thousandths of an inch during the time the bullet is still in the barrel. This shallow hot area expands more than steel under it, tightening the bore until the heat diffuses. The expansion and contraction cycles fatigue the steel until you see cracks between small areas of the surface in a sort of alligator skin pattern or little near-squares. As the fatigue continues with further firing, these squares start to break off, leaving the throat asymmetrical. This affects accuracy and is the reason barrels are set back and rechambered. The rest of the bore beyond the throat is usually still good, except for a very short bit of funnel near the muzzle, which often also need a short setback and recrowning to restore precision on target.

Bottom line, unless you have a bullet lube that lowers combustion temperature and pressure, it's not likely to have a lot of effect on barrel life. Applying a bullet lube, like moly, actually does this a little if you don't adjust the powder charge, but they also lose 20-50 fps off muzzle velocity. If you increase the powder charge to bring the velocity back up, you've killed most of the temperature drop.

As an aside, the 16" guns on the old battleships were good for about 400 rounds or so, depending on the projectile. A lot of tank and artillery gun barrels have lives in this range. Some overbore rifles, like the .300 Baer magnum have short lives measured in the hundreds of rounds. A lot of folks complain the 6.5-284's are shot out in about 1100 rounds. Bart B. had an empirical formula somewhere for estimating what to expect based on charge weight and bore capacity, IIRC. Maybe he can resuscitate it.

In general, the faster your rate of fire, the warmer the barrel runs and the sooner its finest accuracy is lost. Some M24 sniper barrels have been reported lasting 15,000 rounds or so, but the rate of fire is usually very slow with sniping. Also, the one sniper class I took had us cleaning every ten rounds, so carbon and other fouling adding to erosion is less of an issue in these rifles than with a service rifle match gun that is shooting matches with 80 rounds for record, plus sighters.

Originally Posted by Snyper

Keep in mind he's talking about those who scrap barrels when they go from 1/4" groups to 3/8" groups.

MOST folks will never "wear out" a barrel in their lifetime

I can tell you from personal experience that this is not so. Most people assume a gradual, even growth of group size with barrel wear, but that's not how it rolls.

I shot out my first M1A barrel at about 3200 rounds. That rifle had shot 3/4" groups off the bench with a scope mounted to it, and my best 10 round prone strings with iron sights were also that size. That's about the size of the X-ring on an MR31 100 yard reduced slow fire target, but it's no benchrest group size. I was typically shooting more like 0.9 moa from prone at that short, wind-indifferent range with that rifle that year. When the barrel went, I was cleaning my prone slow fire targets with 40-70% X counts pretty regularly in our local 100 yard league. Then one day, in the middle of a good string, I threw a 10:00 9 I hadn't called. I figured I'd messed up. The next week I got another uncalled 9, also in the second quadrant. Then the week after that there were two uncalled 9's in that same quadrant. By the end of the season, 1 out of 5 shots were 9 ring fliers, and there were some in all four quadrants. By then I'd realized what the culprit was, and had a new Krieger barrel on order.

So, as it failed, the barrel kept shooting most rounds same as before, but intermittently and increasingly threw fliers that opened the groups up to about double the gun's original best diameter. You can see that someone shooting three shot test groups might not detect the problem until it is well underway. The bottom line, though, is even someone shooting at 1 moa will find the effect apparent if they shoot large enough numbers of rounds in each group.

Years later, when the Sierra tests were published, I was gratified to see they determined end of barrel life with the same symptom. Their fixtured test guns shoot very small groups, as Bart B. can tell you from his visiting Sierra's facilities. To know when one of these barrels is shot out, they look for the first clear flier that appears.

If you keep shooting one of these shot-out barrels, the fliers begin to get wider. IIRC, the military doesn't reject a barrel on the black rifle actions until they group about 7" at 100 meters. On a machine gun they go until there's either a 200 fps average velocity loss, as compared to when it the barrel was new, or when 20% of the rounds show over 15° of yaw on a 100 meter target. So these barrels are very loose and not failing in the same mode as my shot out M1A barrel did, and are not even spinning bullets well when they are retired. For 5.56, a Springfield Armory machine gun test from 1967 gave a standard barrel about 12,000 rounds before it shot that badly. Nitrided chrome-moly ran about twice that, and chrome-lined stellite ran almost 50,000 rounds, or 3.5 times the plain barrel's life. The ratios are what are interesting. I've not seen chrome-lined stellite offered on the civilian market in either M14 or AR barrels.

[oldpapps]

I love to see an entry from Unclenick for two reasons, first is he is as wordie and long winded as I am and the second is that I always learn so much from him.
Keep it up Unclenick.

OSOK

[Hummer70]

Uncle Nick,
Funny you should mention the fliers at 9:00 being first sign of barrels letting go. I had the exact same experience on the M16A1E1 test at Aberdeen PG.

We were shooting 100 yards indoors and I started getting wild shots at 9:00. We were shooting dispersion record in 1200 round intervals and thenext to last 1200 had some fliers at 9:00/10.00 and 1200 rounds later they were gone. This occurred on all three rifles.

This ammo was loaded by LC using ball propellant. Barrels were gone at 6000 rounds.

In the retest we used Belgian SS109 and I did not get the wild shots with it and the barrels were still just in spec (7.2" ES)at 12,000 rounds. Don't know what the SS109 was loaded with but whatever it was it was very accurate and easy on barrels.

[Hummer70]

Uncle Nick,
Funny you should mention the fliers at 9:00 being first sign of barrels letting go. I had the exact same experience on the M16A1E1 test at Aberdeen PG.

We were shooting 100 yards indoors and I started getting wild shots at 9:00. We were shooting dispersion record in 1200 round intervals and thenext to last 1200 had some fliers at 9:00/10.00 and 1200 rounds later they were gone. This occurred on all three rifles.

This ammo was loaded by LC using ball propellant. Barrels were gone at 6000 rounds.

In the retest we used Belgian SS109 and I did not get the wild shots with it and the barrels were still just in spec (7.2" ES)at 12,000 rounds. Don't know what the SS109 was loaded with but whatever it was it was very accurate and easy on barrels.

As for lube and long life, don't have any good data on that but do know Mid Tompkins bought Sierra 168s at the factory that still had the forming lube on them and he shot them as they came from the box. I have a box of 1000 of them I have never got around to opening up.

Next time I run into Kevin I have to ask him about that testing. Last time I ran into him he was at NRA show in Charlotte. By any chance do you have a email for him?

[mikld]

Most of the damage to a barrel is from flame and powder erosion. so lubing jacketed bullets won't make a practical difference in wear

You can try moly coated bullets to help make it easier to clean the barrel, and may slightly reduce wear

I agree with Snyper. I believe high pressure/velocity calibers "wear out" (burn/erode out) barrels faster even shooting the same number of rounds a lower velocity round of the same caliber, from higher temperatures (jes my opinion). Moly coating was real popular a few years ago, and "everyone" was trying it. It has since fallen from grace in the reloading community; mebbe it doesn't work as well as expected?

[reynolds357]

Askinswi, Winchester claims it reduces fouling and increases barrel life. The coating is not truly a lubricant like moly. It is a protective oxide. I have shot ballistic silvertips since their first commercial availability. Take any load you want, interchange ballistic silvertips and regular ballistic tips and see what happens on paper. Also observe what happens in your bore. If you want to get real crafty, get out the chronograph and do some ballistic comparison of the two. You be the judge as to what benefit Lubralox truly has.
I am sure what Nosler/Winchester says is technically correct. It is my opinion that the level of benefit provided by Lubralox is so miniscule it is not measurable.

For further proof, take regular ballistic tips and moly coat them. Then see what happens on the chronograph and on paper. You WILL observe a very measurable difference. I personally do not like moly coated bullets because they create a barrel cleaning nightmare.