skiutah02
Silver $$ Contributor
Have two barrels shooting 90s in operation at moment. 1st one has just over 2000 rounds on it. Was shooting fine at end of season, but who knows what will happen next season. I will be using this one as a backup/local match/practice barrel. Barrel #2 has just about 1000 rounds. At round count 700ish, started blowing up bullets (long story). Took it to someone who was interested in what the bore looked like (and offered to borescope it he was so interested). He showed me how to properly clean it (made me cringe) and it returned to its "normal" accurate self (but needed load tweaking). In the process he thought that the barrel had 2-3 thousand more accurate rounds of life left in it based upon how little wear he saw in the lands/throat area. The last I shot it was during the 2015 FCN Team match, and it put up scores of 198-12x and 198-11x at 600, so I hope he is right.
I experimented with some powders in barrel #2 and was pushing them 2870-2910fps which seems to be a great node accuracy wise, but is a "one and done" on virgin, neckturned brass. Here are two targets from that experiment shot at 600 yds (shot about 1 month apart), and yes that is under 1" vertical in one of the targets. So pushing them fast may not be solely a great predictor of barrel life (but this is a working hypothesis), but it probably doesn't help barrel life.
Drew
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. The one addition I'll add is I purchased a tool that is effectively a go/nogo gauge for small primer pockets that gives me advanced warning that a primer may not be tight enough for my liking when I hand prime it. Put one red mark on that one. Then a second red mark when it seats with less tension then I feel is good. Drew
