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Posted: 4/30/2004 3:28:26 AM EDT
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Another newbe question... When I "rapid fire" my new Bushy M4'gery, the barrel gets pretty hot. here --- Joe |
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When it starts to glow a dull reddish colour, it is getting too hot. Slow down. It may be difficult to notice this in bright sunlight, so consider doing your rapid fire in the shade or indoors. If the barrel wilts until it points at your toes, your are too late. The barrel has overheated. |
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I don't know guys, I have pretty strong fingers, well before I touched the barrel -- now I have blisters...hoot But seriously, it gets pretty hot and I wanted to be informed. thanks, Joe |
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The two issues to be concerned about with your barrel are cook-off and throat-erosion. Cook-off is when the chamber is hot enough to fire the round without the primer being struck by the firing pin. It CAN happen in semis if you fire rapidly enough, long enough and especially if you leave a round in a hot chamber for an extended period of time. I think there was a report on here in the last month about somebody cooking off a semi at around 500 rounds of rapid fire. Here the main thing to remember is when you are doing a lot of rapid fire, keep the gun pointed in a safe direction and empty the chamber before you go downrange. Cook offs can happen at lower temps if you let the round sit in there long enough. Throat-erosion is going to happen to some extent through normal use; but high heat will speed throat erosion. To give an example, in a non-chromelined, chrome-moly steel barrel a gun rag fired 10,000 rounds through a Colt Sporter over a weekend. By the end of the weekend, it was showing signs of throat erosion. Without the continual high heat caused by trying to fire 10,000 rounds in a single weekend, I'd have expected that barrel to last at least twice as long. A good simple rule-of-thumb is to stop firing your gun and empty the chamber is when you see the glue in the handguards catch fire and start giving off a nasty black smoke. That is around 550-600 degrees barrel temperature IIRC. A little bit of white smoke is just CLP smoking off the barrel and is nothing to worry about. |
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