When you buy a new hunting rifle, do you need to shoot it a certain number of times to “break in” the barrel? This is sort of a controversial question, and the internet and even true gun experts are somewhat divided on the answer.
The idea behind barrel break-in is that the manufacturing process leaves behind ever-so-miniscule imperfections in the barrel, and the break-in procedure helps smooth out those little tool marks, leading to better accuracy and even reducing future cleaning effort. Many manufacturers provide break-in instructions for the rifles they sell, although many of them also admit that the process is not strictly necessary.
The break-in process is pretty simple, but somewhat tedious: You shot one shot, clean the barrel, shoot again, clean again, and repeat for about 10 shots or until you start seeing less copper fouling on your cleaning patches. Then you shoot three to five shots, clean, shoot three to five more, and repeat that process several more times. The good part of this is that you have plenty of shots to really get to know your new rifle and how it functions and feels. The bad part is that no one enjoys all that cleaning—not to mention the price of the ammo you’ll be burning.
Copper fouling in your barrel makes it less accurate, and it can settle in all those little tool marks and be very difficult to remove. Cleaning it out after every shot helps smooth out those marks before they get all filled with fouling, so the fouling eventually has fewer places to hide. Just how much difference this makes is up for debate, but the consensus is that breaking in a rifle causes a relatively small increase in accuracy. For some people, like long-range precision rifle shooters, every little bit matters, and they are meticulous about breaking in their barrels. For the rest of us, who are shooting our rifles mostly at 200-yards-and-in hunting distances, it’s not even noticeable. Savage Arms seems to agree; a company blog on this subject says, “If a rifle will only be used to take shorter range shots, such as a ranch or farm rifle, or a closer range hunting rifle, then it may not be as important to break in the barrel to squeeze out a little more potential accuracy. If the rifle is not used very often, then it may also not be as important to take the time to break in the barrel.”
I admit I have never bothered to break in a barrel on any rifle.
What About Wearing It Out?
Can you wear out a rifle barrel? Yes, it’s possible. Depending on tons of factors, barrel burnout can happen after as few as 1,000 rounds or so. If you’ve shot your gun a lot and suddenly start getting fliers in your groups with no other plausible explanation, you might have a burned-out barrel. What actually happens is that the rifling in the barrel, particularly at the throat, begins to erode and lose its definition, and the rifling can no longer stabilize the bullet as effectively as it once could. You might also experience a drop in velocity or more copper fouling than you used to get, as the eroded surface catches more copper.
You might think that the friction from the bullet traveling down the barrel is what causes it to wear over time, but it’s actually more a function of the pressure and the heat generated at each shot. Higher pressures mean higher heat, which means faster erosion of the steel. Powder charge matters, too, especially in relation to the diameter of the bore. The more powder you burn, the faster the rifling erodes. Some barrel types are more resistant to erosion than others—stainless steel is advertised as lasting longer than chrome-moly, for example.
Of course, it really all comes down to round count. Your average deer hunter will never fire enough rounds to shoot out a barrel in her lifetime or her granddaughter’s lifetime, but shooters who go through more rounds might burn through a barrel a year or so. This includes mostly high-volume competition shooters.
How many rounds can you expect out of your rifle? It’s impossible to say for sure, but there are some rough estimates that are generally accepted. A .308 Win barrel is expected to last 5,000 rounds, though some say as much as 10,000. A total of 3,000 is often floated around for a 6.5 Creedmoor, but many shooters say that the number is much higher.
The truth is that there are too many factors involved to ever get an reliable estimate for your specific gun. If you do have a rifle that’s getting up there in round count and you suddenly find it’s spitting out fliers that can’t be attributed to the ammo or the scope, it’s worth taking a look at the rifling (from the breech end, which is where burnout happens) or taking the barrel to a gunsmith for an evaluation. The good news is that swapping out a barrel is a pretty simple procedure.
