Okay, so a few weeks back, FourGuysGuns wrote an article about barrel twist rates. I had some serious issues with it from a technical standpoint – it was flat out wrong on some things – and emailed them directly with my concerns. I was concerned about coming across as rude, but they were very cordial.
I wasn’t sure what would come of that in the long term – if they would write more articles in the same vein, or if they would focus on other things, including, as their description says, “gun disassembly, cleaning, holding and aiming (and) proper range safety and etiquette.” I really think that’s a worthy goal, and something worthwhile and helpful to new shooters.
Well, they wrote an article about barrels again, and my brain started to leak out of my nose. The article is titled “Chrome vs. Steel: Barrels of Fun?” It is not fun.
Why get a chrome lined barrel over a steel one?
First off, both “chrome” and “steel” barrels are made of…steel. Yes. In fact, they are sometimes made of the same exact steel. This steel is sometimes referred to as “chrome moly.” Yes, the ones with chrome lining, and the ones without.
Some people say the accuracy of a chrome lined barrel is inferior to that of its steel counterpart. At 100 meters you may notice a ¼ MOA difference between a steel and chrome lined barrel.
A discussion of accuracy differences between the two without bringing forth any facts. Okay…great. This is simply a recitation of what is already out there, much of which is wrong. It’s not even worth talking about unless you’re going to bring something new to the table.
Chrome lined barrels allow for rapid firing in a much larger volume without degrading the quality of the rifling in the barrel…
Minor point…the throat is going to be the first thing to go, and the gas port will erode too. The rifling along the rest of the barrel will last a very long time. It’s common for benchrest shooters to shoot out a throat, then have the barrel shortened and rechambered – the rifling itself is still usable after the throat is gone. This is a minor point, but should you be taking advice on barrels from someone who doesn’t know this?
The last and most minor thing to note about chrome is that it is not susceptible to rust.
They also say that the “most minor thing” about chrome lining is that it is “not susceptible to rust.” Not only is this not true – chrome lined barrels WILL rust, they just take longer to do so – but chrome lining in barrels and bolt carriers was primarily introduced to aid in the prevention or delay of rust. It’s not “minor.”
Steel barrels are not meant for rapid fire. They degrade much faster under high heat/pressure situations
Pressures are going to be the same between the two. They later say shooters should not put “stress… on the rifling” of a bare steel barrel. I don’t exactly know what that’s supposed to mean.
The durability of chrome comes with a slight sacrifice in the overall weight of the rifle. There are many different configurations of barrels but the average weight added to a rifle with a chrome lined barrel is between five and seven ounces.
This is the part where my brain started leaking out of my ears, nose, pores, etc. Any weight differences between a bare steel and a chrome lined barrel are going to be infinitesimal! I don’t know if they confused an HBAR chrome lined barrel with an M4 profile CM barrel, or what, but this highlights the extreme lack of knowledge on the part of the author.
At this point, I don’t care if I come across as rude. FourGuysGuns’ plan is apparently to recite bad gun forum knowledge as truth and use Wikipedia articles as primary sources. People like this have no business giving advice on AR platform rifles – or any firearms, for that matter.
It hurt reading the quotes, I can’t imagine the article. I don’t know if I’d refer to the weight delta as infinitesimal, then again, I’m an enginerd, I like the wording “the weight deltas would be negligible.”. 🙂
I’m sure he’s not even aware that 5 to 6 ounces is a THIRD OF A GODDAMN POUND!
Jesus, If I want a light weight shirt I don’t get all natural colored ones because the dye is going to weigh it down…
I bet his next post is going to be about Parkerization vs Bluing and the weight differences between the two.
I like this blog post. It didn’t make me want to kill myself or anything. . .
Everything I learned about barrels I learned from a Benchrest competitor. The quotes left me scratching my head because I know for a while at least chrome lined barrels were all the rage in the benchrest community. The rule I learned was if you want corrosion resistance and slightly easier cleaning get a chrome lined bore, but for maximum shot to shot consistency a well built stainless steel barrel is best. My ARs all have chrome bores, but my hunting rifle uses a chrome moly barrel and it can still shoot better than me.
Mother. Of. God…
It reads like a cross between arfcom and 4chan. The comments on it are amazing, too.
lol@badarticles
Four guys named “Whitey, Superbowl, Monkey, and Lou”? Did they meet at a Victims of Bad Parenting convention?
The articles are trash. If I were their editor (maybe I should be? Hmmm…) I’d hand it back to them with no edits and a simple “do it over.” Their sentence construction is atrocious. It’s not very hard in the Internet Age to become someone who constructs respectable, yet down-to-earth and jargon-free sentences and paragraphs, but these clowns, with their lack of subject/verb agreement, their numerous ol’ boy asides, and happy capslock key don’t seem to get the picture.
Speaking of pictures; holy hamster, can you “guys” find any better source for images than Wikipedia? There are a gazillion free-to-use images on the Internet, and a good camera of your very own isn’t even breaking a benjamin these days. Ripping off the picture images from the “rifling” article on Wikipedia is beyond unscrupulous; it’s just damned lazy.
Their second article is even worse. Barrel life is greatly dependent on how hard you run the gun, not whether it’s chrome-lined or not. Chroming does not help absorb or dissipate heat. Rifle barrels are chrome-lined because they are expected to sit around, fire occasionally, and be impervious to moisture over long periods of time, whereas most machine gun barrels are not chrome-lined, because they are consumable items. Chrome-lining as a process became popular soon after it was developed, primarily as a way to reduce corrosion, not as a way to reduce wear or dissipate heat.
“At 100 meters you may notice a ¼ MOA difference between a steel and chrome lined barrel.”
It is often considered a mark of professionalism to blatantly rip off articles by competing blogs.
“Personally, I donât shoot accurately enough that I would be able to distinguish this without bench resting.”
This is because you are subhuman.
/rant
Any thoughts on how chrome lined is introducing a metal liner to a barrel? Instead of cutting rifling directly into steel.
Is chrome more/less effective than case hardening a steel barrel? In regards to the life of rifling.
Just curious about why so many companies seem to be going towards non-chrome barrels. It doesn’t seem to be enough of an improvement for the cost to go with chrome anymore.
Your first two questions can be answered with some research. The full answer is longer than I care to type. Try m4carbine.net and use their orange search button at top right.
As for your third question, there is a split. Some of the better and more innovative companies are going to various nitriding processes, which seem to provide a more durable barrel with no accuracy compromises. At first it also seemed to be cheaper than chrome, but from what I’ve read, and there is some controversy on this, doing it right will not end up any cheaper than chrome. But some companies take a simplified approach which is cheaper.
On the lower end, some companies have always offered unlined steel purely for cost reasons, and unfortunately at least one company (DSA) has gone from offering nitride-treated and chrome-lined barrels to mostly unlined barrels in their AR15s, which is a huge step backwards. Their explanation is based on cost and user needs. They have apparently determined, probably correctly in their case, that their customer base can’t tell the difference in use and would rather pay $25 less for a barrel, even if it only lasts half as long (or less).
Thanks, I needed some laughs this morning.
Now I’m going to weigh all my barrels to find out how much the chrome weighs. Anyone got a microgram-capable scale I can borrow?
This hurts my soul.
Oooh oooh oooh! Get them going on nitrocarburizating!
This reminds me of a time James Yaeger tried to explain +P ammunition. He didn’t have a clue. Self proclaimed internet gun gurus with big egos and fragile feelings make it hard to find reliable information. That’s why I like this blog, accurate and to the point. Keep up the good work.
Please give me the source on that so that my friends and I may have a good laugh at JY’s expense.
The problem with explaining +p is that it’s not the most consistent thing in the world. I’ve seen standard pressure and +p 124gr Gold Dots, the king of duty ammunition, chrono within 15-25fps of each other. My guess is that it has something to do with the volume of ammunition being produced these days and the slippage of quality control.
That said, I think +v would have been a much better identifier, since that is what you’re going after and that is what the “+p” provides, in theory.
As for the “FourGuys”, it’s like seeing all that bad gun store talk codified into articles. I really don’t see chrome lining degrading accuracy to any consistently measurable degree, especially with a hammer forged barrel. There just doesn’t seem to be much opportunity for rifling flaws to appear in the first place with that process. A chrome lined barrel shouldn’t be any less accurate than a non-chrome lined barrel assuming there weren’t any flaws in the barrel before the hard chroming process.
Future article suggestion for this blog: Document the hard chroming of barrels. We’ve all seen hammer forging machines and barrels being cut on lathes, I don’t think many of us have seen the hard chroming process. I know that I haven’t, at least not with barrels.
You don’t have to know everything, but at least be smart enough to know what you don’t know. And the worst kind of ignorance is the kind that feels a need to spread bad info to those that don’t know any better. I am not saying that I haven’t been wrong about something gun related, but I at least pass info with a stated source……you know, “they say……”
Ounces for $25 bucks….? Really. I do like a 1:7 non chromed,nitrited berral.