High round counts on ARs/AKs/handguns

[UnforseenWeather]

Hey guys,

Found this over at another site and thought it was extremely interesting. I figured I'd post the links all in one thread so we wouldn't have 3 active threads on essentially the same topic.

Short story: A guy in Las Vegas owns a very high end machine gun range and sells shooting packages to tourists so they can fly into town and rent guns like they've seen in movies or video games. He goes through an incredible amount of ammo every month, and knows what breaks. The guns in question often have over a hundred thousand rounds on them.

ARs: Click

AKs: Click

Handguns: Click

I found it quite interesting!

[Hawkeye]

I've read that before. Some good/interesting info in those.

[UnforseenWeather]

Yeah, some noise to go with the signal in those threads but all in all worthy reads. And these are pretty sterile conditions, too.

[winter]

Pretty interesting.

[matt]

Aug 10, 2015 13:23:14 GMT -5 UnforseenWeather said:

And these are pretty sterile conditions, too.

Good point. While most of us can't approach those types of insane round counts, we also don't have a crew of armorers taking our guns off the line to clean and maintain them at regular intervals.

We also may not do most of our shooting in the relative cleanliness of an indoor range. I have a carbine that I am still finding mud in from a rainy training day 2 years ago.

This type of information is invaluable but it may not perfectly represent what we would experience.

[Hawkeye]

The info is valuable for a number of reasons, as already mentioned. For me, I find the most value to be from a parts longevity standpoint... Ie, what parts tend to break the most, how often, their service life, etc. Not so much the reliabilty of the weapons in general because as mentioned they aren't being used under typical "field" conditions. That's not saying the general reliability info is not useful though.

[Erick]

Its an interesting link but I think we should not overestimate its application for our use.

Why?

Because they change out barrels frequently as wear items which means they will find breakage in parts long before any prepper fighting a multi year long conflict would.

For example trhey said they had issue with piston rifles "breaking".
Probably the piston or the piston spring.
but if the p[iston breaks after 30,000 rounds and they already changed the barrels its meaningless.

Any parts that last as long as the barrel basically last the life of the gun ...outside that is of a grid-up log support system where barrels are easily replaced and the ammo exists to shoo them out i the first place.

Their shooting schedule is very very different than ours as are the conditions as a result nothing they "discover" will affect my kit and load out.

[panzer0170]

Aug 17, 2015 21:03:23 GMT -5 Erick said:

Its an interesting link but I think we should not overestimate its application for our use.

Why?

Because they change out barrels frequently as wear items which means they will find breakage in parts long before any prepper fighting a multi year long conflict would.

For example trhey said they had issue with piston rifles "breaking".
Probably the piston or the piston spring.
but if the p[iston breaks after 30,000 rounds and they already changed the barrels its meaningless.

Any parts that last as long as the barrel basically last the life of the gun ...outside that is of a grid-up log support system where barrels are easily replaced and the ammo exists to shoo them out i the first place.

Their shooting schedule is very very different than ours as are the conditions as a result nothing they "discover" will affect my kit and load out.

I dunno - I think you raise an interesting point in the parts lasting the 'life' of the firearm if they last as long as the barrel - Having seen a fair few instances where people are manufacturing their own firearms or bastardising something they've bought and changing barrels, what's to say people aren't going to own a spare barrel or two? What about cannibalising rifles to keep another one running? No one is going to manufacture any new barrels, bolts, triggers etc... Knowing when individual bits of your rifle are going to fail, even if it is at a round count higher than your rifles 'life' is important;

Rifle 1 barrel breaks, rest of the firearm is fine? Rifle 2 piston is buggered and you need a replacement - If your piston in rifle 1 has an estimated 2,000 rounds left on it, and the piston in rifle 3 has 50,000 left on it? You're going to want to replace it with the 'better' piston, regardless of if the original rifle it came from is never going to work again...

Rifles lasting 100,000 rounds are nice - But you can't account for the time your rifle goes down after 5,000 because of some manufacturing error that no one has clocked yet, because you're the one firing the most rounds through product X. And we're not even just limited to 'product' X, it could be 'batch' X, especially if your 'product' is something scavenged from the local gun shop etc and you have no idea of provenance.

[UnforseenWeather]

Erick, I'm thinking that this could be a handy guide for parts other than the barrel. Full auto, and specifically the heat generated by full auto, is the real barrel killer. I know I don't have class 3 toys and my trigger finger, while quick, is not near full auto RPMs, so we don't necessarily have to concern ourselves with that.

But I find it both interesting and applicable to see what else breaks on guns with round counts into six digit territory so I can stock up on those items just in case. That's what this is all about.

[UnforseenWeather]

Kinda neat: Our friend MAC went there.

[panzer0170]

Oh, is that the facility? I watched that vid. I want to go play