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Stainless firearms, alloy?

I generally pick 4140/4150.

I noticed they don't tend to get scaled up in the throat. They just wear away until the rifling is gone. I have a few old barrels with 6" of rifling missing. Slow gradual reduction of accuracy.

On the stainless barrels the throat fire cracks, and if a chunk chips out it stops shooting immediately.


I use remage style prefits and a barrel is only $450 complete. Even at that I still want to ring out all the decently accurate barrel life since I shoot a lot. Only need 1moa accuracy generally to hit the steel at matches, so not worried about a .0" group.


There are better steels. Maintaining accurate bore size and rifling when you're using tiny tooling over 26"+ length makes machinability important. Liners are being explored that may someday make all this irrelevant, but they're still stupid expensive compared to replacing a barrel every 1500-3000 rounds.



Generally all the rest of the stainless parts aren't too important. 17-4 seems to be fairly prevalent, but I'm not huge on stainless anything with low humidity and decent maintenance practices I generally don't pay the premium stainless demands.
 
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