AR-15 wear and heat questions.

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Adrenaline101

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I've done some googling on the subject and I am interested to hear some CGN opinions on these questions.

1. At what round count do you high volume shooters start looking towards changing out their barrels? I've heard as low at 3k for match shooters and some as high as 25k.
2. How much of a factor does heat play into barrel wear in a semi-auto platform?

I noticed yesterday between shooting some MFS steel case and a bunch of norinco that my barrel and hand guard was way hotter than I had experienced before. After about 300 rounds of fairly quick succession mags I finally took a break long enough to watch the smoke coming out of the hand guard vents and figured that it was time for a long cool down, nearly 20 minutes later and it was cooled down enough to think about putting it in the case.
 
steel cased/jacketed ammo will wear out the barrel twice as fast. google lucky gunner ammo test and you'll find out a comparaison between brass cased/copper jacketed vs combloc ammo. After 10,000 rounds, the barrel that shot combloc ammo was toat and the one that fired brass cased ammo was still going strong.
 
I have no plans to shoot the MFS steel cased, it was a copper jacketed round but I wasn't a fan of the flames. I was more or less concerned with the heat I was experiencing, if I get 10k rounds with no issues I think that will satisfy me.
 
Note the lucky gunner test wore out the barrels at around 6000 rounds for the bi metallic jacketed rounds, but the copper jacketed rounds also did a number on the barrel. This is in large part due to how aggressively they shot the ammo and how hot the barrels got. They rarely cleaned the rifles and would shoot till they got to 750 deg. fahrenheit. You will get better mileage if you do proper maintenance and don't over heat your barrel much. Good article, worth a read.
 
I wonder if barrel length makes a difference. I think if the barrel is real short it wouldn't wear out as fast cuz the bullet is in it for a only a short time. on my AR I have a stainless thick barrel I would hope it would last allot longer then the pencil barrel on a norc 311-CQ.
 
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