bought an M1A, few questions...

[cuervo]

Okay, I took one of their numbers out of context, but who here is going to replace an M1 barrel after just 6000 rounds? The military might replace barrels every 6000 rounds for the AMU, but service rifles are going to have a much higher round count before they're replaced. And unless you only shoot matches, you'll shoot more than 50 rounds between cleanings. So, in general, you will affect your throat and crown much more by shooting a rifle than by cleaning it.

In our opinion the useful life of a M1 barrel is approximately 6,000 rds. Our experience has shown that after 6,000 rds a reasonable marksman will detect poorer scores on his target. The "cone of dispersion' opens up noticeably beyond 6,000 rds. due to muzzle wear and throat erosion.
Now lets look at some data. So far we have aggressively stroked this barrel 35,000 times and are approximately 71.5 % of the distance from 2.0 to 3.0 on our gauge. If we project this out it will take approx. 50,000 strokes to degrade the muzzle by one graduation, and this is being as abusive as we can with a segmented steel rod.
If we assume that a rifle is cleaned every 50rds (average of practice and match shootings) then 6000 rds would equal 1,440 cleaning strokes under my cleaning procedure. This is just 3% of the distance from the 2.0 to 3.0 on our gauge!