Why (and how to) break in an AR barrel?
Modern firearm barrels are a thing of beauty, especially with today’s world of CNC machines and ISO9000 practices making it easy to produce repeatable high-quality results even in small scale. Gone are the old days of suspect metallurgy and forming barrels with bar steel wrapped in a coil and forged into the barrel, which was common back before industrialization. Still, even small pistol and handgun barrels today have tiny rough edges and tool marks left in a barrel’s bore which need to be worked out before you can assess its accuracy potential– and the longer the barrel the more marks.
Therefore, we send some rounds downrange to smooth things out.
So how do you break in a new AR barrel? More in my column at Tac.44.com